fedora 14 goes gold today and available for download. it also happens to be election day here in the united states of america. in the spirit of both, i wore my voter’s choice t-shirt to indicate how i cast my ballot. it’s good to have choices, to choose the os you want and with some choices even after you pick certain operating systems. ahh, freedom.
after many months of investigating and waiting, i finally purchased a laptop replacement back around july. my chose was sony’s vaio ea series with the intel core i5 processor, 4 gigs of ram, and a blu-ray drive.
my concern was making sure i had supported video since my last purchase proved to be an epic fail. i took a copy of fedora on a usb key into best buy and booted the sony laptop up to verify the video drivers. my testing was a definite win.
as with all my computers, i swiftly removed windows from the hard drive and replaced with linux, fedora flavored. i got my laptop up to speed rather quickly and was happy.
then one day, i was interacting with some people in the #fedora-social channel on irc and someone asked me if sound was working. i told him that i wasn’t sure. when i got home, i checked. it was not working. i never thought to check the sound as there’s not been problems with the sound working in the past. (at least, i’ve not had any difficulties.)
when i reported back that my sound was silent, i was given a few suggestions to try. after jumping through those hoops, what finally worked was to grab a koji kernel and install it. at the time, it was in release candidate 1 status, but it gave me sound. since then, that kernel was stabilized, and i am currently running 2.6.34.6-54.fc13.x86_64.)
since that’s been resolved, this laptop is has all the desired items on my list.
if you prefer a faster browser than firefox, then google chrome is what you probably want to be running. if you want something a bit more bleeding edge than waiting for google to push out patches to their chrome release, chromium is what you want.
since they release updates several times a day, i wrote a small bash script to grab the latest version released and set it up as my default browser. (of course, this is for linux.) and this is specifically for the 64-bit linux platform. swap out the CHROMIUM_URL values in the script for your appropriate architecture.
#!/bin/bash
## get_latest_build.sh
## this assumes you've set up sudo
## if not, then change the sudos to "su -c"
CHROME_DIR=/usr/local/bin/chrome
SNAPSHOTS_URL=http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots
CHROMIUM_URL=$SNAPSHOTS_URL/chromium-rel-linux-64
#CHROMIUM_URL=$SNAPSHOTS_URL/chromium-rel-linux
PLUGINS_DIR=~/.mozilla/plugins
if [ ! -d $CHROME_DIR ]; then
echo "creating $CHROME_DIR..."
sudo mkdir $CHROME_DIR
fi
echo "get latest version number..."
wget -nv -O "/tmp/LATEST" "$CHROMIUM_URL/LATEST"
LATEST=`cat /tmp/LATEST`
echo "LATEST = $LATEST"
echo "download latest..."
wget -O "$CHROME_DIR/chrome-linux.zip"
"$CHROMIUM_URL/$LATEST/chrome-linux.zip"
echo "unzip latest..."
unzip "$CHROME_DIR/chrome-linux.zip" -d "$CHROME_DIR"
echo "rename the directory with build number..."
mv "$CHROME_DIR/chrome-linux" "$CHROME_DIR/chrome-linux-$LATEST"
echo "reset soft link..."
rm "$CHROME_DIR/chrome_linux"
ln -s "$CHROME_DIR/chrome-linux-$LATEST" "$CHROME_DIR/chrome_linux"
if [ -d $PLUGINS_DIR ]; then
echo "copy plugins directory into new chrome dir..."
cp -r $PLUGINS_DIR $CHROME_DIR/chrome_linux/
fi
echo "setting permissions on directory..."
chmod ug+rx "$CHROME_DIR/chrome_linux"
echo "done!"