The server now has 6GB of RAM; two 1GB and two 2GB sticks of reliable Corsair XMS2 DDR2

I jumped on the downloads (Installer DVDs of 32bit and 64bit) as soon as I could, burnt the 64bit DVD, and rebooted, hoping to have it installed within half an hour.

I already had 10GB of empty space at the start of one of my 750GB drives in preparation – all I had to do was tell the BIOS to boot the DVD and install it!

Well, that was the idea… If only it was that easy… Linux is never (at least in my experience) that obedient

I got into the second step of the installer (the first is chosing the language), where it asks you to chose your keyboard layout/language. I picked “United Kingdom”, and clicked “Next”… and the whole installer (minus the mouse cursor) froze. I assumed it was processing something, and waited a couple minutes… no change. CTRL+ALT+F1-8 did nothing (normally they’d switch to other terminals/logs). CTRL+ALT+Backspace did nothing. CTRL+ALT+Del did nothing! I lost my patience at that point and pressed the reset button…

I rebooted and tried again: same error. I rebooted and tried the default “US – English” layout: again, same error. I rebooted yet again, and tried the text-only installer… I’m sure you can guess what happened when it asked me my keyboard layout… Yup, it did it again.

I have now given up with trying to install it, at least for – I might try it again in VMware, or burn the 32bit DVD (or perhaps a 64bit LiveDVD, if there is one) and try that instead, once I can find a bit of spare time.

Some of the basic specs:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
• OCZ 2×2GB 1066MHz DDR2
• Gigabyte X48-DQ6 Motherboard
• 4×750GB, 3×500GB, 1×250GB Samsung Spinpoint F1
• Antec Quattro 850W PSU
• Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit SP1

For the complete specs list, see the systems page. Thanks to Scan, eBuyer and CCL for selling all the components I wanted

I will be putting Fedora 9 on it (in 64bit of course) once it’s released.

I’m mirroring (locally only though, not publicly) the “Core” and “Updates” repo’s – I looked into doing the “Extras” repo too, but that’s nearly 10GB of files! That will have to wait for bigger hard disks… :P

So far I’ve got my laptop and my local Linux server using my local repo, and I’ll set my main pc to use it once I’ve installed Linux on it.

I also installed lighttpd on my local server, running on an alternate port, which should make installing large software packages over the LAN that little bit faster than if I used Apache 2, which runs on the default port. I’d switch to lighttpd as the main web server, but I couldn’t get PHP working well with it the last time I tried.

Along with Firefox 2, Fedora Core 6 was released yesterday

So far it seems pretty similar to Core 5, apart from the changes to the graphics. In particular, the new login background is a lot nicer

Once I’ve upgraded my Fedora Core 5 installation on this PC, I’ll post a screenshot or two

Apart from the lack of add-ons (extensions appear to have been renamed) compatible yet, it’s really good. The new skin is nice too, but is gonna need replacing with something that blends in better with my SoftCrystal Linux WindowBlinds theme. There’s a built-in spell checker in text boxes, and much better tab/window handling – it can now remember (or so it says) what tabs and/or windows you had open in your last session, and restore them!

So far, I haven’t noticed any memory leaks – I hope it stays that way! The feeds system is also a lot better – I never really used to use it as it was quite hard to add a new feed so it would show as a pop-up menu – it seems a lot better now

I’ll update this post with any extra stuff I find, as I find it.

Update: There is a new extensions, or rather add-ons manager. It’s a lot nicer than the old one, and it seems to check for updates when you start the browser, and offers to update them then and there, and it doesn’t need a restart (as it’s not yet fully loaded) afterwards

Get Firefox!

I’ve moved Fr3d.org and the L33TSig service to the new server, so they should be a lot faster for everyone now – I’ve certainly noticed a big difference so far!

- Fr3d

For those interested, the specs are on my systems page. The large black object on the right is my 1KVA UPS, and the small silver box on the floor is my Maxtor OneTouch 300GB USB2/Firewire drive

And yes, I’m bored. Nothing much is happening at the moment… Just trying to stay cool in about 35°C of heat…

You can download it here

You will of course need Linux to run this. The daemon runs seperately from the GUI part, so you can use the daemon-only for any servers you want to. A small configurator app is being worked on for this purpose
For now you could use VMWare, PearPC or a similar application to run a simple GUI version of Linux to make the config.

Here is a screenshot of the GUI:

(Click to enlarge)

- Fr3d

About one month ago, SithToast, owner of ToastedNet started renting a dedicated server to take the load of his previous reseller account at another small web host. I look after and fix the server for him, and I get free hosting

There were a few major issues to begin with, which caused the server to “panic”, and then required a hard reboot from the datacenter techs – This happened for about two weeks non-stop, with time between reboots anything from about an hour to a couple days; it was totally random. All that was required to fix it was a quick look at the logs, recompile the Linux Kernel, reboot, and then it was sorted

L33TSig and all my other website also moved at the same time, so hopefully most of you will have noticed that everything loads a lot faster now

The server is hosted in a huge datacenter owned by Sago Networks, in Florida, USA. I’ve also setup an IRC server on the server, and will be gradually moving stuff from the old slow one to this new one.