Ah, the joys of using Linux in a Windows world. With a couple of Fedora Core 4 installations under my belt, I was pleased that many things just work. But of course the bulk of my attention goes to the many things that just don’t.

I’m trying to use Evolution as an Outlook replacement. I can interact with my inbox on the Exchange server with no problems. However, I can’t see my calendar at all. I push the ‘Calendars’ button, and I see a list of calendars in the pane above the buttons. The calendar view, to the right, is completely devoid of appointments. When I try to select one of the checkboxes corresponding to a calendar, a status message ‘Opening exchange://myusername@domain@server/personal/Calendar (...)’ appears at the bottom of the window for a fraction of a second, as does a checkmark in the checkbox I clicked, but both disappear quickly. It’s so odd. And aggravating.

I did just now manage to mount my Windows partition, after installing the NTFS kernel module. Yea for that.

Fedora automounts my iPod Mini, but I’m at a loss when I get to gtkpod. It tells me iPod Database Import Failed: ‘Illegal seek to offset 654644 (length 4) in file ’/media/ipod/iPod_Control/iTunes/iTunesDB’.‘

I’d like to be able to print to networked printers, but I haven’t been able to locate them using printconf-gui.

Fedora ships a version of xscreensaver without any graphics demos. Granted, it gives you a perfectly functional blank screen, but for anyone who’s used xscreensaver before and expects to be presented with a list of graphics demos to choose from, it looks like a bug.

As for video, I tried to watch the Quicktime clip of Cisco ripping out the pages of Michael Lynn’s presentation on Cisco’s critical vulnerabilities, but neither Totem nor Helix, the two video players Fedora installs, come with Quicktime decoders. I installed a succession of GStreamer plugins before finding the module that decodes .movs: gstreamer-ffmpeg.

Linux admin-y things have been going well for me lately. Last night I upgraded my laptop from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 4. No particular reason—obviously I don't adhere to the truism “if it ain't broke, don't fix it”—but it seemed the world had already moved on to 3, so why not get the latest? The installation went smoothly, once I realized that I had to pass it the askmethod option at the boot prompt in order to perform a network install. (Is that method not very popular? I thought enough people would have broadband by now that network installation would overtake installation by disc(s).) I haven't played around with it enough to give it a real review, though I had seen Tuxtops's “cold” review of it. I had to re-setup widescreen LCD support and recompile the wireless driver, which I discovered required me to install kernel-devel first. The GNOME menus are arranged a little differently, so it took me some time to find the configuration menu where I could swap the Caps Lock and Ctrl keys.

On my Gentoo box, I finally got the updated gnome-vfs to compile. It had been stuck for weeks, insisting on using some i486-pc-linux-gnu-gcc file that it couldn't find. This was my payback for futzing with /etc/make.conf to get some long-forgotten other software to compile. After breaking various things, I made sure I was consistently telling Portage that this was an i686 box, not an i486, it still gave me the same error. The solution seems to have been emerge libIDL, followed by fix_libtool_files.sh whenever the compiler complained about some missing library. Whew. That was annoying.

Lastly, I noticed the other day that my mailserver had over six thousand messages in its queue. (thedreadpilot and I are the only users on that server—it's pretty small-scale.) Mostly they were undeliverable messages for a domain with which I have a secondary MX exchange but whose mailserver hasn't been responsive for a while. I removed that host from rcpthosts, set all the messages in the queue to reach their queuelifetime, and watched as messages bounced after one more delivery attempt were dropped from the queue, which is now an order of magnitude smaller. That freed up a significant amount of disk space.

Next on the agenda is making sure I know how to build, install, and run a standard kernel.org kernel so I can participate in the Linux driver-writing tutorial at OLS this year.