Posted by Brad Hudson on Nov 20, 2009
Is it Friday already? Where has the week gone? Whatever, we’ve got lots of good news tidbits for you this week, including several follow-ups to previous stories. Enough jaw-jacking, let’s get to the news.
Operating Systems
This week we got an early alpha of Google Chrome OS, which is slated for full release sometime in Q4 of 2010. ZDNet blogs and Ars technica have three good first looks at Chrome. First up is Adrian Kingsley-Hughes article Chrome OS – The good, the bad and the ugly, and how it fits in with Windows, Mac and Linux.
For a more security related view, Ryan Naraine has an early look into Chrome OS security with Inside the Google Chrome OS security model.
Lastly, Jon Stokes at Ars Technica has his own first look with screenshots in Chrome OS: Internet failing at PC > PC failing at Internet.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Don Seiler on Nov 19, 2009
Today, I had a spare Fedora 11 machine sitting next to me, so I thought I’d try the upgrade to the newly-released Fedora 12, aka “Constantine.” Fedora support cycles are rather short compared to Ubuntu, so Fedora 11 will likely be de-supported in 6 to 7 months. Normally I’d wait a little longer into the Fedora 12 cycle for others to find the fun upgrade bugs and have them fixed for me, but I didn’t mind having to re-install from scratch on this machine if I needed to.
Following the Fedora documentation, I decided to use the “preupgrade” tool. Everything was going smoothly until the machine restarted to begin installation of the new packages. I got a message that there wasn’t enough space in my /boot partition. Specifically, the message claimed that there was insufficient disk space in /mnt/sysimage/boot. I found this rather odd and troubling, since I had let the Fedora installer determine the /boot partition size when I originally installed Fedora 11.
Turns out that this is a known problem with the preupgrade tool. A kind soul in #fedora on IRC directed me to the list of common Fedora 12 bugs, in particular the preupgrade free space check. I installed the updated preupgrade package as directed, but again got the error. That’s when I followed the next link for additional tips to free up space in /boot. The first was to remove obsolete kernels, which I had already done. The next was to run tune2fs on /boot filesystem to free up reserved blocks, which aren’t needed for /boot. I strongly suggest you visit the links provided for helpful screenshots and commands to follow.
After making these changes, the upgrade worked and am I’m the proud owner of a Fedora 12 Constantine laptop, with a slightly brighter shade of blue desktop than that crusty old Fedora 11. ;)
