malvasia bianca

The new Ultra 20 (panini) is all set up now – I’ve transferred my home directory, and I’m reading mail from there, doing svn commits there. I still haven’t set up backups properly, but that’s something I wasn’t doing right on the laptop, either, so it’s not a reason to hold up the switch.

Notes:

• Running in 64-bit mode seems fine. The only problem I’ve noticed so far is that various browser plugins (e.g. flash) aren’t available in 64-bit mode; if I really cared, I’d figure out how to run a 32-bit browser there, but as it is I don’t use those plugins at all frequently, and I’m planning to do most of my web browsing off of the laptop (my old Linux laptop now, my MacBook when it shows up.
• I learned a bit more about Subversion; rather than try to move the repository using rsync, I decided to dump and restore it the right way. While I was at it, I converted it to use FSFS instead of Berkeley DB to store data, and stuck in an extra directory level in the hierarchy. Following which I got to use ‘svn switch’ for the first time.
• It took a while to get the local web server working. Which I use mainly for dbcdb testing, though it’s occasionally useful to be able to look at my public_html directory, too. SELinux was the culprit; apparently the security contexts have gotten stricter in FC5. (Either compared to FC4 or compared to whatever I first installed on this laptop; not sure.) I learned about ‘ls -Z’ and played around with running ‘chcon -t httpd_sys_context_t’ on various files; ultimately, due to various peculiarities in my setup (including that ~/public_html is a symbolic link into a directory contained in a directory where I don’t want to fiddle with contexts), I turned off SELinux for httpd. It’s not accessible outside of my local network, so that’s not a big deal; I might still try to play around with more ways to get this right, though.

So that’s largely over with; now I just have to wait for my MacBook to show up (1-3 day lead times? Yeah, right), and I can go through another phase of new computer geekery. And then I’ll be able to settle down and get back to work! (So to speak.)