A taste of Linux.

I've recently been playing around with another wiki called MoinMoin which seems to work quite nicely, out-of-the-box, under CentOS. And, it even comes as a yumable rpm file too. But the usual bugbear for me, to remember the url to get it up and working on my box, and it is;- http://localhost/mywiki/FrontPage -----

I've come to the conclusion that, for me at least, SELinux is evil! Let me tell you why. Yesterday I tried to burn a dvd, and it failed using k3b. So I tried using gnomebaker which I'd just installed, and it failed too. Overall, I burnt five [yes, 5] coasters! Today I managed to burn the dvd! I'd had a brainwave, maybe SELinux was causing the problem. So I disabled it and rebooted because it hooks into various parts or places of the kernel, tried the burning with k3b and it worked! I don't understand how or why it stopped it working but I know for definite that it did. Eject.
If a cd/dvd gets stuck in the tray sometimes only logging out and logging in as root allows you to free it. Or so I thought! It turns out that if you use on the command line;- sudo eject /dev/hdg Providing that /dev/hdg was the one that needed to be released :), it works! -----

Whilst setting up kmail to use pgp to digitally sign my emails, kgpg kept failing with the error message that 'Chiasmus was not available at /usr/local/bin or was not executable'. So I checked and it wasn't there! I then did a 'yum provides' to see what package provided it, and it only showed up as a 'chiasmus-png' which wasn't much help at all. Without this package I was unable to proceed any further, and I couldn't find a source for it .... so I ended up cobbling it! I took an executable from /usr/local/bin, copied it to another directory [as root] and then renamed it to be 'chiasmus' and then copied it back to /usr/local/bin. And then I was able to set up digitally signing of my emails with no problems. As I said, this is a cobble, its not necessarily a solution, its just what I did to get pgp and digitally signing working for me. It may turn round at a later date and bite me in the bum, but from what I've read so far it seems to be an optional component, but so optional that digitally signing refuses to work in kmail without it! -----

In my feed reader [akregator] I read in the BBC feed this morning that the Windows 98 operating system has reached the end of its life and will no longer be supported by Microsoft. Fair enough, but theres some very witty comments to the post. You can see them at here. -----