Greetings,
Well I decided to download the RC1 ISO's, and give the whole cooker thing a
try once more. Perhaps I should have listened to intuition and just stayed
away, but, like glutton for punishment, here I am again.
Firstly, the ISO's (once again) refuse to burn and sync correctly. I've
resolved in this matter that the only way I'm ever going to be able to
download a cd set from Mandrake again is to actually pull cooker in through
fmirror and make my own, but this is ridiculous, to say the least. There's
users out there that do have the same problem I have been having. I know this
because I've seen the posts, I've talked to a few of them. Is it THAT much to
ask that Mandrake go to standard iso's (between 650 and 690m)?? In this case,
it wouldn't even involve much more than moving a few files around from one
iso to the next. there's 3 cd's, 2 of which are packed so full they can't see
straight, the third is so loosely packed that it's almost a waste of 100m
space there. C'mon now.
I've never had a problem with Mandrake ISO's untill lately, hell, I've never
had a problem with any ISO refusing to burn until I ran into these (though
the most I've tried to put in the cd was just shy of 700m).
I certainly don't know what the problem is, but I'm certain I'm not the only
one with it. It's more than enough to turn one away from using 'drake
alltogether, believe me.
Next, logs:
Within a week of using 'drake, I found that 100m of logs were generated (yes,
100m), most of these from msec, because of it's "high" security setting. Why
this is integrated into 'drake, who knows, but it is completely and totally
annoying to deal with.. here's why:
Firstly, quite a few files on web servers are required to be a+rxw. This
results in enormous amounts of logs if you've got anything of a web server
running.
Personally, I have my logs set up on a seperate partition for easier access.
Of course this partition is formatted every time I do a new install of the
Operating System, but it just makes it easier to deal with. 100m of space for
logs SHOULD be more than enough (if dealt with and rotated accordingly), but
in this case it was far LESS than enough.. Talk about crazy. Msec reports to
3 seperate files the SAME information (at default): syslog, secure, messages.
In fact, most information is reported a redundant amount of times to messages
(and syslog both), as well as it's own personal file.
For example:
I install Qmail, and run it. One of the reasons I like the later distro's of
'Drake is that I don't have to worry about removing any mail junk, I can
simply untar my Qmail dist, configure it, set it up and poof, I have mail in
< 10 minutes that's easy to configure and use.
Qmail logs info, warn, errors. into /var/logs/mail
ALL of this as well is thrown into syslog, or messages (possibly both), if I
remember correctly, causing redundancy the size of which is just insane.
Whether this is done by Qmail or by the system logging mail (whichever prog
is used) this way, it's just ick!
The same could be said for cron, and various other utilities. Logging is good,
redundant logging is not, very much not. All this does is take up needless
disk space.
Yes, I'm aware that I can change these, and I have, but most won't know how to
do so, or that they can, hence it won't get done.
Next, sound:
I know I've been through this again, but, this time it's a li'l different.. Up
untill recently (while going through my archives of burned cd's), I had
forgotten that I purchased a copy of OSS/Paid just over a year ago. I decided
to try this, rather than stock oss/alsa, and it seems to be handling things a
bit better, as far as multi-channels go.
What I HAVE noticed though, is no matter the sound driver, the following never
works:
kdemenu->preferences->sound->mixer
For one reason or another, this seems to just sit there and do nothing.
Correction, it TRIES to do something, but it fails miserably.
I haven't tried this with the Gnome menus (not to start a war over which WM is
better, but I've been hooked on KDE since I really got into using it), but
I'm sure the output is somewhat the same.
Is it possible to get this to point to 'drake's sound manipulation, rather
than kde/gnome mixers?
Next, php:
I'm not sure if this is a php thing, a distro thing, or what, but it's
something I noticed:
I use php-nuke rather heavily in my sites, and in all of them with the latest
php rpm, they refuse to load the correct includes. For some reason, the
modules refuse to load mainfile.php (maybe because it's not in the same
directory as them, maybe not). The include path is correct (it's the same one
I've used for php since I started using it), the system just refuses to load
this in the latest php rpm. When I switched to 4.1.2 (I think that's the
previous drake rpm), I had no problem with this, so either php has changed
something, the rpm is messed up, or, well, the php build itself is messed up.
Either way, this is something that I noticed. If it's a php change, I'd love
for someone to tell me how I can go about fixing this so that it will
actually work (without using require_once ("/mainfile.php");, because that
would involve a LOT more work than simply going back to an older php
version). I went through php.ini, but I'll be damned if I could find
something that points to the problem.
--
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TJW: Head tech, Dreamless Realms
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Snippets http://dreamless.wolfstream.net/
Telnet dreamless.wolfstream.net:9275
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