I have now Fedora Core 4 with all updates running on my old laptop and this took me about 5 days. After upgrading from RH9 to FC1 I installed the kernel, glibc, rpm, yum and python from FC2 to see if it works with a 2.6.x kernel. After a reboot everything was still working so I tried to upgrade to FC3. After the installation of fedora-release from FC3 I did a yum install yum rpm python glibc and only after about 9 hours later it finished. The next step was to upgrade to FC4 and the yum version of FC3 now running was already much faster. After the
upgrade to the yum version of FC4 everything was much better and especially really fast. Now each yum 0peration only takes about half an hour. I have now upgraded all packages to the latest available FC4 version.
My initial plan was to display the pictures on the framebuffer using fbida. But I totally forgot that the video card is much too old to display anything on the framebuffer with more than 8 bit. So I had to install X to display the pictures at least with 16 bit. The only additional program I have now installed is gqview which is the only client running on the X server in fullscreen mode and displaying every 60 seconds a new randomly selected image.
The next step to get closer to my WallTop was to disassemble the laptop and hope that it still works after the disassembly.
This is the result of the disassembly:
It still works and now all I have to do is to put it in a frame.
NP: Fettes Brot – Jein
I just found out that since I have upgraded to FC4 I cannot attach or detach any attachments
with Lotus Notes running with wine. If I remember correctly this seems to be the first problem
since a long time I am having with Lotus Notes. I think the only consequence from this error will
be that I will stop sending and using attachments and as I have not attached or detached many
documents lately I will hardly miss it.
After reading an article on Slashdot about building a WallTop I have searched and found a very
old laptop somewhere in my collection of old hardware. It is a Pentium with 120 MHz, 32MB RAM and
a 1GB hard drive. First I tried to install FC1 on it but anaconda just quit somewhere during the
beginning of the installation. I have then installed RedHat 9 on it and upgraded with yum to FC1.
This did work pretty well and the machine was still running after a reboot. I am currently
using yum to upgrade it to FC2. In probably 3 or 4 days it will finally run FC4 and I can start to
put it in a frame so I can hang it on a wall. My plan it to use a wireless card to load the pictures
and to use fbi (which I put exactly for this reason in Fedora Extras) to display the pictures
on the framebuffer.
I have finally finished including all mirrors using rsync into the Mirror Status Page.
The main reason for this page was that I have can have quick overview if all the scripts are working as expected or if there is an error which requires some attention. But I think it has probably also some advantages for the users of the mirror (if they actually find this status page).
If you are at the Linuxtag and are going to see the Cell Blade from IBM, then watch closely if they are rebooting the blade, because you could see software that I wrote (the network bootloader) in action 
.
In the last few days I have actually used erwin to do some work on C source code and detected that erwin needs the functinality to jump directly to line and also display the current line in the statusbar. The number is now displayed in the statusbar and the code is already checked into CVS. This was also pretty easy. To write the dialog to jump to a certain line is a bit more work and I have not started doing this. I would also like that erwin remembered at which line the cursor was the last time the file was used. So I have still some ideas what can be improved.
I have updated the scripts which control the mirrors on ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de to save the status, time and some statistical data from each sync. The data is then used to create the Mirror Status Page.
I am still working on it to improve it but the basic functionality is already there and it works pretty good. I have still some ideas how to improve it and will continue to work on it as long as I am still motivated.
While writing the status page I realized that I should also work a bit on my homepage and the different pages I have to have a more consistent look.
I was looking for a visual diff tool and the only one I remembered was tkdiff. But TCL/TK applications are just too ugly and after a quick search I found that there is another python (pygtk2) based tool called meld. A quick yum install meld and I am ready go. Nice tool and I really like the CVS integration.
