Month: October 2010

What can you do with A8M2N-LA / NodusM-GL8E?

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Recently, I decided to turn my HP m7557c computer (motherboard: A8M2N-LA / NodusM-GL8E) to an Unix server. The nightmare began. After trying nearly 10 different operating systems and distributions, I found that only very few of them worked with A8M2N-LA / NodusM-GL8E. I think it is worth to share my experience with this beast – an experiment result that took more than 100 hours.

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
-- Thomas A. Edison
The following operating system are listed in alphabetically:

Fedora 13
Status: No
Comment: Installation went well, but the system was very unstable due to kernel panic. This mother board may not compatible with the newer Linux kernel.

FreeBSD 7.3
Status: No
Comment: Does not support USB keyword, i.e., can’t start the installation.

FreeBSD 8.1
Status: Yes
Comment: Stable, however the harddrives are very unstable. Sometimes the system complains about the harddrive. See the full story here.

FreeBSD 8.2
Status: Yes
Comment: Very stable. No problem found so far.

OS X 10.4
Status: No
Comment: Installation failed.

OS X 10.5.8
Status: No
Comment: Installation completed, but very unstable. The system reboots itself.

OS X 10.6
Status: No
Comment: Installation failed

Ubuntu 9.10
Status: Yes, stable.

Ubuntu 10.04
Status: No
Comment: If install directly from the disk, the system will not boot. The only possible way is to upgrade from an earlier version. See Ubuntu 10.04 – Can’t boot / Can’t install for details.

Ubuntu 10.10
Status: No
Comment: Cannot even load the installation disk.

Hope my experience is helpful to you.

–Derrick

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A letter to Microsoft Internet Explorer Development Team

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Dear Microsoft Internet Explorer Development Team,

Would you like to take the source of Firefox (or any browser besides Internet Explorer) and call it Internet Explorer 11?

Thanks.

–Derrick

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Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the $PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

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This post is about FreeBSD, however the idea is about the same for other Unix systems.

While I tried to install memcached, the system complained with this message:

Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the
$PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

This problem is caused by missing couple variables at the shell level: PHP_AUTOCONF, PHP_AUTOHEADER. It is very easy to solve this problem:

1. First, make sure that Autoconf is installed in your system:

#pkg_info | grep autoconf
autoconf-2.68       Automatically configure source code on many Un*x platforms
autoconf-wrapper-20071109 Wrapper script for GNU autoconf

If autoconf is not available, install it from here:

cd /usr/ports/devel/autoconf268
make install clean

2. Now, we need to set couple variables. This step is very important because you can’t set the variable using sudo export x=y. First, switch to root

sudo su

3. Find out where is autoconf (The location in FreeBSD and Linux are different)

which autoconf

4. Set the autoconf, in my case, it is /usr/local/bin/autoconf

export PHP_AUTOCONF=/usr/local/bin/autoconf

5. Do the same thing for autoheader:

which autoheader
export PHP_AUTOHEADER=/usr/local/bin/autoheader

That’s it. Now try to install your software again and the error message should be gone.

–Derrick

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Finally, Ubuntu uses a more updated Linux kernel than Fedora

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Historically, Ubuntu focuses on the user experience such as beautiful graphical user interface, while Fedora focuses on performance. In the other words, the kernel in Fedora distribution is more up-to-dated.

I just upgraded by Ubuntu 10.04 to 10.10 (released on October 10, 2010), I found that the Linux Kernel in Ubuntu is more advanced than Fedora. I am surprised!

#cat /etc/lsb-release && uname -a

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=maverick
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.10"
Linux 2.6.35-22-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP Sun Sep 19 20:34:50 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

and for Fedora 13:

#cat /etc/redhat-release && uname -a
Fedora release 13 (Goddard)
Fedora release 13 (Goddard)
Linux 2.6.34.7-56.fc13.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Sep 15 03:36:55 UTC 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

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