[Previous entry: "RV042 trick"] [Next entry: "Time Management"]
09/23/2008: "The joys of upgrading"
So I was getting extremely tired of the poor performance of my existing server (a P II!), and it seems to be going downhill, with strange quirks. The latest is a steadily drifting time clock - losing at least a couple of seconds every fifteen minutes or so - enough to cause problems with the typical time updates, so they start failing as being too far out of range.
Anyway, so I bought a new system - an Intel Q6600, 4Gb, 500Gb Sata drive. No monitor, graphics card, or the like, just raw performance. I'd like to be able to virtualize some older stuff, which is why the high-end CPU and memory. When everything is setup, then I'll move some of the older disks over to it.
Right now, Fedora 9 is giving me major problems - primarily PackageKit. I saw this blog entry while doing yet another search to try and debug stuff, and he seems to sum it up pretty well - http://www.dhoytt.com/mainblog/archives/2008/05/packagekit-new-default-manager.html. This thing is just giving me problem after problem.
I did a plain install, and then tried to update the software. Then I go to add some new software, but keep getting pointless errors about being unable to get a TID, and it having a ";" in it. Turns out that installing PackageKit installs both a daemon and a user component, and the install didn't restart the daemon, so it kept compaining about trying to talk to an old server. Not that it could bother to say that, or have something google-able that described it - I had to download the source code and search, and then browse through a couple levels of what could generate the error to find some idea about what was going on.
I get past that, and take some time to setup VNC, get the firewall ports set, and so on, and then finally reboot to test that everything is configured right. VNC working, so now it's time to go back.
Then I try to add software again. Now I just keep getting errors about not having the permissions to install packages. If I try and run as root - that is forbidden. If I run as me, sometimes I was getting prompted for the root password, but that seems to have stopped. The program starts up, lets me select things, and does all of its processing (which seems to take a long time to check dependancies), and then refuses - "Failed to install package. You don't have the necessary privileges to install packages". Browse the SELinux and other logs, and see some mentions of totally separate policies being used, that is controlled by PolicyKit, like org.freedestop.packagekit.update-system. I try to see what I can do there, but the Authorizations option from System | Preferences | System runs, and lets me see what is there, but I don't seem to be allowed to alter anything (the Modify icon never un-grays). Great, something else broken by default - no indication of what I can possibly do.
What is _extremely_ annoying is that they seem to have taken away the tools that actually worked - doing "yum install pirut", goes and tells me that gnome-packagekit is already installed and latest version - nothing to do. Finally, it did allow me to install yumex, so perhaps I can finally get back to what I was trying to do.
Oh, and incidentally, while composing this, I managed to get internet explorer stuck at 100% CPU - apparently real multitasking, like scrolling through the google history of searches before the window has finished updated isn't a good idea.