Mugshot is the website that continues to surprise me the more I use it.  At first it was just a website with an unusual purple theme.  Then it was the very frustrating site with the purple theme.  Now it just may be one of the most interesting and underrated sites of the year.

In case you haven’t clicked on the link yet, Mugshot is a social web aggregator.  You sign up to Mugshot and then let it know about all of the social networks you’re a part of such as Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, delicious, Picasa, digg and Reddit.  Additionally, you add in some feeds from Amazon.com, last.fm, and Netflix.  Finally, if you enter your blog address it tracks new posts.  It then uses this to track all of these in one convenient place.  The thinking is that you and your friends all sign up for Mugshot and then you have one-stop-shopping to find out everything that’s up with your friends.

Flock has completely changed how I interact with the so-called Social Web.  In my case, that means Facebook and Flickr.  Ever since I first started using Flock and received the help I needed to get the blogging to work, I’ve been using it every day.  In fact, that only thing that has kept me from having it be my only/default browser is that it’s extremely slow in Flickr when loading pages.  Also, in any pages with videos (whether from Youtube or Vimeo) there is a video and audio stutter that renders the video unwatchable.  But that’s the only real negative I’ve been able to find with Flock.

I looked at the top 60 of 365 search strings people type into search engines when they come to my site.  These represent 34.14%  of the search terms people type to get here.

It seems that most people come here looking for:

• Relient K ( 7.4%)
• Gnewsense ( 5.2%)
• Fedora 8 ( 4.71%)

The best thing is that ever since I switched from blog posts with URLs that look like http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/p?923 to http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/year/month/day/posttitle/ the search engines have been bringing more and more relevant searches over to my server.  Before they were way off topic due to the fact that the search engines were not picking up on my topics efficiently enough.  As you know, I love having more people come because it means more readers and I don’t feel like I’m typing for no reason.  Also, especially when it comes to Linux issues, I’d like to think that my posts can help others who are going through the same situations.  When it comes to the specific search terms that people are coming over for when it comes to Fedora 8, it’s obvious they are coming with questions I provide the answers to.  Here are some examples:

In order to get my title bars back, all I had to do was run compiz-fusion in the terminal. To get it to persist I had to do SYSTEM–>Preferences–>Personal–>Sessions. Click on add, name it whatever and the command should be compiz-manager and to get all the awesome plugins you’ve been seeing since the merge with Beryl, just download ccsm. If you have any problems, check out this linuxquestions.org forum, that’s how I figured it out.

I had to uninstall a few more multimedia packages, but it eventually upgraded. After rebooting I arrived at GDM just fine - yay! I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the bootup time on Fedora 8 seems to a A LOT faster than it was in Fedora 7. I feel like I got to GDM a lot faster.

Compiz is working and so is dual screen - so far this live upgrade has been better than any of my DVD/CD upgrades. Due to either updates in Compiz or in Gnome or in Fedora’s changes to Gnome, I finally have something I’ve wanted since Fedora Core 6 - on the desktop switcher, when using Compiz, it would not show the dividers between the desktops. Now it does show the dividers, making for a better experience. It’s easier to click on the exact desktop I want. Then again, at least on this first boot, I seem to be missing the top-most bar on my program - where the max, min and close program button are. Not surprisingly, there are no updates to install.

Mario is my main Linux box. I had to uninstall x264 this comes from the fact that I mixed livna and freshrpms. I never intended to do so, but I started with freshrpms back in the day, but nowadays I use livna for my graphics card. That plus freshrpms relative lack of updates compared to livna means that it’s slowly sliding off my computer. The only bad thing is that livna does not carry binaries for Cinelerra. I’ll have to investigate what I should do there. So far, for dependency errors I’ve had to remove:

I followed the procedure at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq so the point of this is just to go over my experience with these steps.

1. Review and remove all .rpmsave and .rpmnew files before and after upgrading I basically did a locate, found them and deleted them.

2. for a in $(find /etc /var -name ‘*.rpm?*’); do b=${a%.rpm?*}; diff -u $a $b; done I did this, but I didn’t really know what to do with the results. It appears not to have mattered in this case

Well, at least it worked pretty well on my future PVR. I will give a more detailed explanation/directions of my experience for others who may be wondering if this is really as scary as it sounds since it’s “unsupported”. However, my main Linux computer is much, much more complex in the number of packages installed. I’ll probably be waiting until after the Thanksgiving Holidays to tackle that one to make sure that I have the needed time to fix things if they go wrong. At least I’m happy at the prospect and I plan on letting the Fedora Live Upgrade SIG know about this so they can make it officially supported.

Well, the entire upgrade process is not yet over, so I don’t want to get too excited, but I think this may solve my problem.  I started a yum upgrade on my living room computer  - which will one day be my MythTv PVR (once I get the necessary hardware).  It went through the dependency check in roughly 4 minutes or less.  It’s now downloading 951 MB of updates, so it may be a while before it’s ready for the next phase.  Still, if this works, I know what I’m going to do with my main computer.  I really hope this can eventually become a supported method of upgrading.  It seems to be a lot faster and doesn’t require me to uninstall all of my third party programs.

It may have been about to install or it may never have installed, but after 35 hours, I was getting a little annoyed.  I’ve decided to try the unsupported yum upgrade.  I’ll try it first one a guinea pig computer that’s at Fedora 7.  If that works, I’ll try it on my real machine.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: [Fedora 8](http://technorati.com/tag/Fedora 8), upgrade, yum

It’s still right at the end of that little progress bar. The HDD activity light on my compute continues so I’m hoping it’s not frozen, but just working on figuring out the dependencies on all of my packages. I’m going to give it until I get home today and maybe until I go to bed. After that I’ll have to rethink things - perhaps uninstalling those non-Fedora packages…. q:o(

Upgrading to Fedora 7 didn’t take this long and neither did Fedora 6, but that’s ok - as long as it happens.  It’s nearly done with the dependency checking.  It’s been getting closer and closer to the end of the bar.  Part of me thinks it may be stuck, but after waiting 10 hours to get this far, I don’t want to stop if there’s a chance it will start installing tonight or even tomorrow morning.  Before the next upgrade I hope to have more RAM, as I think that’s probably part of the reason why it’s taking so long.  Just wanted to update how long it’s taking both for anyone else in this situation and for myself so when Fedora 9 comes out, I can remember how long Fedora 8 took.

I tried upgrading Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 a few times when it first came out and it kept getting stuck at 26% in the dependency checking phase. I went on the fedora IRC room and I was told to remove my non-Fedora repos. I didn’t listen because that’s always the first thing they tell you to do and, in my experience, it never seems to be the true culprit. Then I found out online that the update servers were swamped when Fedora 8 first came out. Also, freshrpms didn’t appear to have any RPMs yet for Feodra 8. Tried it again today and it appears to be going much better. It’s taken around 2.5 hours, but the dependency check is almost done. I’m hoping to be able to upgrade today. This last part has been especially slow, so I’m hoping that within the next hour or two I’ll be able to start the actual upgrade process. I’ll post what happens here in case others are having similar problems.

I’m bit torrenting is as we speak. Get it here. Be nice and download via bit torrent if you can so we can all share in the bandwidth!

And here’s the release announcement: Official Announcement: (To the tune of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”)

It’s close to midnight and something cool is coming through the “tubes” It’s looking real tight, a distro for the experts and the n00bs With Live CDs* so you can try it out before installing Or DVDs so you can have the packages you choose No way to lose