joshkelahan.com

So I’m sitting here at work….

It’s another one of these contract IT positions. Some have been good, but this one is really boring. It reminds me a lot of when I was a consultant way back in the day at Mizzou.  The deskside support IT guy here apparently had kidney failure, or something, and I was contracted in to fill his position until he returns. On the one hand it is kind of neat, because I get my own office, and I have access to all the cool stuff in the server room. On the other hand, most of the job is spent sitting around waiting for a problem ticket to come in. Yesterday there was a little excitement when someone’s monitor decided to go all green, but as you might imagine, it only took about 10 minutes to swap the monitor for a working one.  I’ve also been doing some laptop builds, just setting up the laptops that users will get.  I have to let the batteries charge up all the way, so a single laptop takes an hour and a half.  Luckily, I get off here in about 2hrs, so thats good.  The rumor around here is that they guy I’m  filling in for will be back in the next day or two.

Here is a screenshot of the desktop of my laptop running FC4 and gDesklets.

It ended up taking much longer than expected. There were at least 20 different libraries I needed to install, plus their dependancies. Thank god for Yum

I recently upgraded my laptop from Fedora Core 1, to Fedora Core 4. Have been having a right good old time configuring Yum (which is supposed to be configured out of the box, but who cares). Yum stands for Yellow dog Updater Modified. It is a neat little application that allows you to find and install packages and their dependencies. It makes installing new software much simplier then before, since you don’t have to find them yourself. You can even use YUM to upgrade all of the packages (and their dependencise) already on your system. It works a lot better than Red Hat’s Up2date program (even though that uses the same underlying core). Working to get gdesklets (its like Konfabulator for linux, execpt is open source and free) working. I’ll throw up some screens when I do.