I started working on Sunday, a week and a day ago. It's a (paid) one month trial so both sides can see if they are happy with the arrangement. I'm working as a Linux C++ server programmer for Emblaze. So far I'm mostly happy with the job.

On Saturday I met with peachuk and TDDPirate on the University Café close to my home. Peach has been visiting Israel and wanted to meet us (we met online on IRC and MSN Messenger), and we decided to arrange a meeting. Since TDDPirate is deaf, I brought a laptop from home to facilitate communication with him, but I couldn't turn it on after we met. As it evidently turned out, its battery was dead. (I was worried that my back will hurt from carrying it, but thankfully it still doesn't.). So we had to do with a pad of paper.

We ate dinner there and had a nice conversation. Peach seemed different in real life, than her Instant Messaging persona, and I was happy to meet TDDPirate again.

Yesterday was an eventful day. In the morning, I was dismayed to discover that my cellphone had a low battery, because it wasn't charged properly. Then at lunch, I accidently ate some fava beans at lunch, which I might be allergic to due to G6PD. So far, I'm OK, though.

Then I left work early to go to a Tel Aviv Linux Club meeting. When I arrived at the final bus station, I noticed that I could not feel my watch. As I discovered, its chain broke, but I still have both pieces at home. I attended the talk which was about open-source Geographic Information Systems, and included many nifty and visual presentations.

That's it for real life. Otherwise, the Mandriva Cooker Linux distribution at home, recently upgraded perl to version 5.10.0, which caused many software packages there to become broken because they relied on it being the previous version (5.8.8). I had to fix some of the problems on my system myself, while submitting or reporting them to the distributor for inclusion. At work I'm now using Ubuntu Gutsy, which has its own share of bugs that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Mandriva ones.

One of the things that got broken was Website Meta Language, which is an HTML preprocessor I'm using for all my sites. I've hacked a quick patch to build it, but since now the GNU Autotools setup for it has also become broken, I've decided to ditch them in favour of CMake. So far, CMake seems nice, but I only really started with the conversion process.

Update: I'm sorry for having posted this on my non-technical blog. The problem was that Firefox got stuck when posting the message, and when I went to LiveJournal again after killing it, it restored the text of the post, but not the rest of the parameters. So I forgot to switch the destination to "shlomif-tech". I'm sorry for that, but it seems it's too late to change it now.

STAF stands for "Software Testing Automation Framework" and is a framework for IBM for software testing. I spent a large amount of the last two days trying to get it up and running on my Mandriva Cooker Linux system, in order to fullfill this request for a Linux beta-tester.

Trying to get the binary to work with my Perl failed due to a segfault when running it. So I opted to build it for source. I followed the STAF developer's guide which explains how to build STAF, but still needed a lot of trial and error.

Eventually, I installed ActivePerl-5.8 and used the following shell script, that needs to be sourced (or "."ed) into the current shell, to build everything. You may need to customise it a little.

#!/bin/bash
# One needs staf to build the main things, connprov* to be able to 
# run STAFProc on the local machine and perl because I needed it.
export OS_NAME=linux BUILD_TYPE=debug PROJECTS="staf connprov* perl"
export JAVA_LIBS="/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_09/" JAVA_VERSION="1.5" 
export JAVA_V12_ROOT="/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_09/" JAVA_V12_LIBDIRS="/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_09/libs/"
export PERL_BUILD_V58=1
export PERL_BUILD_V56=0
export PERL_V58_ROOT="/opt/ActivePerl-5.8"
export PATH="/opt/ActivePerl-5.8/bin:$PATH"
PLIB="$PERL_V58_ROOT/lib/"
A="$PLIB/CORE"
export PERL_V58_INCLUDEDIRS="$A" PERL_V58_LIBDIRS="$A"
# This variable is completely undocumented in the relevant part of the
# STAF documentation, but with its default value it won't work correctly.
export PERL_V58_TYPEMAP="$PLIB/ExtUtils"

After doing it, type "make". Cheers. Now I can go on with my business.

Maybe it's just me, but I believe Ubuntu and Canonical have a severe case of the Not Invented Here. Instead of building on one of the three most suitable distributions at the time (each with advantages, disadvantages and often trade-offs): Debian, and Mandriva Linux (formerly Mandrake Linux) and MEPIS, they have forked Debian, and created an improved but incompatible version. Furthermore, they have their own proprietary web-based translation tool, their own proprietary bug-tracker (what's wrong with Bugzilla, Trac, or Request Tracker), they had two version control system ("Bazaar" and "Bazaar-NG"), which aimed to combine "the best advantages of all the rest", and wrote many system utilities from scratch.

The worst thing is that they are burning money fast. Mandriva used to be profitable for a while, and could have been more if it had a better management when it started. And Red Hat is very profitable. All the distributions I mentioned (including Ubuntu) are open source and may survive the going-away of their parent company, either by a new company being established, or by the community working on it. By open-source I don't mean the FSF-fanatical view in which every component must be free software, but rather the fact that it can be bootstrapped and usable using FOSS exclusively.

Ubuntu has done some things well: good hardware detection and integration, viral marketing, positive hype, etc. Debian has its own share of problems, but I still think it's more independent and economically-sound and less NIH-syndromed than Ubuntu is. So I guess from now on, I'll use Debian instead of Ubuntu when I do (i.e: when I'm not using Mandriva or Fedora or whatever), and recommend everyone to do the same.

Some people think Ubuntu is perfect. It may be very polished, but it has its share of problems. I think Debian is actually better in this regard with its rigid quality control. No one can deny Mandriva has bugs, but they have a public bug-tracker, and they fix these bugs. I guess fast-moving and bug-free are often trade-offs.

So stay cool, be independent, think for yourself but cooperate with others, and don't be "Ubuntu". Cheers.

Today I spent the morning doing several small computer-related errands: sending emails, updating web-sites, and cleaning up my vipe home directory.

Then I updated the packages in my Mandriva Cooker system, and as I went to read the LWN.net feed, found out there's a new -rc kernel. So I decided to upgrade to it, while I was at it. After compiling it and running "make modules_install" and "make install" as root, I rebooted the machine. Trying the new kernel did not work and it complained about being unable to mount /dev/sda1, and before that about a bad initrd. My trusty Mandriva One CD to the rescue, and I found that there are .old initrd's files in the /boot directory, and moved one of them on top of the new initrd. Then I was able to boot it? But why did "make install" cause that.

I started debugging the bootloader scripts to see why the hanged, and found out the culprit was with a broken gunzip and zcat. As it turned out they broke on Mandriva Cooker. I talked about it with the guy who broke it on the IRC, and he told me he uploaded an update (which wasn't on the mirrors back then). So, per advice from someone else on the IRC, I downgraded to the 2007.0 gzip package, and used it to install the kernel properly (2.6.21-rc3-git4 this time, as I tried to see if it fixed the problem I was having.).

This took the other half of the day, and kept me busy. In any case, there's now an updated gzip package so if you're on Cooker/Mandriva 2007.1 and have the gzip-1.3.11-1mdv2007.1 package, then make sure you upgrade.

Today I was also able to catch up with my huge User Friendly backlog (of over a year), and to read (or otherwise mark as read) all the RSS feeds in Google Reader. So it wasn't completely wasted.

After I installed Mandriva One to the hard-disk, I was irritated by the main desktop menus' organisation: instead of several levels of menus inside the main menus, I had several huge top-level menus with all the applications crammed there. However, Freenode's #mandriva came to my rescue, and I found out a solution:

Run drakmenustyle and select the "Mandriva menu" option (or any other option that you'd like), restart your desktop and the menus will be corrected. Now I'm happy.

I've decided to make another weblog entry enumerating all the boring things I've been working on lately, based on items ticked off from my daily to-do lists. Feel free to skip this entry and read Reddit instead.

1. Installed Plagger on Mandriva from RPMs
2. Worked on Test::Run
3. Added Google AdSense to DocBook/XML-generated essays, and to the Quad-Pres-generated presentations. Hopefully it will both result in more AdSense revenue for my site as well as not be a deterrent.
4. Prepared the slides for a presentation I'm giving to the Israeli Pythoneers about the Joel Test.
5. Did some other work on my site.
6. Pruned bugs from the XML::RSS queue.
7. Blogged, and blogged and blogged some more. ("When in doubt - blog!")

Well that's it for now. Now to get some more work done.

A few years ago, I've noticed a pattern in the Linux-IL mailing list. Often when someone asked for help with a sendmail problem, some people said something similar to: "Sendmail sucks! Use qmail instead.".

I originally documented this pattern in a "Threads suck! You'd better use processes" discussion there. However, it seems this post was too obscure to be noticed by the entire Internet community.

A few days ago I joined #mandriva on Freenode trying to get to the bottom of a problem I have with kmail at work, where I cannot start KAddressBook from inside it. I asked my question and soon afterwards received:

• One Thunderbird recommendation.
• Two Evolution recommendations.
• One sylpheed-claws recommendation.
• One gmail recommendation.

The problem is that I wasn't interested to learn about alternative E-mail clients, and just wanted to get my problem solved. And in gmail's case it was completely out of the question due to my work's constraints.

Moreover, the same symptom was not present on my home Mandriva 2007 installation, nor it is present now that I've upgraded to Cooker (which will become 2007.1).

When someone asks for help with a problem with technology "A", and you happen to be a fan of its alternative "B", then recommending him to use "B" is not very helpful. If someone says: "I hate 'A''s guts! What can you recommend instead?" then you can recommend him "B". But if you don't know the answer to the problem with "A", then just don't say anything.

Regards, Shlomi Fish (whose Live Journal sucks and you should read Mulix' Live Journal instead). Have a nice day.

How do you find a lion in the desert? You build a fence around the half of the desert, the lion is found in and confine it to half of the desert. Then you build another fence in the half of where the lion is to confine it to a quarter of the desert, and another fence and another fence until you fully confine the lion.

I've used this technique (otherwise known as Binary Search) to isolate this Mandriva bug. I knew that when running my configurtion of the KDE environment, my windows jittered, while when not running the KDE windows manager, or in a new user's KDE setup, everything was OK. And when moving away ~/.kde it was also OK. So I had to find what in .kde causes that.

At first I guessed it was some file in ~/.kde/share/config. This was indeed the case, as a fresh .kde with my original config directory copied on top exhibited the problem. Then I incrementally copied files from the "bad" config directory to the "good one". I started with a-j, and l-z and they did not reproduce the problem, as most of the config files start with k. Then I used several ranges of letters that start with k. So I covered k[a-k]* (not reproduced), k[l-z]* (reproduced), k[l-s]* (not reproduced), k[t-z]* (reproduced), k[t-v]* (not reproduced), and k[w-z]* (reproduced). Then I guessed it was probably kwinrc and indeed it reproduced the problem alone.

Now, my kwinrc was long so I started deleting directives out of it to further isolate the problem. After a long time of deleting and keeping several "kwinrc.good" and "kwinrc.bad" files, I discovered that it happens only with the Keramik windows style, and the focus-follows-mouse option. So a workaround for that is to use a different windows' style. All of this took a long time.

Other bugs I discovered:

1. a mikmod -n bug - this was an old bug in the libmikmod core code, which only surfaced on this update. It was fixed since it was reported.
2. xine cannot play this MOD file, or this one, and probably many others. (As I discovered now, MOD Archive contains at least 7 different versions of the Airwolf theme, all of them different from what I have. ) This bug was not reported yet.
3. mplayer -ao arts no logner works. This change was intentional and I spoke with the packager who did it about it via email. mplayer without the -ao flag or with -ao alsa works fine in KDE.
4. The Mandriva Galaxy (Classic) Theme flickers when the text in the title decoration of the window changes. This is especially annoying with a new kmail message that updates the title according to the subject. This bug was not reported, either.

On a different note, I ran Mandriva One on a machine at home, with AIGLX enabled. The 3-D Windows' management effects are very cool!

After I upgraded to Mandriva 2007.1 Alpha, I got the following warnings whenever invoking gvim:

Bonobo accessibility support initialized
GTK Accessibility Module initialized

** (vim:23983): WARNING **: AT_SPI_REGISTRY was not started at session startup.

** (vim:23983): WARNING **: IOR not set.

** (vim:23983): WARNING **: Could not locate registry

They annoyed me because when running gvim from the command line, I want it to be as silent as possible according to the "Silence is Golden" principle. As I found it it happens with all other Gtk+ apps. So I looked for a way to eliminate them. There was nothing on the Mandriva bug tracker, but a quick Google search yielded this thread on the fedora-devel mailing list. This message there yielded the following workaround:

gconftool-2 -s "/desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility" false --type bool

Now I'm no longer getting these warnings. Note that I don't know what is the implication of the command, and it may cancel out accessibility altogether, which may be critical for some users. You have been warned.

Well, the upgrade to Mandriva 2007.1 Alpha went relatively flawlessly. urpmi was successful. However, then I ran into this KWin (KDE's window manager) bug, which made using KDE unusable for me. So I've switched to using IceWM and am now speaking from an IceWM exile. Nevertheless, I am still using all the nifty KDE applications that I'm used to using so it's not that bad. I still miss the KDE environment, though.

Today I've placed my QClam modifications online, and notified the author about it. I also installed the Inkscape trunk, found a bug, and confirmed or said I could not reproduce a few others. I read LWN, and added several links to the Vi Humour page on the Text Editors' Wiki (so no one should say that "Vi is serious.".).

I also tested bleadperl (The development version of perl5). I was able to install the CPANPLUS bundle, but installing Task::Sites::ShlomiFish was dead-on-arrival because of a Params::Validate compilation problem. I didn't feel I was as productive as yesterday, but today things tended to get in my way.

Well, I'm off to write a report about the recent Perl Mongers meeting.

At work I received a recycled computer for my workstation. I installed Mandriva Linux 2007 (using the Mandriva One installation CD) on it and it detected all the hardware without a hitch. Windows XP (which I need to run a Windows-only VMWare admin client) was a completely different story. It reported three things that it could not detect: the Ethernet card, the soundcard, and the video adaptor.

We were able to install the drivers for the Ethernet card by connecting a co-worker's USB disk, and then we had networking, after consulting the Linux installation for its type. Linux said the soundcard is an AC'97 one, but installing these drivers from the Realtek site (first hit on Google for "AC97"), caused the computer to abruptly reboot in the middle of the installation. The second time it happened, I filed a report to the Microsoft site, but they gave me the same link with the drivers.

And I'm not the only one who have encountered this problem.. I wonder what I should do. I'll go mad if I can't listen to music while working on the computer, especially when working on a crappy OS like Windows.

When you fire up a konqueror window on Mandriva Linux then what happens is that it loads a page and then redirect you to a page on the Mandriva servers. This redirect is annoying because it takes place even if you start to type an address in the address bar. Here's how to cancel it.

Fire up a terminal and type the following command:

perl -pe '/^View0_URL/ && s/(about:)mandrakelinux/${1}blank/' < /usr/share/apps/konqueror/profiles/webbrowsing > ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/profiles/webbrowsing

What this command does is create a custom user "webbrowsing" profile for Konqueror where the default page is converted from "about:mandrakelinux" to "about:blank". It affects only a single user. If you're interested in making this change system wide then use the following untested command as root:

perl -pi -e '/^View0_URL/ && s/(about:)mandrakelinux/${1}blank/' /usr/share/apps/konqueror/profiles/webbrowsing

Mandriva Linux' msec cron job has a tendency to reset the permissions of several files and directories on a Mandriva system. If you want to keep a certain permission, then what you need to do is invoke drakperm as root, and add a rule there to set the permission to a certain (usually more permissive) value.

I ran into such a problem when Mandriva kept removing the group and public read flags from the "shlomi" user home directory (and from other users under /home). After I ran drakperm and added a rule for /home/shlomi it no longer happened. I got the "drakperm" tip today from people on the IRC (Freenode's #mandriva channel), so thanks to them as well.

As an update to my previous entry, I'd like to note that the changes I made to LoggedFS are now available as this patch. I sent it to the author for incorporation into the main code, but until then it can be downloaded from my site.

The KDE Problem I discovered is now tracked in this Mandriva Bug, and if anyone who reads this blog can try to reproduce it with his version of KDE and kmail, I'd be happy to hear such reports.

After I woke up today, I decided to make myself a daily schedule. So I copied my last daily schedule (back from 8-August) and updated. One of the items there read - "htdig Mandriva bug." (that my friend reported and I confirmed). Since it was very old, I decided to finally get to investigate it.

Searching for "htdig" on the Mandriva bug tracker yielded this bug report, which was still open, and I could confirm the bug still existed by installing htdig and running it. After I downloaded the source RPM and looked at it and the htdig site, I saw that the version in the source RPM was out of date (3.2.0b2-something while 3.2.0b5 has already been released). So I updated it, and tried to recompile. It took several "rpm -bb" iterations to get the RPMs to build: I had to remove out of date patches, add one of my own to fix a compilation bug, and mess up with the installed files list. Eventualy it got built and I installed the modified package, and tried to run it again. This time the bug was not reproduced.

I uploaded the updated package only in the evening and posted a link in the bug report. Between that, I got my aggregated RSS feed to work again. Now I've built the new kernel and am preparing to install it. There goes my 8 days uptime...

P.S.: if you want to get an audio feedback once a long compilation ends, you can do something like: make bzImage modules ; mplayer -ao arts /home/shlomi/Music/mp3s/"Jenna Drey - Why Should I Believe You (Rock Version ).mp3" . Substitute "make bzImage modules" with the compilation command, "-ao arts" with your favourite "mplayer" params", and the Jenna Drey song with a media file you'd like to hear.

I decided to try to build the latest Pugs (from the subversion trunk). The INSTALL file said: "Pugs needs the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), preferably version 6.6 or above.". OK, but Mandriva only has GHC 6.4. So I decided to make the world a bit better by preparing ghc-6.6 packages for Mandriva.

At first I installed the Mandriva ghc-6.4 source rpm, and then looked at the ghc 6.6 RPM Spec from the ghc homepage and adapted the Mandriva RPM accordingly. Then I started the building. It took a long time so I let it run overnight. In the morning when I woke up, I realised the RPM building was not successful. Apparently, the Mandriva RPM Spec building process also built the documentation and the makefile called haddock with an unknown flag. I realised I had to install the latest haddock version (0.8).

So I had to prepare an up-to-date haddock package. I started but then the build failed towards the end because the /usr/bin/haddock-0.8 binary was not installed. I guessed it was removed, and removed it from the RPM spec and built again. This time it was OK and I was able to install the binary RPM.

After haddock-0.8 was installed, I was able to install and build ghc-6.6. (After a few hours of compilation time). However, afterwards when I tried to compile pugs, but it compiled that it could not find the "mtl" library. I consulted people on the IRC about it and someone told me I should also build the src-extralibs package of ghc by unpacking it in the same directory.

I modified the RPM SPEC of ghc-6.6 to do exactly that, and rebuilt. I installed ghc-6.6 again, and again tried to compile pugs. It still complained about the "mtl library". Searcing for "mtl" in the ghc RPM build tree yielded the fact it was installed under the "ghc-6.6/ghc-6.6/" sub-directory there. As it turned out I used the rpm %setup macro in the wrong way: I used the -a 1 (which unpacks the source in 1 after cd'ing into the directory) instead of -b 1, which unpacks the source before cd'ing there.

Thus, I had to rebuild ghc after this correction. After a few more hours of compilation, the rpm was prepared, and I was able to install it. This time, I was able to compile pugs, and I even tested it and submitted a smoke test. This report to the Mandriva bug tracker is the result of my efforts and contains links to the RPMs I prepared.

I spent at least a day working on it, but a hacker got to do what a hacker got to do.

So I was editing XML using vim and again decided that there may be a better editor out there. A google search for "XML editor" or "open source XML editor" yielded nothing. Then I thought that maybe Eclipse has a good XML editing mode. So off to install Eclipse

I'm running Mandriva 2007 and the urpmi (Mandriva's package manager) command for installing Eclipse ("urpmi eclipse") completed successfully, after installing a lot of dependencies. Then I tried to run it from the command line. It took it a long time, and then it crashed. After consulting with the people on Freenode's #java, I was told that I should run it using Sun's Java Development Kit instead of with gcj.

So I downloaded it, and the people there told me how to run Eclipse using it. Just use the following commands:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_09
PATH="$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH"

Then I was able to run Eclipse. However, when I tried to edit an XML file, I got it without syntax highlighting, and without anything else. Turns out the default XML editing mode of Eclipse is pretty lame. And a Google search for "Eclipse XML" yielded only non-open-source solutions. So I still don't have a better XML editor than gvim.

Again on #java, someone recommended Vex, which is a visual editor for XML. But it provides a word-processor-like interface, that I won't like as I want to edit the tags and need to edit "data-style" XML documents.

If anyone can suggest a good open-source XML editor that runs on Linux, please comment here. In the meantime, gvim is all I have.

So, to continue the story, I got around to installing the SATA disk yesterday. At first I disconnected the IDE hard disks to prevent damage. Then I connected the SATA disk using the instructions I found on the wikipedia - it's much easier than an IDE disk. Then I tried to boot the Mandriva Ehad 2006 installation CD, which I prepared in advance.

What happened? Nothing. The computer did not recognise the CD (but it recognised the SATA disk - yay!). However, a poweroff and poweron solved this and the installation proceeded. I selected all the usual options. There were a few glitches during the installation. At one point, it complained about a bad file or something like that. Then, the bootloader installation completely confused it. To resolve this, I rebooted the CD and selected the restore bootloader option. It refused to install LILO, but installing GRUB was successful, and I was able to boot the system.

This time I made sure to put /home under a separate partition, to later facilitate re-installation, or dual-booting. The Internet worked out of the box, and I was able to get Samba working. What I did afterwards was (in a rough chronological order):

1. Re-enabled the IDE disks. This just involved connecting them again.
2. Recreated my home directory from my backup archives, which I backed up on a Windows machine.
3. Upgraded to Mandriva 2007.
4. Configured /etc to my liking.
5. Installed and configured Apache 2.2.x, rsync, slocate, SpamAssassin, several Perl modules, and other packages that were absent in the default Ehad installation.
6. Tried to build kernel 2.6.18. However, booting it using grub caused a blank screen to appear, and before that make install complained about a missing module, which I couldn't find. I resorted to installing kernel "2.6.17.13-mm-desktop-1mdvsmp", which is the Mandriva Multimedia kernel (up to 4 GB) with SMP support.
7. Moved some files from the old hard disk to their rightful place.

Now, I'm on the SATA disk. df reads:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              40G  2.7G   37G   7% /
/dev/sda2              83G   38G   46G  46% /home
/dev/hdb3             5.2G  4.4G  815M  85% /mnt/kubuntu
/dev/hdb1              69G   38G   31G  56% /mnt/old-mandriva
/dev/hda1              26G   23G  3.7G  86% /mnt/win_c
/dev/hda5              49G   49G  377M 100% /mnt/win_d

The SATA disk seems very fast. It took me under a minute to unpack the latest Linux kernel. So now I'm now hopefully back on track. In the meantime I was able to do some Test-Run hacking, as well as catching up with my email and RSS feeds.

Finally, here's a joke I told to my dad: "The bad thing hardware is that it sometimes work and sometimes doesn't. The good thing about software is that it's consistent: it alwaays does not work, and always does not work in exactly the same way".

Well, I stayed up all night during the night before last to backup. In the morning afterwards and during the rest of the day, I still really wasn't tired. One good thing that came out of it was that I covered several full chapters of "Perl Best Practices" (which I can now highly recommend).

During the day, I tried to get my Kubuntu system to work with my existing data which seems to be completely OK. I eventually upgraded to Ubuntu Dapper which is the most recent release. Even that is still missing recent software that exists in my Mandriva 2007 system, like Vim 7.0, or Apache 2.2.x, but it's still better.

At first I tried creating an account on my Kubuntu partition with the same UID as "shlomi" on Mandriva, but a different home directory location (/mnt/mandrake/home/shlomi). This worked well for some things, but eventually I opted for a better solution: create a symbolic link for /home/shlomi to point to the same directory in the Mandriva partition, and have the same username. This seems to work very well.

I had to install a lot of software to start hacking again, and as a result my 5.2GB Kubuntu partition is 90% full. I can install software using ./configure --prefix="", but I'd really like to enlarge the partition. Fortunately, due to backups and backup induced cleanups my mandriva partition now has 32 GB free space and I can comfortably reduce it. (Assuming the XFS tools can handle the bad blocks properly.).

I already updated my home site with two new ideas, and fixed some bugs I discovered there. I also discovered a very obscure Apache 2.0.x bug, which only Konqueror was affected from, and unsuccesfully tried to compile my homesite using perl-5.9.4. I'll try again later, but this may involve squashing some CPAN bugs.

Meanwhile, we bought a new hard disk (a 160 GB SATA one) to use as a replacement for the Linux one. This time I'll have one partition for home, and one or more partitions for the roots of the different distributions. I already burned a CD of Ehad 2006, where Ehad is the Israeli-oriented remastering of Mandriva, and am going to install it.

In case, I'm not going to write in this blog until Rosh Hashanah (which takes place this Friday) then Shanah Tovah. I expect that I'll again spend part of Yom Kippur summarising the previous year as reflected from my blogs.

Finally, today when I went to a walk, I took our good camera with me, and took some pictures. Expect them at a Flickr near you soonishly.

Due to the fact I ran into this Mandriva bug, X-Windows stopped working. Thus, I first tried working on the virtual consoles, which was very little fun, and then decided to work on my Kubuntu partition. I did not enjoy the exile too much: Kubuntu is not bad, but I like Mandriva better and all my life is on the Mandriva hard disk.

While on Kubuntu I chatted on the IRC, and also worked on a DocBook/XML-based file. Eventually, I found a workaround on the bug report, and after I applied it everything worked on my Mandriva. Now I'm back to Mandriva and am happy again.