# rpm -ivh --force gnome-terminal-3.6.1-1.fc18.x86_64.rpm

nice to have functionality back. what up, gnome?

now, you need to protect it from updates. first, install the yum-versionlock plugin:

# yum install yum-versionlock

next, lock the package:

# yum versionlock gnome-terminal

if you have already performed an upgrade using fedup or this is a new install, unlock the gnome-terminal-3.8.x package.

# yum versionlock delete gnome-terminal-3.8.x-y.fc19.*

check it to see if it is locking your version:

# yum versionlock list

all done.

gnome 3.2 polished up some first-gen bugs and made things a little better. i was getting more accustomed to the new feel. sure, i missed some customizing features for which gnome was known, but i learned to be productive with the interface.

gnome 3.4 brought even more new features and continued to fix things. i was still happy.

but then gnome 3.6 arrived and although it had more nice things, i started noticing a trend toward what seemed closer to ubuntu’s unity or mac’s interface. i became a little concerned about the direction gnome was headed.

then i previewed gnome 3.8. the feature highlight video i watched gave me the desire to want to try it out, but in doing so another small feature was removed: terminal transparency.

gone.

what? why?

it’s very minor, but a function i use/rely on regularly for work. on a smaller laptop screen, window switching is time consuming. being able to see through a terminal window to read data saves time.

it is a small thing; but when you start to realize so many small things have been taken away already, they start to add up. you begin to see you are being spoon fed like…like an apple user.

the choices are going away. which is why i have already switched to xfce. totally customizable. choices again.

very nice.

i decided this morning to try out a local place for breakfast. i’ve been to melinda’s fir lunch before and like it a lot. i had always wanted to come back for breakfast. on my friday off, i made the trip over. it’s not that far for me, actually. in the shopping center on hill behind burger king and starbucks (on cedar bluff) is where this little restaurant is nestled. the food is very good and the style is what you might find at a diner, but when you realize melinda is from south africa, “country” is the same as cracker barrel.

the items on the menu you’d recognize, but it really is more of a home-cooked meal than you’ll find anywhere outside of home. this morning’s breakfast was very good. light and fluffy pancakes, eggs, toast, and bacon…all very good. (the bacon passes my approval with flying colors, for what that’s worth.) but the signature item for me was the hashbrown casserole. i am not a huge fan of this item anywhere. i mean, fried potatoes taste the same no matter who cooks them, right? not these. i really enjoyed the flavor of these. can’t put my finger on the distinguishing ingredient, but i liked them!

melinda is a cheerful hostess who welcomes you when you walk in. i like the accent, of course, since it’s a familiar one to me. the place is a quiet getaway if that’s what you want to start your day. you can visit her facebook page for more information: http://facebook.com/MelindasCountryKitchen

mike stoltz from the EFF (electronic frontier foundation) sums it up in this quote to engadget:

“This shows just how absurd the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is: a law that was supposed to stop the breaking of digital locks on copyrighted materials has led to the Librarian of Congress trying to regulate the used cellphone market.”

for most people who are don’t care about using their phone other than given to them by the carriers, this will pass them by quietly. for the rest of us who would rather actually own the devices for which we paid money, it’s huge red flag.

what i would hope for is that this is the beginning of decoupling phones from carriers. as in the rest of the world, i can walk into an electronics store and buy a phone, any phone. then i can walk across the street to a carrier, any carrier, and get an account and a sim card, plug that sim card into my new phone, and it all just works.

i see two beneficial aspects to the customer:

1. it causes phone manufacturers to make phone with features that are competitive with other phone despite carrier contracts. that means more phone sales for the companies since carrier contracts don’t include limited phone selections at the beginning. competition between mobile device companies increases for better phone offered on any network, opening the pool for sales.
2. it causes the carriers to improve their networks rather than bank on the phones to bring in their customers. that means they have to focus on their networks and services rather than looking to lock people into their contracts based on a phone selection. competition is encouraged, including lower rates for us.

now, maybe i’ve not looked at this completely or correctly, so i welcome feedback to correct any misconceptions. but if this policy works for the rest of the world, i could work for us. and i would say it should be the case for our mobile device market.

related articles:
• CNET: Unauthorized unlocking of smartphones becomes illegal Saturday
• Ars Tecnica: Unlocking new cell phones to become illegal on Saturday
• Engadget: Unlocking new phones now banned under DMCA, the EFF weighs in

i took some pictures. check them out.

yesterday, i posted my review of how horrible the new fedora 18 installer was. i do have some good news to fedora 18 upgrades. the new fedora updater called fedup.

i had another computer running fedora 17 that i was going to need to update to fedora 18 as well. given my fresh burning of my laptop’s update, i was loathing the thought of going through all that again. but i caught glimpse of fedup on the fedora website and remembered hearing good things about that.

so, while punching away on my laptop, i started the fedup process on my desktop computer. it ran with update, it rebooted. grub had included the fedup option in the boot menu as the default to complete the process. it finished the pieces necessary post-restart and cleaned itself up nicely.

wow! that was super easy! and it’s also my recommended method for updating to fedora 18. there is a catch, though: you must be running fedora 17 or higher for it to work. this means if you are running fedora 16 or lower, you’ll need to either upgrade to fedora 17 first and then run fedup or just leap to fedora 18. (see yesterday’s post and accept my sympathies in advance.)

why couldn’t have anaconda have been as stress-free as fedup?

since i’m an experienced fedora updater, i gave no second thought to downloading install media for the task. no live update spin since i wanted to get as much installed as i could in one sitting. booting from the dvd took me into the new anaconda, the redesigned installer. it looked sharp! it was clean and looked less like it had from the last couple of decades. but looks really aren’t everything as i would come to discover.

my situation: i have a hard drive with a single install of fedora and a couple of partitions of data i want to carry over untouched to the next install (/home and /usr/local). these two partitions are also segmented in a logical volume mount (LVM).

in the past, i would have performed a manual partition configuration and kept the whole partition layout reformatting all but the aforementioned two. that was my plan this time.

time to install. i got through the first part of the install screens without any problems. but when i tried to deal with the partitioning, i got stuck.

the wording of the partitioning piece was something i had to pay close attention to. i couldn’t just assume that it was all going to be click here to reformat, click there to preserve. i ended up reading the help section after several failed attempts finding in the end it wouldn’t let me keep my existing partitions. i tried this several times, a few of them after rebooting to start the process from scratch. i finally was able to get all the partitions under the fedora 18 install header, but it still told me there were errors.

fedora 18 partitioning

i wanted to reformat root (/), boot (/boot), and swap. but i wasn’t really deleting these partitions, which is what i believe the installed wanted in order for the necessary space to be available for the install. in fact, i didn’t come to that realization until at the end i made the decision to wipe my entire hard drive and start from scratch.

no matter what configuration i ended up on the partitioning screen, i would always end up with the same error message not allowing any progress forward. (on a few occasions, my configuration combinations ended up locking or crashing the installer forcing me to restart from a reboot.)

fedora 18 installer errors

here is what i have come to understand at the end: this installer will work if

1. you intend to do a clean wipe of your hard drive and install fresh, or
2. you have multiboot partitions of linux and can swap out an entire segment with the new stuff.

the latter choice is actually a variation of the former in reality. give that logic, there is no way to preserve your existing partitions. if there is a way, it’s not clear, it’s not in the help documentation, and it’s not online (at the time of my adventure).

in the end, i backed up my /home and /usr/local partitions to an external hard drive, did a complete wipe of the hard drive, set it up the same as my  previous install, and restored from backup the data in my favorite two locations. this took way longer than it should have for a “streamlined” install process, which is how it’s presented. i don’t believe enough testing was done on non-virtual environments with layouts like mine and by people who had no behind-the-scenes knowledge of how the installer worked. i do believe they will improve on this going forward given that this has been the focus point of many negative reviews.

many people complained about redesigned interface. i can handle something like that as long as the look is not off the deep end or made to look like any fruity technology. it’s the functionality that pushed me to the edge of calm.