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            Since <a href="fedora-11-preview.html">updating to Fedora 11</a> a few days ago, this is what I have been seen when ever <a href="fedora-11-woes.html">trying to use VLC</a> (the system completely freezes up if I try to use totem!)
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">VLC media player.0.0-rc2 Goldeneye
                    Bus error
                </span>

                Trying updating, tried removing and re-installing. Tried jugging the repositories to see if using RPMs from a different source might have an effect. During these operations, yum repeatedly said the following:
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">
                </span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">/sbin/ldconfig: file /usr/lib64/libcxcore.so.1.0.0 is truncated</span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">/sbin/ldconfig: file /usr/lib64/libcxcore.so.1 is truncated</span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">/sbin/ldconfig: file /usr/lib64/libavcodec.so.52 is truncated</span></p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">/sbin/ldconfig: file /usr/lib64/libavcodec.so.52.20.0 is truncated</span></p>

            Tried to find out which RPM provides these shared objects but yum again refused to corporate.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">http://ftp.isu.edu.tw/pub/Linux/Fedora/linux/development/x86_64/os/repodata/66da271dd9f7a6d6e50f822f10aa90d7fbfc0ba1d021947a63ceb49da8f86a-filelists.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
                    Trying other mirror.
                    ....</span>

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            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">http://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora/linux/development/x86_64/os/repodata/66da271dd9f7a6d6e50f822f10aa90d7fbfc0ba1d021947a63ceb49da8f86a-filelists.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
                    Trying other mirror.
                    0d7fbfc0ba1d021947a63ceb49da8f86a-filelists.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
                    Trying other mirror.
                    Error: failure: repodata/66da271dd9f7a6d6e50f822f10aa90d7fbfc0ba1d021947a63ceb49da8f86a-filelists.sqlite.bz2 from fedora: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.</span>

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            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">
                </span>

                This particular error is easy to fix. Just do a ' <em>yum clean metadata</em>'. clean metadata is the remedy for many of the problems with yum specially the file not found problems. Sometimes it can be used to resolve conflicts too. But it didn't resolve the problem with the truncated so files (shown in second error dump). Looking close I found that even after doing a yum remove vlc the offending shared objects are still there. They were promptly disposed of and VLC was installed yet again. This time thankfully the truncated so error message didn't pop up and VLC finally started up without that annoying bus error.

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Starting up VLC on Fedora 11

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            After going into all that <a href="fedora-11-woes.html">trouble with Fedora 11</a>. I landed back on square one thanks to Palimpsest. Since the time I upgraded to F11, It kept warning me about a hard drive that is on the verge of failure. Now I am someone who has suffered a lot from drive failures the most recent one was in <a href="1643.html">October</a>. None of those drives so much as mummered before failing so I thought I would take the warning seriously, specially because this drive is now <a href="000840.html">4 years old</a>. Once upon a long ago, it was the largest drive that I had weighing in at 120GB. Now it's the smallest. The new drive is 500GB and cost about as much as the old one did. When you consider the fact that inflation is always 20% or higher in our country, a gigabyte now costs about 1/10th of what it used to do.

            As fate would have it the faulty drive was the very drive that had the '/' partition. All the files in it were rsynced onto the new drive after booting with the DVD in rescue mode. The /etc/fstab file was edited, taking care to use the UUID instead of the drive name. That's necessary because plugging / un-plugging drives causes their drive letters to change. I kept the old drive in but booted off the new drive and used it for a couple of days before unplugging it. That's when I started getting a blank screen on bootup.

            It was time to reboot with the DVD and to try to update grub. Yet grub installed refused to do it's task:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;"><strong><strong>Could not find device for </strong></strong></span></p>

            Now that message appears to be truncated. There should be a device name at the end but it's simply not there. I had very foolishly formatted the drive as ext4 I am beginning to think that Fedora 11 isn't quite ready for it yet. Even so the /boot partition is ext2 (the Fedora installer refused to format it as ext4)

            Then I found a <a href="https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=504678">post</a> which explains how to manually installed grub. Even after following those steps, all i got was just another blank screen on boot up. I tried once more and installed the boot loader into all three of the drives I have. Then toggling through the boot sequence, I finally managed to get a grub menu on bootup instead of blank screen. I suppose you can call that progress. By manually entering the kernel and initrd parameters, I could now get the machine to progress into the next step, only to see it freeze up just before the services are started.

            Fedora 11 official release is just a few days away. The easiest thing at this stage would probably be to just wait for it, But I decided to take the plunge and reinstall with the preview DVD.&nbsp; Even then the installer bailed out several times apparently it's a time zone problem (more on that later). Once I sorted that out the installer proceeded very quickly probably because it recognized the RPMs that were already installed.

            I have a working machine once again, even though it still refuses to run VLC or tweetdeck and crashes when you try to use Mplayer.

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F11 and Back to Square 1.

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            <p></p>
            <p>No more Nokia for me. Nokia is to mobiles what M$ is to computers. They sell lousy phones for a hefty prices. I started using Nokia phones only after Siemens mobile finally hung up the towel. <a href="is-that-a-phone-or-a-lemon.html">The camera on my E71 stopped working</a> with in a month. This is a known issue and widely recorded on many websites and forums including on Nokia's own support forum. Yet Nokia support staff deny that it is a known issue. It's not something that just effects the E71, or just E Series phones other S60 phones are effected as well. <a href="https://www.google.lk/search?q=s60+%22Camera%3A+feature+not+supported%22&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;aq=t&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;client=firefox-a">Just see for yourself</a></p>
            <p>While denying it's a known issue, they are happy to fix it but the only catch is they want the phone to be sent to the US. Why is that? well my father bought it for me while in the US a little over a month ago. The prices charged by the local agents are atrocious and the E71 like many other Nokias costs about 40% more over here.</p>
            <p>Unfortunately neither me nor my father have any immediate plans of a US visit. Claiming warranties from any Sri Lankan company is like pulling teeth so I am not keeping my fingers cross about being able to get this fixed free of charge from the local agents.</p>
            <p>This is not my first bad experience with Nokia phones. A 6151 I had sometime ago just fell apart. It's keyboard broke, the power button wore out and ringer stopped working. After that I had a lot of trouble with an E51 as well.</p>
            <p>This is in stark contrast to Siemens phones that I used long ago. They were virtually indestructible. I had an M55 which I dropped at least 40 times. I used to throw it up in the air and catch it like a ball. It was supposed to be shock proof. It really was.</p>
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No more nokia

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            Like with Fedora 10 playing videos is not easy on Fedora 11 either. VLC player simply will not start.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">VLC media player.0.0-r Goldeneye
                    Bus error</span>

                Tried to do a yum update hoping that this is a bug that has been fixed.
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
                    Setting up Update Process
                    Resolving Dependencies
                    --&gt; Running transaction check
                    ---&gt; Package rpmfusion-free-release.noarch 0:11-1 set to be updated
                    ---&gt; Package x264.x86_64 0:0.65-9_20090117.2245.fc10_92 set to be updated
                    --&gt; Processing Dependency: libx264.so.67()(64bit) for package: vlc-core
                    --&gt; Finished Dependency Resolution
                    vlc-core-1.0.0-0.5r.fc.x86_64 from installed has depsolving problems
                    --&gt; Missing Dependency: libx264.so.67()(64bit) is needed by package vlc-core-1.0.0-0.5r.fc.x86_64 (installed)
                    Error: Missing Dependency: libx264.so.67()(64bit) is needed by package vlc-core-1.0.0-0.5r.fc.x86_64 (installed)
                    You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
                    You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
                    package-cleanup --dupes
                    rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest</span>

                At the end of the error message it provides some suggestions unfortunately none of them worked. I did a yum whatprovides to find out what the missing RPM might be. There are several possible candidates and most of them appear to be for Fedora 10. I picked one almost by random and tried to install it and got the exact same error produced above. Hello! The very reason I am trying to install this RPM because the shared object is not there so don't tell me that it's not there!

                I tried removing VLC and trying to put it back in again. That resulted in the above yum error going away, but it failed to make the vlc error go away.

                Then I found the installed 264 libraries and yum removed them

                yum remove x264-libs-0.0.0-0.24.20090319gitc109c8.fc.x86_64 libx264_65-0.65-9_20090117.2245.fc10_92.x86_64

                There were&nbsp; a lot of dependencies and nearly all of them were F10 rpms. These were also removed by yum. Then I re installed vlc one more time. This time a lot of dependencies were installed which had the .f11 tag in their filenames. The installation wasn't successful.
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Transaction Check Error:
                    file /usr/lib64/libfaad.so.2.0.0 from install of faad2-libs-1:2.7-1.fc.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libfaad2-1:2.7-16.fc10_92.x86_64
                    file /usr/lib64/libavutil.so.49.15.0 from install of ffmpeg-libs-0.5-2.fc.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libavutil49-0.5-30.fc10_92.x86_64
                    file /usr/lib64/libswscale.so.0.7.1 from install of ffmpeg-libs-0.5-2.fc.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libswscale0-0.5-30.fc10_92.x86_64
                    file /usr/lib64/libpostproc.so.51.2.0 from install of ffmpeg-libs-0.5-2.fc.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libpostproc-0.5-30.fc10_92.x86_64</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Error Summary</span></p>

            Removed these offending RPMs and trying installing VLC one more time. The installation was successful but vlc still refuses to start. Time to give up on this.

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Fedora 11 woes

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            Having become a twitter addict, tweetdeck was amongst the first batch of applications that I tried to&nbsp; install on my fresh Fedora 11 installation. But to install, tweetdeck you need to install Adobe Air and that got off to a bad start.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">[<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="b9cbd6d6cdf9d5d6dad8d5d1d6cacd">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> ~]# /home/raditha/Download/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
                    Error loading the runtime (libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)</span>

                [<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="5a2835352e1a3635393b363235292e">[email&nbsp;protected]</a> ~]# yum install libgtk-x11
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">No package libgtk-x11 available</span></p>

            this is because adobe air needs 32bit libraries (lame or what? ). In the past I have had trouble mixing 32 and 64 bit libraries but I decided to risk is and installed the 32 bit version manually with <em>yum install gtk2-2.16.1-4.fc.i586 </em> even then&nbsp; the installer still fails.<em>
            </em>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Error loading the runtime (libxml2.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)</span></p>

            I tried to fix it with:

            yum whatprovides "*/libxml2.so.2"

            yum install libxml2-2.7.3-2.fc.i586

            Only to run into another error or rather a series of errors.
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 200px;"><span style="color: #993300;">(setup:19453): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "clearlooks",</span>
                <span style="color: #993300;">(setup:19453): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "clearlooks",</span>

                <span style="color: #993300;">....</span>

                <span style="color: #993300;">(setup:19453): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "clearlooks",
                    Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module": libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
                    Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "pk-gtk-module": libpk-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
                    Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "gnomebreakpad": libgnomebreakpad.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory</span>
            </div>
            All this lead to another round of yum install commands which resulted in about 60 MB of additional downloads.

            yum install libcanberra-gtk2-0.12-1.fc.i586.rpm
            yum install PackageKit-gtk-module-0.4.6-8.fc.i586
            yum install bug-buddy-2.26.0-2.fc.i586

            and this leads to another inevitable series of error messages
            <div style="overflow: auto; padding-left: 30px; height: 200px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Transaction Check Error:
                    file /usr/share/locale/am/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/ar/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/as/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/az/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/be/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/<a href="../../cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="4e2c2b0e222f3a2720">[email&nbsp;protected]</a>/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/bg/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/bn/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/bn_IN/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/bs/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/ca/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/cs/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/cy/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/da/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/dz/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/el/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/en_CA/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es_AR/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es_CL/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es_CO/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64
                    file /usr/share/locale/es_CR/LC_MESSAGES/libgweather.mo from install of libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.i586 conflicts with file from package libgweather-2.26.1-1.fc.x86_64 </span></div>
            Is it any wonder that ordinary people don't use linux? This error had to be overcome by manually installing gweather using the rpm command and the --nodeps and --force flags. That had to be followed by installing the 32 bit version of the GTK engine. After doing all this what do I get? Another error of course.
            <p style="text-align: center;"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/air-error.jpg" alt="an error occured while installing adobe air"></p>

            Please contact your administrator. What I am supposed to do give myself a call? After a lot of googling I discovered that the air installer will put more detailed error messages into a log file but only if a file by the name of ~/.airinstall exists on your system! how lame is that? JavaFX is bad enough but this is ridiculous. The error message was certainly detailed but not very useful.
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Performing runtime install
                    UI SWF load is complete
                    UI initialized
                    starting user confirmation
                    runtime install entering error state: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text="Unhandled e
                    xception TypeError: Error #1009" errorID=1009]
                    begin quitting</span>
            </p>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>

            Now it's the time for me to begin quitting too - there is nothing about this error on google or even on the adobe site.

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Fedora 11 and Tweetdeck.

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            A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded Fedora 11 and a couple of days ago I managed to find the time to install it on my desktop. It was running Fedora 10 at the time and the upgrade, like all <a href="2160.html">past upgrades</a> didn't go smoothly. Since I have had so much trouble with Fedora updates in the past, my tactic is to first install on a virtual machine to test it out. Invariably the virtual machine installation proceeds smoothly it's only when you try the real thing that you run into trouble.

            To be accurate the upgrade did go smoothly and it was the post installation configuration/firstboot that failed. As usual, grub installation was messed up and the system didn't start up until I booted the DVD in rescue mode and re installed <a href="1803.html">grub</a>. This is par for the course. Every time I have updated fedora, I have had to do that. On booting up, It seemed that each service waits twenty seconds to start up. Some of them didn't start at all [FAILED] but when the system got to atd it got completely stuck and stopped responding at all.

            Booting again into rescue mode, I found that most of the symbolic links to the .so files in /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 are missing. Worse yet, some of the shared objects from Fedora 10 hadn't even been replaced. No wonder this is getting stuck. I tried to manually install or update the missing libraries but rpm itself was broken (rpmbuild.so missing). When that happened in the past I have been able to <a href="1579.html">use the rpm2cpio tool </a>to manually install the contents of an rpm. This had to be done on a second computer and the files brought over (with a USB stick ssh is also dead) to the effected machine. Unfortunately all that effort didn't get me anywhere because rpm still complained :
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #ff6600;">rpm: symbol lookup error: rpm: undefined symbol : rpmConfigDir</span></p>

            I never found out what causes it. After a lot of googling, I just gave up and reinstalled from scratch over the existing installation. I can afford to do that because my drives have been properly paritioned and I am not going to lose any data by doing this.

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Fedora 11 Preview