Some interesting news and articles

Here is a couple of news/articles/announcements that I have found interesting recently:

The Case for the /usr Merge is definitely an interesting read. You can also have this functionality by upgrading to Fedora 17.

Overview of new features in Apache HTTP Server 2.4 is obviously a must read. Besides the performance gains, I also find the KeepAliveTimeout upgrade - the ability to set this configuration option in microseconds - significant. This functionality can shave off those milliseconds spent for setting up a connection on AJAX heavy pages while not degrading overall server performance.

PHP 5.4 is out if you haven't heard. Traits and a built-in web server for development purposes. Nice!

I hate dealing with HTML so anything that helps me with this headache deserves some respect. Check out the Page Inspector 3D View (nicknamed Tilt).

Upgrading to Fedora 16

Finally had some time to upgrade my Fedora 14 distribution to Fedora 16. I followed the YUM upgrade instructions on the Fedora website. Having never had good luck with odd Fedora releases, I will be skipping Fedora 17 for now and waiting for 18 instead. Overall, The Fedora 15 upgrade was smooth and the reboot of my dual-boot system was successful. However, the following Fedora 16 upgrade presented me with a blank GRUB screen after reboot even though I followed the instructions line by line. At the end, I had to create a Fedora 16 DVD, boot into rescue mode, re-run the GRUB setup commands again:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

/sbin/grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
/sbin/grub2-install BOOTDEVICE

After dealing with the usual sound problems, the system was up and running with the dual-boot GRUB setup still intact. At this point, a couple of changes have come to my attention. There is a new systemd component that handles system services. Runlevels concept is replaced by targets instead. Read more at systemd documentation and cheatsheet page. In addition, the chkconfig and service command outputs seem to have changed.