And now the long story…

Since the upgrade to Mandriva 2008.1, wifi stopped working on my laptop. I tried to install the 2008.1 on several machines. I tried to connect on different access points. I lowered security on the access point. I tried eveything. On desperation, I even tried to boot Windows to check that hardware was ok ! And the only log I had was this:

SIOCETHTOOL: Operation not supported

After all these tests, I was convinced that the problem had something to do with the distribution itself. Maybe a firmware issue or a bad combination of packages…

Then came the 2009.0 release. I though that an upgrade will cure my malediction. Indeed. Nothing new on wireless side. My wifi was still broken. Until I came across a tip on a random forum (I don’t remember which one) suggesting that dhcp_client could be the culprit.

So I replaced it by dhcpcd, and against all expectations, it worked !

And to not be annoyed by dhcp_client in the future, it’s wise to definitely remove it:

urpmi dhcp_client

• /etc/rpm/
• /usr/lib/rpm/

As usual, this package is available in my RPM repository.

So I decided to move the http://kev.coolcavemen.com/static/repository folder to http://kevin.deldycke.free.fr/repository, which is a 10GiB (yes, ten gibibyte, this is not a typo) free web space offered by Free, my ISP.

To do this smoothly, I’ve just set up a generic 301 redirection thanks to Apache. This is the only line I added to my root .htaccess file to enable this:

Redirect permanent /static/repository http://kevin.deldycke.free.fr/repository

This move will normally be completely silent for you. So please, let me now if something bad happend while you play with my repository.

• List all installed packages:

  rpm -qa
  

• Get the list of all installed packages and their architecture:

  rpm -qa --queryformat "%-40{NAME} %-8{ARCH}\n"
  

• Same as above, but show i586 packages only:

  rpm -qa --queryformat "%-40{NAME} %-8{ARCH}\n" | grep i586
  

• Downgrade a package to an old version:

  wget ftp://ftp.repository.org/mandrakelinux/official/10.0/package-1.0-1mdk.i586.rpm
  rpm -Uvh --oldpackage package-1.0-1mdk.i586.rpm
  

• Unpack/Deflate/Extract a RPM without installing it:

  rpm2cpio dummy.src.rpm | cpio -id
  

• Evaluate %mkrel 3 rpm macro:

  rpm --eval '%mkrel 3'
  

• Force removal of a package that has problems with embedded “pre-” and/or “post-” scripts:

  rpm -e --noscripts packagename
  

Urpmi

• List all available packages with name containing python:

  urpmq --fuzzy python
  

• Find which RPM contain the file named dummy:

  urpmf dummy
  

• Get informations about the dummy RPM:

  urpmq -i dummy
  

• Get the list of all RPMs that require python-psyco package:

  urpmf --requires python-psyco
  

• Get the list of all RPMs that provide python-psyco package:

  urpmf --provides python-psyco
  

• I use this command in a cron entry to update automatically and regularly my Mandriva:

  /usr/sbin/urpmi.update -a && /usr/sbin/urpmi --update --auto --auto-select
  

• Generate urpmi repository index and metadata of the current folder:

  genhdlist ./
  

• APT/URPMI commands list

Yum

• Install a new package:

  yum install subversion
  

• Search for packages containing the x11 string:

  yum search x11
  

• Get the list of packages that provide Python’s Subversion bindings:

  yum provides "*/svn/__init__.py"
  

• Update repository index:

  yum update
  

• Clear all caches (sometimes required to force a repository index update):

  yum clean all
  

• Generate Yum repository index and metadata of the current folder:

  createrepo -v ./
  

This build, named amarok-1.4.4-3, is exactly the same as previous one (i.e. with SQLite, MySQL and Postgresql support). Don’t forget to update the libtunepimp package from my repository and use the 5.0 version.

Diva is based on gstreamer, so please install all gstreamer0.10-* RPMs first. Because this version is still an alpha and a developper version, it is subject of numerous bugs and instability. So please, don’t report me bugs, I’m not a Diva developper !