Skip navigation

Tag Archives: Fedora

Lost Java

Somehow, I broke my Fedora installation this weekend.

After having a great time getting started on my Gravatar project this past Saturday, I settled in for some Labor Day programming yesterday. However, as soon as I tried to open Eclipse, I was given an error message telling me that the command ‘java’ was not in the PATH variable (or something like that)

I have no idea what the hell happened between Saturday and Monday, my laptop was shutdown between those times.

At first, I thought it might be some leftover quirks from the time that Fedora shut itself down when my battery died (the fact that it didn’t warn me is pretty crappy). I ran some fsck’ing on a few mounts. But I don’t know what I’m doing there, so I wasn’t surprised when that didn’t work.

I decided to go for the obvious and just fix the PATH variable. This required me to figure out where this damn variable is in Linux. I also wanted to uninstall Oracle’s JDK 7 as I thought that might have been a part of the problem. First, linuxquestions.org helped me uninstall all java packages with the ‘yum upgrade -y’. I don’t know what it does, but it set me back to using openjdk7. Then a stackoverflow post helped immensely by showing me where my PATH variable was and how to alter it.

After I added the openJDK filepath to my PATH variable, I logged out and logged back in. ‘java’ at the command line works again and Eclipse opens without a problem.

Issue resolved.

Distro hop

I recently decided to try another Linux distribution.

This time I went with the Fedora Xfce spin in 64-bit flavor.

My favorite distribution yet! Miles ahead of the KDE environment and better looking and more intuitive than Mint LXDE. Plus its available in 64-bit. Which does absolutely nothing for me, but still.

Too bad I wasn’t able to use this version of Linux for more than a week and a half. I started hearing crackling whenever I would plug-in my piece of shit Dell laptop. I finally noticed that the crackling was being caused by little blue arcs of electricity coming out of a crack in the wiring of my AC adapter. Definitely will not be operating this laptop until I am able to get a replacement AC adapter.

Fedora KDE out, Mint LXDE in

Everything looks cool so far on my comic site so far. No issues with ComicPress plugin I’m using there. It just looks terrible, as I’m using the out-of-the-box theme. I hope at some point I’ll be able to start looking at learning to theme WordPress sites.

But enough about that!

This past weekend I finally got fed up with the shitty drivers available for the shitty broadcom BC4311 series wireless network adapter that my shitty Dell Inspiron 1521 has.

I have tried a few more Linux distros via LiveCD:

Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit – Something about the color scheme of this distro really turns me off, the reddish-purple just makes me angry. That and the fact that my Broadcom doesn’t work, despite trying the troubleshooting items I find online.

Mint 12 64-bit – I so want version of Linux to work because of its emphasis on aesthetics. Alas, its build on Debian, just like Ubuntu, so my wireless doesn’t work here. I doubt my craptop would support a decent looking UI anyway.

Mandriva 2011 – I know next to nothing about this distro, but I am impressed with the UI and how easily I got my wireless to work.

I almost went with Mandriva, until I remembered each distro can come with different frontend/UI/desktop environment (I don’t know what the graphical part of the OS is technically called). Going back to my fav distro, I found that Mint is available in a LXDE version! Knowing what a POS my ancient laptop is, I opted to take up the ‘L’ part of the LXDE environment. Its supposed to be pretty light, so that would definitely help out my aging Athlon 2800 system. I fired up the live cd and everything looked nice. Much better than the unintuitive, unattractive KDE desktop I had spent the past month or two with.

Still no wireless support until I found this ->http://nfolamp.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/ubuntu-11-10-getting-wireless-bcm4311-working/

After trying the items on this blog, I got wireless working on LiveCD! Bingo!

I promptly clicked the “Install Linux Mint” icon. Everything has been working great since then. A huge improvement over my experience with Fedora 16 and Fedora 16 KDE.

Now, if they’ll only come out with a 64-bit version…