Category: Linux Tip

pcmcia network device not working in fedora core 2

symptom: In Fedora Core 2, a pcmcia networking card doesn’t work on boot. This is with kernels 2.6.6 and greater. Oddly, 2.6.5-385 (which came with the distro) works fine. After boot, it is impossible to get the card to start up, and shutting down causes a hang. iwconfig seems to hang. Sometimes completely restarting pcmcia and reloading the yenta_socket module solves the problem.
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Windows jump around when clicking on workspaces in pager

If you are running Fedora Core 2 with Sawfish as your window manager, and you notice that when you click on workspaces in the pager your windows jump around randomly, there’s an easy fix to get it working again:

Download the source code to libwnck, build it, and install it on top of the rpm Fedora Core 2 provided to you. This was an old bug that was fixed long ago, but for some reason the RPM of libwnck still has it.

tip: apache won’t start, semphore problems

if you’re getting things like:

(28)No space left on device: mod_python: Failed to create global mutex 23 of 32 (/tmp/blahblahblah).
[Wed Apr 14 11:53:47 2004] [error] mod_python: We can probably continue, but with diminished ability to process session locks.
[Wed Apr 14 11:53:47 2004] [error] mod_python: Hint: On Linux, the problem may be the number of available semaphores, check 'sysctl kernel.sem'
(28)No space left on device: Couldn't create accept lock

then this tip is for you!
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rpm crashes / won’t respond

RPM is a little like windows — it’s chaotic, and if it’s disturbed everything blows up and there’s nothing you can do. But, if you find that rpm suddenly stops working and none of the commands work, try doing:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*

and it might just work again. As always, you should have backups.