In my previous post I covered some tips about using apt and dpkg, Debian-based package tools. Red Hat/Fedora-based distributions also have useful sets of command line tools for package management, namely rpm and yum. Some of the tools work in a similar fashion, some have other features. I'm just going to cover the ones I've found handy.

Querying if a package is installed
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My first PC was an IBM XT clone that had 640KB of RAM and a 42MB hard drive that ran MS-DOS. I learned a bit about MS-DOS before graphical user interfaces came on the scene, so I've always had a soft spot for text-based tools. I've also found that when faced with over 200 updates (new machine install) it's often much faster to use apt to update a system. If you run a Debian-based distribution such as Ubuntu, Xandros, Morphix, you should be able to use these tips.
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So I just read that SCO owes Novell just over $2,000,000, a small victory for Novell. Of course Novell doesn't really expect to see any money, SCO has after all filed for bankruptcy. SCO apparently has no money and the bankruptcy court is "bending over backwards" to help SCO. Indications from the Groklaw article seem to indicate that SCO still has enough resources to continue in court. It's to the point of ridiculousness now.
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Last night I went to a presentation/pitch for Vista deployment in the enterprise (there's a Star-Trek joke in there somewhere). It's not that I'm dissatisfied with Linux, but I like to know what's going on with Windows, especially since we do deploy Windows machines at work. At some level I always want to learn something new. What I learned was more pitch than enlightenment.
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Prompted by your good chef in IRC here's the second part to my effort to create a digital picture frame. In the first part I mainly described a couple of "gotchas" I ran into with respect to using software, and things I'd recommend doing before putting the notebook in the frame. In this part I want to stress how important pre-planning is with respect to the entire project. I took the project right through to the end - with a working digital picture frame as an end result, but I learned some things about what frame to choose, matting and other non-geek aspects that would make building a digital picture frame simpler.
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Bright and early this morning some guys came into our shop with a newish notebook (Dual-Core 1.8GHz, 160GB SATA hard drive) with a major problem: they'd killed Vista and their rescue partition. They came armed with a legitimate Windows XP Home CD and key but said they weren't able to get XP on the notebook. It seemed odd, so we looked into it a bit further and discovered that the problem was a "driver issue." Basically Windows XP Home (2002) doesn't support SATA out of the box. It's possible to press F6 and load a driver from a floppy, but the notebook didn't have a floppy, it was too new!
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Tonight (April 4th, 2008) was the inaugural meeting of the Kitchener/Waterloo Drupal users group (there's a DRug reference in there - DRupal Users Group). The meeting was small, but interesting, with a diverse range of interests. No one was completely new to Drupal (except someone who stopped in for a little bit to learn more) so it made for an interesting first meeting.

We went over some of the basics of the Drupal content management system, checked out a wide range of sites using Drupal in interesting and different ways, from putting books online to simple ecommerce sites.
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Last year I bought both of the Linux Toys books. One of the projects inside that caught my eye was the digital picture frame. I'd just been in an unnamed large department store where I saw a picture frame that would be perfect for this kind of a project - the catch was I didn't have the "spare" notebook required by the project. Well, I finally got a suitable notebook and hunkered down last night to work on the project.
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A few days ago an individual brought in a couple of computer systems into our shop complaining that they were slow and noisy. We noticed that the power supply fan was clogged with dust, so we opened the case in order to clean the computer completely. Much to our surprise we found cobwebs and dead bugs inside the system (we were tempted to joke with the customer about spiderman gumming up his system, but thought better of it).
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