Erik Jacobs A Real American Hero

SQL Buddy has been a tool I’ve used a lot lately for simple MySQL administration of servers. It’s a much lighter alternative to phpMyAdmin and can be installed very quickly via a zip. But I wanted an RPM. RPM just makes things a lot easier installation-wise. I don’t have to wget/unzip/etc every single time I want to deploy it. So I built a quickie RPM.

Here’s a link to download the SQL Buddy RPM I’ve created. The source RPM is there, also, if you feel like looking at it and making suggestions. Eventually I’ll get around to submitting it to Fedora for a real package review, and perhaps get it into EPEL. But this was the critical first step for me.

After getting messages about updating Adobe Air for a while, I finally decided to bite the bullet and do it.

Big mistake.

Crazy hell ensued, in that nothing from Air would work any more after that, and all I got was cryptic core dumps. I tried to uninstall Air and Tweetdeck, and failed at that for a while, too, until I figured out the following:

1. Air and Air applications like Tweetdeck actually end up as RPMs.  You can (should) remove them using rpm -e as the root user or with sudo.  (found via Adobe’s page, sort of)
2. I found the rpms by grepping: rpm -qa | grep ado — or — rpm -qa | grep weet
3. You may have to remove or move your certificates folder in /etc/opt

So, if you decide to update Adobe Air on your Fedora 12 box and suddenly everything seems borked, you might just want to uninstall everything and install from scratch.  I just did this and it worked well, and I’m up and running with the latest Tweetdeck for Linux.

I know, I know — I haven’t blogged about RidingResource in a while, but we’ve been focusing on other non-blogworthy stuff like starting to promote and fixing little goofy bugs here and there. I have, however, been poking about with Fedora 11 (Leonidas) and have been finding little tricks and things here and there to make life easier. One thing I found was that the new F11 has the nifty KMS stuff that gives you the slick graphical boot up and seamless login into Gnome (X). However, one thing I noticed that was missing was the ability to set non-native resolutions in the display settings.

For some, this ability is important. For example, I frequently conduct presentations online and not everyone that I present to has a widescreen monitor. Trying to share a desktop/application at 1680×1050 when the viewer only can see 1024×768 makes things difficult for the viewer.  They end up having to scroll and do all kinds of other goofy stuff that annoys them.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where these non-native resolutions “went.” I remember being able to set them in F10 without doing anything fancy, but in F11 these “extra” modes were curiously absent. After some prodding around, a kind fellow in #fedora on freenode suggested trying to disable KMS when booting in grub by adding the “nomodeset” option. This actually did the trick. While I lose the cute bootup sequence, I can always create another grub boot option that still has the KMS enabled. I can boot normally, or boot with “nomodeset” when I know I’ve got to do a presentation.

Hopefully this information helps!

As is to be expected with installing or upgrading any operating system, there might be a few speed bumps along the road. I recently updated one of my laptops to run the latest Fedora 11, Leonidas, and have been spending time re-installing software that I want to use. One thing that I ended up using quite a bit was Adobe AIR with Tweetdeck, a Twitter client.  Adobe is kind enough to provide an Adobe AIR for Linux.

Installing Adobe AIR should be relatively trivial, but I ran into some roadblocks that you might be experiencing, and had some recollection of my experience with F10, so I thought I’d post them here.

1. Run the installer as the root user or with sudo
2. I found in several sources that creating a ~/.airinstall.log file will output the (inevitable) error messages in (somewhat) greater detail somewhere
3. If you get such errors, and you see something about rpmbuild, you may need to install the rpm-build package
4. If you get more errors, you might find something that whines about librpmbuild.so and librpmbuild-4.7.so  I noticed that there was already a librpmbuild.so.0.0.0 in /usr/lib, so I took a gamble and created a symlink to librpmbuild.so and attempted to reinstall.

Doing these 4 things managed to get Adobe AIR to install in Fedora 11, so hopefully it will work for you, too.