Ed Anderson's Blog

Tomorrow is my last day at rPath. I'm leaving a on a religious mission trip to Taiwan for 2 years, starting on the 14th. Wish me luck! I'm excited. It's going to be a lot of hard work, but it will be fun and worth it. I'll only have limited internet access out there.

I'm going to miss everyone here at rPath! I can't wait to see what rPath and Conary are like two years from now. I have no doubt that it will be anything short of amazing. :-)

Black Friday! I've never done it before. I've never camped out in front of a store from 11:45a to 5:00a in the bitter cold to cash in on some cool deals. It was great! My uncle and I were about 12th in line at Best Buy, although that about doubled by the end of the night, as people invited friends, and others snuck into the front. My uncle brought some chairs, and I brought a sleeping bag that kept me very warm all through the night. A good friend from highschool got there about 15 minutes after we did, so I told him to come join us in line. Apparently this wind and cold was nothing, to him. Less than a week ago, he was in the same place, camping out for an xbox 360, in the rain and even lower temperatures. Now he has four of them that he's going to sell.

I bought two new 19" LCD monitors, and a 425VA UPS, to replace my old crappy battery backup when it dies. The coolest part was that I was the absolute first person to check out! It was nightmarish for most everyone else, who were waiting probably 3 hours in line for check-out. I'm glad I went. It was fun!

Thanks to a collaborative effort with developers from Foresight, gnome-volume-manager for Gnome 2.12 is now supported in rPath Linux 0.71.

Removable media such as CDs and USB keys will automatically mount when inserted. DVDs and audio CDs will automatically play in Totem. USB Printers should install automatically. These actions are enabled by default, but you can also run a CD burner when blank media is inserted, import photos from your camera, sync PDAs, install printers, set up input devices, and more.

Everything can be configured with gnome-volume-properties.
(Desktop -> Preferences -> Removable Drives and Media)

Removable media is mounted in /media and can be unmounted with pumount.

It turns out that the OpenOffice.org dependency issue in the 0.70 installer was a bigger issue than we had initially thought. Because of OpenOffice's dependency issue, none of the dependencies for any other packages are installed either. Luckily, it's very easy to get around. Either deselect the OpenOffice.org package under group-xorg (or compat32 for x86_64 installs), or do an 'Everything' install. This of course only affects users installing OpenOffice. It will be fixed in the next release.