To perhaps the relief of some people , I am no longerrunning Fedora 8 on my home machine; I've now pretty much finishedmigrating to Fedora 15 on my new hardware. I did the actual migrationthe way I'd planned; I installed Fedora 15 from scratch on the newmachine's system disks, transplanted the old machine's mirrored disksinto the new machine as additional data disks, and then mounted my homedirectory filesystem and so on.

(It's bit annoying that

As part of my migration to Fedora 15, I have been dealing with a buggyprogram that crashes a lot. It has an option to dump lots of debugginginformation as it runs and collect stack backtraces when it crashes,and of course the developers want you to do all of this when you reportproblems to them. Inconveniently, right after I installed all of thedebugging packages necessary for good stack backtraces the programseems to have stopped crashing. For now. I don't trust it and when itcrashes

Back in a comment on Gnome3Out I mentioned feeling that the Gnome 3developers are targeting people who use their computer in asignificantly different way than I do. Because I've been using Gnome 3again recently, I feel like trying to explain that today.

While Gnome 3 has a number of interface differences from Gnome 2 andother desktop environments, two of them stand out very prominently (atleast to me). First, a great many interface elements are built aroundthe assumption that you only want one

Despite what I wrote back in the last entry ,I actually think that BSD's choice to not put network devices in thefilesystem is defensible and in many ways was the best option they had.Explaining why requires rewinding back to the pre-BSD days of Unix.

In the days of V7 and earlier, devices on Unix were simple. You hadblock special devices for hardware like hard drives that you read fromand wrote to in fixed size blocks, and character special devices forhardware such as serial ports

In the beginning of Unix, all devices were accessed through thefilesystem via files in /dev and ordinary file IO system calls (let'signore ioctl() ). This had all sorts of advantages that have beenwritten up in plenty of Unix books and articles already, so I'm notgoing to try to repeat them.

Then came Berkeley and BSD Unix. As part of adding networking in generalthey added devices to represent network interfaces, but they did not putthese devices in the filesystem. Your

There's a modest mania in various systems of giving sysadmins stable(or 'consistent') device names. Solaris has done it for a long time, Ibelieve that Irix had some version of it, Linux has made two attempts todo it for network devices, and so on. Before people design yet anothersystem that makes yet another attempt at it, I believe it's worthwhileto step back and ask what we actually want out of 'stable' device names.

My bias is that two things

Lately I've been doing a bunch of things with a real installed Fedora15 machine (previous experimentation has mostly been with a Live USBstick used temporarily on various machines). One result of this isthat I've actually noticed the name that Fedora 15 chose to give myethernet as a result of its switch to consistent network device naming .

As it happens, my Fedora machine's Ethernet is now called p5p1 . Thereare at least two problems with this name.

The first

Fedora 15's consistent network device naming is done by biosdevname ; its documentation implies that this is doneusing information that you can also see directly with dmidecode and biosdecode . Today I'm going to walk through why I think there'senough information in my machine's BIOS information to get it right(as I mentioned yesterday when I complainedabout this).

SMBIOS/DMI information comes in several different types. The biosdevnamemanpage implies that what it pays attention to are information on actualphysical slots (

It's been about five years since I did my last set of powerconsumption numbers for a desktop . Since I nowactually have a new machine , that makes it time fora new set of numbers. I've tried to make the measurements as comparablewith the old numbers as possible, but it's not quite an exact match.

The new machine has a CPU with a nominal 95 watt TDP and an efficient650 watt power supply (vast overkill, but it came with the case