TechniTip.Net

Dear Hell, IE8 is out

What a surprise – after waiting a while and ignoring the Internet Explorer 7 – a new version was released. I really was not a friend of IE7 because it had the following problems for me:

• Start up was slow (connecting to somewhere…)
• I use a bigger font on my notebook. Otherwise it get’s hard to read characters on a 17″ TFT with 1920×1200 pixel resolution. But this bigger font caused IE7 to scale images like menu bitmaps in a ugly way. Really ugly…
• IE7 often behaves different than other browsers regarding CSS issues

Firefox and Safari made things usually in a nicer way for me. So I was really interested how the new Internet Explorer 8 will behave and installed it. During installation the first annoying issue: The user has to answer 11 questions. Sure I’ve selected user defined settings which will cause some more questions, but nevertheless the questions asked are annoying for regular users. And the questions are strange, things I’m really not interested in.

Scroll down to get over the screen shots of all the questions (screen shots are German). You will probably have the same feeling during scrolling like me during IE8 installation… “Where is the end?”

So far default setup stuff…

Scrolling… scrolling…

Soon it’s done…

Ok after selecting if you want to have search machine provider list updates and so on – Microsoft also want’s to push other search machines, all others than Google ha ha – finally my first impressions:

• Uh, IE8 will now import settings from Firefox and other browsers. What kind of invention
• Start up seems faster, ok good.
• No more ugly image scaling with my big font. Uhhhh yeah!
• Clicking a link on a page again, e.g. clicking the TechniTip.Net on the top of the page a few times and you will the whole page flickering. Firefox and Safari don’t show such a behavior. Uhm.
• The new feature “recommended sites” seems to be too much for my under developed mind. Went to www.ebay.de and selected recommended site, the results: yahoo.de, de.youtube.com, amazon.de, some other ebay link, web.de. Checking some other site I was not able to understand why these pages are recommended.
• And the strange thing: In IE7 the old fashioned menu bar was removed. Now it comes back. Back to the rules… But: the menus introduced in IE7 on the right side are still there. The result: two menu items “Extras” are available with some different items and some identical. Someone able to understand? I’m not… The screen shot below shows both menus (photo composition of both menus on one screen done with Photoshop):

My opinion: Some strange “inventions” and it looks like that the IE8 is behaving better than IE7. I’ll keep using Firefox.

Debian “Lenny” 5.0 Released

Finally after 2 years running Debian “Etech” 4.0 the new version Debian 5.0 codename “Lenny” has been released. The new release is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, a Debian Developer who dies on December 26th, 2008 in a tragic car accident. Read more information about “Lenny” on the Debian homepage.

As you know only the early bird catches the worm, I immediately decided to update one server to Lenny. Sure, sometimes the worm isn’t delicious but if you are dealing with IT stuff you will know this kind of bad tasting worms already.

Okay the good news are: The worm wasn’t bad tasting in this case. Find my upgrade report below.

Upgrade Procedure

First I started with:

apt-get update

And received the error message:

There are no public key available for the following key IDs: 4D270D06F42584E6

Which means we need to get a new public key:

gpg --recv-key --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net 4D270D06F42584E6
gpg --export 4D270D06F42584E6 | apt-key add -

or optionally with (not tested):

apt-get install debian-archive-keyring

Fine, next apt-get update was done again and several packages have been updated. It was prompted if a new /etc/mysql/my.cnf should be installed or my old one should be kept. I decided to keep my old one.

Afterwards I upgraded the distribution with apt-get dist-upgrade and many packages have been downloaded and installed.

For several config files it is again prompted if the old one should be kept or overwritten. I decided to backup to old configuration files and overwrite them with the new ones from the current distribution. I wanted to make sure that I don’t run into conflicts. Using this way the upgrade is performed very quick.

In the next step I adapted all my changes from backuped config files into the new ones. In my case mainly the Apache2 and MySQL configurations.

Apache2

After doing this Apache2 started with the message “NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts” and no one of my virtual hosts was recognized. I resolved this issue by changing the file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default and /etc/apache2/ports.conf. Within both files I’ve changed declarations “*:80″ to “*”:

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

<VirtualHost *>

/etc/apache2/ports.conf

NameVirtualHost *

Note that all your virtual host configurations also have to be defined with “<VirtualHost * >”.

APT

To receive the updates for “Lenny” edit the file /etc/apt/sources.conf and change the line:

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free

to

deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free

Grub

One special thing on my server here (Strato root server) is the Grub configuration. The server is configured with SATA RAID 1, therefore partitions are mounted on /dev/md0 and /dev/md1. After every kernel update I manually change the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Here I copy the two parts for the latest running kernel and simply adjust the kernel versions:

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel (2.6.26-1-686)
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 root=/dev/md1 ro console=tty0 console=ttyS                   0,57600
initrd          /initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686
savedefault
boot

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel (2.6.26-1-686, recovery mode)
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 root=/dev/md1 ro console=tty0 console=ttyS                   0,57600 single
initrd          /initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686
savedefault
boot

Finally reboot and your issue will show “Debian GNU/Linux 5.0″.

New Hot Babe Version Available!

A new version of Hot Babe for Windows has been released!

- Now with setup

- Option for auto start on system boot

- Options are saved in registry

- Options are adjustable in tray icon menu

Download at hotbabe.planlos.org.

Read more about: Hot Babe on TechniTip.Net.