Yeah… Fedora has been slowly becoming my nemesis, mainly due to the mismanagement – or rather, the lack of management – of its repositories. If Fedora doesn’t adopt strong repo management at some point, it might as well stop calling itself a linux distribution.

I have been running a stable FC4 server for years, no complaints. But ironically, my undoing came about because I resisted the temptation to upgrade for long enough that eventually doing even the most minor security upgrade would be a huge repo dependency nightmare. A FC5 upgrade attempt was too much and I found myself with a dead server.

And Red Hat just seems to be getting more and more hands-off. I understand their logic, but who wants to volunteer to help with a distro that is still basically managed by someone else? It doesn’t make the best sense. And this bit me hard: I opted for a full Fedora 7 install from DVD, and found it had a severe kernel bug that allowed me to get through the installation and reboot into a completely trashed system that would give me a kernel panic before I could do anything… (and I am not alone…) I knew I needed to move away from it, and that was the proverbial straw…

If I hear one more ignorant person complain that gentoo is for ricers… do me a favor, try it or STFU. It gives you the most transparent access to your linux system, the way it was intended. Having a kernel tailored to your hardware is the way it should be. Using someone else’s binaries is like sharing underwear. (Man I’m feeling ranty!) And IMHO no other distro except perhaps Ubuntu is in the ballpark of gentoo’s stability, availability of new releases, and documentation quality. So just shut up, all you gentoo virgins. Besides, I can rice 183% if I want to! 😛

The server has been rebuilt and is mostly back up and running… someone talk me out of trying to run my own cyrus IMAP server before it kills me…

Sometimes Thunderbird makes me scratch my head. Case in point: Thunderbird defaults to checking only your Inbox for new email, and none of the subfolders under the Inbox. To check subfolders, you have to right-click on EACH ONE, go to properties, and turn checking on. That’s silly – this Mozilla article seems to agree with me.

Maybe it’s me. I make heavy use of server-side whitelist filtering on my IMAP server to categorize incoming emails. If I get an email from a friend from Fort Myers, it goes in the Fort Myers folder. I hope I’m not the only one doing this… if so, people, you’ve got to try it. Once you set it up, you’ll be happily in control. Get an important email, and you can read it right away. Another joke email from Aunt Gertrude – well, you’ll get to it when you have time. And with Chatter Email on my Treo, I can assign different ringtones to each folder, instantly telling me if I have an important (RING!) or unimportant (bzz) incoming email.

The other email tool I have to have is spamassassin. It uses Bayesian filtering, and it’s now smart enough to keep spam out of my life. Sigh… what a relief.

Anyway, to make Thunderbird check all your IMAP folders for mail (duh), do this:

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor
Start to type [mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new] into the filter box.
Double-click the [mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new] line to change it from false to true.
Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Connection Timeout -> Bump up to 120 seconds (if needed)
Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Show expanded columns in the folder pane (double click to set to true)
Then you can click on "Unread" and/or "Total" in the small column control at the upper right corner of the folder pane.

Up up and away.

A guy that compiles the XChat GPL’ed code for Windows, at what looks like the official XChat site, XChat.org, tries to get you to pay for it – is that even legal? XChat2 is another guy’s build for Windows, and almost as up-to-date – use it instead.

The only configuration that drove me nuts out-of-the-box was the flood of “join/part” messages in large channels like #gentoo. From the XChat FAQ (at xchat.org, go figure), number 11:

11. How do I turn on Conference mode where I will not see join or part messages?

Right-click on the tab you want to change. In the submenu of the channel name, there's a toggle-item "Show join/part messages", simply turn this off.  If you want to turn this option on globally, type:

    /set irc_conf_mode 1

Then all channels you join after setting this will start with "Show join/part messages" turned off.

I continue my love affair with Gentoo by moving to the latest profile, 2007.0. Profiles are sort of watermarks that are released every 6 months or so. They prevent major upgrades to your system, until you’re ready to make the leap to a new profile. Once again, very well done, Gentoo dudes. I’ve got three Gentoo machines at this point, and I’ve migrated two with zero problems. The only real change for me was that I learned to use dispatch-conf with rcs (which gives you version-controlled automated configuration updates, whoop!) instead of the more clumsy etc-update. Oh, and it looks like the gnome terminal configuration file format changed, as my settings are no longer valid. But mythtv is rocking along, no problems. I even managed to upgrade the TV recordings drive from a 250GB to a 400GB sata drive along the way. Party on.

UPDATE: I had the gnome-terminal problem on two different machines. A re-emerge fixed it up:

emerge -av gnome-terminal

Crummy Windoze is obviously not well known for graceful remote access. (continued…)