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20031119 Wednesday November 19, 2003

Fedora Core 1 has killed my Red Hat 9 box I don't know if it was Fedora or me, but it appears that my main hard drive on my Red Hat 9 box is hosed. Here's what I posted on Experts Exchange and the Fedora Mailing list:

I tried to upgrade to Fedora Core 1 from Red Hat 9. I experienced some issues with disk space, and based on someone's advice, I deleted /tmp and created a symlink /tmp -> /home/tmp. I did not have /home/tmp created when I tried to install Fedora. It warned me about having a relative symlink during the upgrade, so I rebooted to undo the symlink. I've rebooted a number of times since then, and did get in to rm /tmp and mkdir /tmp. Now it appears I'm hosed - here's the message I get on startup: 

Creating root device
mkrootdev: label / not found
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 2 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 132K freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel
_ <- Flashing cursor

I received a few responses from the mailing list, but my main hard drive appears to be hosed (unrecoverable). I tried doing a clean install, and Fedora again complained about not having enough disk space to copy the images over.

Finally, I took a break and thought of a workable solution while putting a turkey in the oven. I have another machine that has the exact same hardware as my Linux box - it has Windows XP on it, but I'm not using it. So I'm in the midst of installing Fedora on it, and then I'll move the hard drive. I lost all my configured stuff: Apache, CVS, Tomcat, DNS, DHCP, CUPS, but I was able to select most of it in the installation process. Let's hope all these packages are the latest and greatest - then I won't have much configuring to do. Posted in General at Nov 19 2003, 01:45:56 PM MST 6 Comments

Wanted: View Source with syntax highlighting The Display Tag has a nice feature in it's documentation: the ability to view the source of a JSP [example]. This is done using a servlet, and works fairly well. However, as I write documentation for Struts Menu, I'm finding I need to view more than just the source of JSPs, but also the source of stylesheets, scripts and Velocity templates. So far, I've found that the view source protocol works fairly well for this.

Nice Tabs Menu Examples: generated HTML, its JavaScript file, its CSS file

Normally, I would be perfectly happy with this - except the view-source protocol doesn't seem to work in Safari (last time I checked). Secondly, I got to thinking - it sure would be nice to have a Servlet (or some other technology) that would read in a file and spit out it's contents with syntax highlighting. This is to say that you'd see in your browser what you see in your editor (i.e. BBEdit, HomeSite, Eclipse, etc.).

The ideal tool would allow me to pass in a URL to a file, and it would spit out an HTML version of that file, complete with syntax highlighting. It'd be similar to Java2HTML, but it would allow HTML, JavaScript, Java, CSS and JSP. I noticed that it might be possible to generate HTML from Java using Java2HTML on the fly, but that only covers one file type. Another option is to instruct documentation readers to change their view-source editor to be their favorite editor.

Has anyone seen such a tool? It sure would be sweet for writing better and more readable documentation for web developers. Posted in Java at Nov 19 2003, 08:51:19 AM MST 6 Comments