Fedora 10 correctly handles FA19 in various applications, including OpenOffice.

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Yes, it’s the Christmas holidays and I’m tinkering with Perl scripts that parse XML files and SQL databases. It was worth it, however, to discover that the circle is now complete: Emacs requires Perl.

Also awk, bash, cpio, ping, and sed, but hey, who doesn’t need those?

[Yes, that list is so basic that it would be surprising if a package didn’t end up pulling one of them in somewhere down the dependency chain, but Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with delusions of godhood, built around text processing; why would it want Perl? Turns out there’s exactly one Perl script in the distribution, packaged up in emacs-common: /usr/bin/grep-changelog]

An Unselect All button, so you don’t have to manually click on dozenshundreds of “optional” packages that are installed by default. It’s pretty sad that the easiest way to reduce the amount of cruft in a Fedora/Redhat/CentOS install is to ignore the GUI package selector, install once, save the resulting Kickstart config, load it into a text editor, strip out everything you’re sure you won’t need, re-install with that template, and then see if you ended up with a bootable system.

This still installs a lot of stuff that you’ll never need or want, but at least the resulting package list is smaller, and after a few iterations you can build a decent server or netbook install.

[Update: If my script is correct (package selection from comps.xml and dependencies from primary.sqlite), installing Fedora 10 without changing the default list of packages will install 1099 1109 1116 1070 RPMs out of 2218 total; stripping out the default-but-optional packages brings that down to 510 514 522 505, which still includes a working Gnome desktop environment. A typical offender is a2ps, which pulls in texlive, imagemagick, ghostscript, ncurses, groff, and plenty of others (even libthai!).]

I’d also like a Really, Really Unselect Everything That Isn’t Necessary For This Locale button; “core” and “base” still have a fair amount of cruft in them.

Note: this is not a Linux-versus-{Windows,Mac,whateverdude} posting; it’s just about the difficulty of overriding the decision to include every precious snowflake’s package in the standard install. The decision to enable every compile-time option doesn’t help, either, since you end up pulling in half a dozen other packages on the off chance that the user is in an environment where one of them might matter.

Why do I care? Because about six weeks ago, I did an update on my EEE PC running Fedora 9, and there were so many updated packages that I didn’t have enough free disk space on the 4 GB flash drive to download them all, much less unpack and install. I had to symlink the yum directory to a loopback-mounted ext2 image on another flash drive (because the drive itself was FAT32, which wasn’t good enough).

[note on the twice-updated RPM counts: my script wasn’t handling conditional packages correctly. I was processing conditionals before resolving all dependencies, so it missed cases where the package in the condition was added by a dependency, not by another group. A good example is language packs for OpenOffice: you select the packages for each application, all of which depend on the -core package; when you add support for a language, it adds the office language packs if it sees -core.]

[Update: Okay, I had to completely redo the dependency resolution, because multiple non-conflicting packages supply the same requirements. Anaconda chooses exactly one of them, apparently based on the length of the package name (shortest wins). My script now produces exactly the same results as a default install of F10, so the numbers should finally stop changing.]

When someone installs a machine and enters somedomain.net as the hostname, please do not insert the line “search net” into /etc/resolv.conf.

But hey, it’s a start.

Last week, I got a letter reminding me that my 2002 Lexus RX-300 was due for its 200,000-mile service. Monday, I called the dealership near my office to schedule it. The service tech asked for my phone number, typed it in, and said:

S: Wow, you’ve got a lot of cars.

J: Um, no, just the one.

S: I see at least 50. No, wait, 115.

J: By chance, are any of them a 2002 RX?

S: No. Is your address 1721 Del Monte?

J: No. But you have the right name and phone number.

S: Um, okay, we’ll just schedule this manually, and I’ll tell someone about the glitch.

A few minutes later, I realized why the address he gave sounded so familiar: it’s the dealership I originally bought the car at, in Monterey. I figured he had just clicked the wrong option and ended up looking at their inventory.

No. When I showed up the next morning, they typed in my name and said, “wow, you’ve got a lot of cars.” I pointed out the address, and someone laughed and said he knew what had happened:

everyone has admin privileges in the system, and the last time I'd come in, the tech had made the "rookie mistake" of transferring every car at another dealership into my name instead of transferring my car's home dealership from there to here.

He was surprised that I hadn’t gotten 115 warranty service reminder calls.

When you alert me that a server is running out of swap space, I really don’t want to log in and find out that you’re the one using up all of the virtual memory.

[Update 10/24/08: after informing them on 10/2 that the replacement was also defective and that it was heavily used (the one I exchanged for it was pristine, by the way), I have never heard from them again. Their customer service is as bad as their engineering.]

[Update: the replacement arrived used. Not “previously owned”, used. As in filthy, sticky, and filled with hair and food from the previous owner. It’s also even worse for typing, generating phantom keys under even more conditions, like attempting to type the word “since” (which comes out “sincey”) at a normal speed. It’s junk, and I’ll never buy a keyboard from them again.]

Fuck you. “Thank you sincerely for eventually agreeing to replace the defective product and ship the replacement in parallel.”

When I sent a support message about my still-under-warranty expensive keyboard suddenly generating spurious keystrokes, I expected a better answer than this:

What you are experiencing is called a "shadow key" or "phantom key" or "ghost key". Every keyboard has them (in different locations) but most people don't notice them, because they don't type the key combinations that produce them. They are an artifact of how keyboards are built.

There is a workaround...

You can turn On the Sticky Keys feature on the Universal Access control panel, in System Preferences. This will allow you to press & release the Command and Shift keys together, and then press the key being modified on its own.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience...

This is the most useless “workaround” I’ve ever seen. “Can’t touch-type on your keyboard? DON’T TRY!! Problem solved!”

Never mind that I simply don’t believe their explanation…