Today I basically converted my Red Hat 8.0 machine from ext2 to xfs, and implemented devfs.

This took way longer than it should have.

Redhat is not very well setup to work with devfs, even with devfsd installed. Don't expect your mouse to work. Expect that somewhere in the boot-up scripts, redhat will try to rewrite your /etc/fstab file with new names (and then not write them back correctly if you use 'devfs=nomount' when you boot)

I had to use my LBT (bbc) disc 35 times today. That disc rocks. There are 2 show-stopper bugs in it. 'mount' doesn't work, (but 'mount.real' does) and 'losetup' is missing, so you can 'mount -o' something, but never release the /dev/loop0, so you can never reboot. :( These will have to be fixed soon! It still seems awesome to be able to use such a little linux disc for doing all this xfs conversion work.

Anyway, finally got the sequence all down, and after mkfs.xfs on a partition, you have to xfs_admin to set the label, since /etc/fstab uses partition labels for mounting. Grub is also very picky, and has to be re-installed for xfs support to work.

Whew.

Thursday and Friday of this week, I will be at the Open Source Health Care Alliance conference. ( http://www.openparadigms.com/oshca2002 ) If anyone is going to be there, let me know.

So, after years of using Debian, I am trying to learn the Red Hat way.

I still have all those machines at home happily running Debian, but the computer allocated for me at work has video chips and ethernet chips that are not in any of the stock installable debian kernels, or XFree packages, so I popped in the RedHat 8.0 CD here at work, and, voila, everything autodetected and is supported. I guess that's why RedHat's stuff has so many patches.

So, that and the fact that every other person here uses Redhat has made decide to better my RedHat skills and stick with this set-up for now.

So, first thing I noticed is how limiting Metacity is as a window manager. Yes, I've read all the gnome-devel lists about how confusing it is to operate a desktop, so that's why the gnome2 environment is so dumbed down. But, still... I can raise a window with a mouse click, but cannot lower it at all?

Metacity "lower" patches here. http://david.cdk.com/~dkaiser/metacity

soon and very soon I will be done with this unemployed thing...

more news tomorrow

yawn... that was fun,