Richard Fearn

If you install two (or more) Linux distributions on one machine, then by default they both install grub to the master boot record (MBR). The second distribution’s grub menu therefore overwrites the first.
For example, on my laptop, I have Windows on /dev/sda2, Fedora 8 on /dev/sda5 and Debian 4.0 (etch) on /dev/sda7. Having installed them [...]

Launching the Fedora installer over the network, as well as having a local mirror of the Fedora repository, means you don’t need to burn a CD or DVD. It’s a convenient way of trying out a new distro.
I’ve done this for Fedora 8. I have a local Fedora repository on my Fedora 7 gateway. You [...]

Ever since updating my gateway to Fedora 7, I’ve been getting messages like this in my daily Logwatch:
84   *Warning: Pre-queue content-filter connection overload
Worrying that I might be losing mail, I looked at the logwatch script for postfix in /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/services/postfix, and discovered that this message refers to lost connections from clients whose IP addresses are unknown - [...]

NFS mounts were taking ages using Ubuntu. The server was OK (I’d used it from other Linux clients without any problems).
I noticed this in the logs:

May 22 20:32:37 penguin kernel: [17181317.116000] portmap: server localhost not responding, timed out
May 22 20:32:37 penguin kernel: [17181317.116000] RPC: failed to contact portmap (errno -5).
May 22 20:33:12 penguin kernel: [17181352.116000] [...]

I share several directories from my Debian server to other machines on the network using NFS. On one of these machines, which runs Fedora Core, some of the directories are mounted read-only, whereas others are mounted read/write. After upgrading to FC6 recently, I noticed that they’d all become read-only.
After looking into this I discovered that [...]

My VAIO has an 8GB recovery partition at the beginning of its hard disk. Windows identifies it as an “EISA Configuration” partition. When I first got the VAIO I booted into Fedora Core rescue mode using the FC6 DVD. I couldn’t mount the partition:
sh-3.1# mkdir /mnt/sda1
sh-3.1# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
mount: Mounting /dev/sda1 on /mnt/sda1 failed: Device [...]

So you’ve installed Fedora Core 6, and the RealPlayer RPM from here. You go to Applications → Sound & Video → RealPlayer 10, and… nothing happens.
Open up a terminal. Try to run RealPlayer from there. Chances are you’ll see this:
[rich@penguin ~]$ realplay
/usr/local/RealPlayer/realplay.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such [...]

Until a few weeks ago my mail server (Postfix running on Fedora Core 5) was having difficulty keeping up with spam. I was finding lots of bounce errors in the mail log, like this one:
Sep 23 12:32:15 fc5test postfix/local[9084]: 875EEF46F3: to=<rich@test.rdf>, orig_to=<abc110@test.rdf>, relay=local, delay=1011, status=bounced (Command time limit exceeded: “IFS=’ ‘ && exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- [...]