Open Source

To test out iFolder I had to upgrade my Fedora Linux install to FC4. I contemplated FC5 but read somewhere about an issue with iFolder and FC5 so I decided against it. Best not to leap frog from FC3 to FC5 anyways...baby steps.

Rather than clean install or download the installer CD and attempt an upgrade I decided to tempt fate and see how well a live update using Yum would work. Note: first I backed up everything. I may be adventurous but I'm not crazy. This upgrade path is not recommended by the Fedora Project, however many people have had good success with it.

Key points:

• Disable third party repositories first
• Backup everything important!
• Make note of any third party software you may have installed (it may be broken after the upgrade)
• Disable SELinux and reboot
• Some config files may have changed. The upgrade will not overwrite your existing config files but will create a version with a .rpmnew extension so you can merge the changes into your existing config.
• FC3 uses PHP 4 and FC4 uses PHP 5 so you will have to update your php.ini file after the upgrade. You pretty much can just mv php.ini php.ini.bak and mv php.ini.rpmnew php.ini to get it working.

This is a quick list of steps on what to do.  For more information on what's going on etc, read through the links at the bottom.  Particularly if you have a 64 bit system, there are some additional steps that I omitted here.

Step 1: yum -y update yum
Step 2: wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-4-2.noarch.rpm
Step 3: rpm -Uvh /path/to/fedora-release-4-2.noarch.rpm
Step 4: Disable third party repositories. I just renamed them from .repo to .bak
Step 5: yum -y upgrade mkinitrd
Step 6: yum -y update kernel
Step 7: Disable SELinux: nano /etc/sysconfig/selinux and set SELINUX=disabled
Step 8: Reboot and load FC4 Kernel
Step 9: yum remove kernel-2.6.\*FC3\* and yum remove kernel-smp\*FC3\*
Step 10: yum -y upgrade
Step 11: Go get a coffee this will take some time...
Step 12: yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment"
Step 13: Re-enable SELinux if you use it
Step 14: Reboot
Step 15: Look over system logs and see if any problems occurred at bootup.
Step 16: Re-enable third party repositories and perform yum update

I didn't come up with this whole step process. I used the following two resources to come up with a strategy:

YumUpgradeFaq

Upgrading Red Hat Linux with Yum

So far it's been a big success. My only snag was php being broken, but after updating my php.ini file it worked fine. Now I should be able to give iFolder a go and see how well it works...

I may have found a solution to my synch issue I posted previously.

iFolder looks promising. It basically meets most of my criteria. Here are some of the highlights:

• Cross-platform: runs on OSX, Windows, Linux, etc.
• Auto-syncs files to server and propagates to all client machines.
• Has a web-front end so you can access your files anywhere using a web-browser.
• Open Source!
• User/Group Security

From the iFolder website:

iFolder is a simple and secure storage solution that can increase your productivity by enabling you to back up, access and manage your personal files-from anywhere, at any time. Once you have installed iFolder, you simply save your files locally-as you have always done-and iFolder automatically updates the files on a network server and delivers them to the other machines you use.

Now it's just a matter of finding some free time to test it out and see how well it works...

I noticed that the last article I posted was showing up twice in the "Latest Articles" block on the left. After a bit of investigation I found it was showing up more than once because I applied two categories to the article, "Open Source" and "Firefox". The SQL statement that builds this block was returning multiple rows for that post, one for each category assigned. If this was a closed source system I would have to live with this bug until the developers of the software posted a patch to fix this. However, Drupal is an open source system and the Article Module is open source as well so I had several possibilities here:

1. Wait until the developer of the module posts a fix
2. Since it's open source a third party might have fixed the bug themselves and posted the fix online somewhere
3. Look through the code and fix this myself.

I ended up taking advantage of option number 2. I remembered my friend Evan Wise had discovered this bug also and he chose option 3 and fixed the problem himself. He posted a fix for the bug on his website and also posted the fix on the Drupal site for the module maintainer and for any others that might want the fix ASAP. It turns out it's a simple code fix that adds a DISTINCT to the SQL.

This is one of the major benefits of open source software. It's a distributed and collaborative effort to improve the integrity and quality of software. You can benefit from the hard work of others and contribute back to that community. This environment not only benefits end users but it can benefit companies that leverage the software or build on top of it.

The latest version of Firefox is available for download. This version brings browsing performance enhancements, automatic updates, re-ordering of browsing tabs, security enhancements, increased support of web standards such as SVG, CSS 2, CSS 3 and Javascript 1.6 and much more.

The release notes for version 1.5 are located here. Also a comprehensive list of updates can be found here.

What are you waiting for? Go download it!