I couldn't sleep tonight because of all the coughing (I have a cold). So instead of just staring at the ceiling, I decided to be a little productive for the good of the Mozilla community.
An increasing number of people like myself are using more than one operating system on the same computer. Linux is an interesting alternative to Windows, but many people feel that they don't want to (or can't) abandon Windows completely. Therefore, I wrote a tutorial explaining how to share your local mail storage between Windows and Linux with Mozilla Thunderbird on a dual boot computer.
I just added a neat feature to the extensions listings on Firefox Help and Thunderbird Help that makes it possible to choose the sorting of the table of contents. While working on this, I got to learn some more about PHP, cron jobs, wget and the fact that Unix seems to accept just about any character in a file name. :)
I'm going to try Fedora Core 2 Test 1 to see if I get the same problems with the FAT32 drives on that distro. If so, it must be a problem with the 2.6 kernel. Otherwise it's just a stupid bug in Mandrake 10 RC1. I'm currently burning the 4 CDs from the .iso files. They had the correct checksums after all, but something's definitely not working properly with either my CPU or my hard drive.
Can someone explain this?!
X:\>p:\FastSum\fsum "x:\FC2-test1-i386-disc1.iso"
MD5 Checksum calculation and verification utility. [1.4.0.70] EN
(C) 2003 Kirill Zinov and Vitaly Rogotsevich. Web site: www.fastsum.com
Calculating...
x:\FC2-test1-i386-disc1.iso 7F0DFC10C980E9FE19EF29FD8E0695E6
Calculation summary:
Processed 1 files in 0 folders with total size 632,13 Mb.
Elapsed time: 00:00:34 Average speed: 18,57 Mb\Sec.
X:\>p:\FastSum\fsum "x:\FC2-test1-i386-disc1.iso"
MD5 Checksum calculation and verification utility. [1.4.0.70] EN
(C) 2003 Kirill Zinov and Vitaly Rogotsevich. Web site: www.fastsum.com
Calculating...
x:\FC2-test1-i386-disc1.iso 48D3CE80C5DA46EB11F7D8AF92B30952
Calculation summary:
Processed 1 files in 0 folders with total size 632,13 Mb.
Elapsed time: 00:00:31 Average speed: 20,00 Mb\Sec.
X:\>p:\FastSum\fsum "x:\FC2-test1-i386-disc1.iso"
MD5 Checksum calculation and verification utility. [1.4.0.70] EN
(C) 2003 Kirill Zinov and Vitaly Rogotsevich. Web site: www.fastsum.com
Calculating...
x:\FC2-test1-i386-disc1.iso 15DF37CCF234B385A7575C70BE9932F8
Calculation summary:
Processed 1 files in 0 folders with total size 632,13 Mb.
Elapsed time: 00:00:30 Average speed: 20,57 Mb\Sec.
X:\>p:\FastSum\fsum "x:\FC2-test1-i386-disc1.iso"
MD5 Checksum calculation and verification utility. [1.4.0.70] EN
(C) 2003 Kirill Zinov and Vitaly Rogotsevich. Web site: www.fastsum.com
Calculating...
x:\FC2-test1-i386-disc1.iso 1D1A136DC4AAF4EEE5598FAAC2B5F851
Calculation summary:
Processed 1 files in 0 folders with total size 632,13 Mb.
Elapsed time: 00:00:29 Average speed: 21,16 Mb\Sec.
X:\>OK, I don't really hate Linux. But this problem I have with FAT32 drives in Mandrake 10 RC1 is really confusing. Appearantly, the drive is mounted properly and I can see all the files and folders on it. When I save a file, such as /win/stuff/untitled.txt, that file appears in Nautilus as saved. And indeed, if I open the file using gedit, it really is there. If I reboot Linux it's still there. But if I reboot to Windows and look for the file, it's gone! And if I switch back to Linux after that, it's gone there too.
To make things even more strange: if I rename an existing file on the mounted FAT32 drive, it will appear as renamed under Windows as well. So it does do something with the drive, but it's not doing it right...
Is anyone familiar with this weird problem? It did not occur in Mandrake 9.2. Could it be problems with Mandrake or is it a problem with the new 2.6 kernel?
Encouraged by an e-mail from Asa, I decided to take the time to remove all the spam comments in my blog and close the comments for posts older than a month. Hopefully this will lead to less spam in the future.
This is pretty ironic. I was just about to post a positive review on Mandrake 9.2. When I was done writing it, I chose to save it to /win/stuff/untitled.txt (/win/stuff is a mounted FAT32 drive). The file saved without any problems, and did so several times (I click the Save button frequently just in case). Then I rebooted to Windows in order to crop a screenshot I made (I'm still not familiar with Gimp), but I found that neither the screenshot nor the review was there on the FAT32 drive. For some sick, stupid and extremely lame reason, Mandrake (10 RC1) failed miserably when saving the files, but it wasn't clever enough to warn me about it! So the review is lost, unless I want to spend another hour writing it again.
I hate datalosses. I hate Mandrake. I hate Linux.