Munckfish.net

I needed to backup my old FC3 system ready to upgrade. I wanted to use dar to do it as I’ve had success with this on Windows. Luckily on Linux there’s a user interface available for it - Kdar.

I couldn’t find any pre-built binary packages for either of these (I didn’t look very hard) so I decided to compile from source. There were a few problems which I faced on the way I want to document them here so I don’t forget how to solve them in future.

Dar

1. Ran the following commands to build dar ./configure --enable-mode=64 && make
2. The configure script failed at first with the error complaining that it couldn’t find /lib/libattr.a. It appears in FC3 the libattr shared object files are in /lib but libattr.a is in /usr/lib. This problem is quickly fixed by making a symlink to libattr.a from /lib like this: ln -s /usr/lib/libattr.a /lib/
3. Once compiled ok, running sudo make install now successfully installed it under the /usr/local directory.

Kdar

1. I used the following commands to build kdar: ./configure --enable-mode=64 --prefix=/usr/local --disable-debug && make
2. Running the configure script produced a confusing error; although I’d built and installed dar, it could not find and link to libdar64. After a little hunting on the net I discovered that I needed to run the ldconfig command to cataloque the newly installed libdar. ldconfig does not search /usr/local/lib by default so I added this directory to it’s search path (run man ldconfig to find out how to do this).
3. The final problem I faced was that it could not find /lib/libattr.la. In fact this has the same solution as the error described above when compiling dar.

Found a good article on exception handling strategy on the Microsoft Patterns and Practices site:

Exception Management Architecture Guide

It focuses on .Net but it’s totally relevant to all languages that need to handle exceptions.

This last weekend I installed Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Breezy Badger) on my old machine and I was seriously impressed.

For months I have been using Fedora Core 3 on my main machine, and have been trying to get around to the hassle of upgrading it to FC4. But now I am considering moving to Ubuntu.

For a home system Ubuntu is just what you need. Fetching new software is really easy using the simplied add/remove package application for common apps and Synaptic/APT for finding and installing more specialist items.

My only gripe is that it appears as if the firewall isn’t setup by default (or maybe it’s cause I cancelled Firestarter first time around?) and the firewall configuration app, Firestarter, needed to be downloaded and installed from the remote repository. However, once you’ve got Firestarter it makes setting up IPTables filters very simple. It even includes a neat tray applet to allow easy adminstration.

Other highlights include:

1. The Mono .Net implementation has been included as well a selection of stable applications based on it
2. Administration is made easy by default as it uses sudo so that users can adopt root permissions without having to actually become root, and can use their own password to do so.
3. Gnome 2.12