Viva La Spacewalk!

It’s been some time in the coming — and in all honestly, I’ve only been on the periphery these days — but the great news today is the announcement of Spacewalk, the re-branded, open source community release of Red Hat Network Satellite.

Spacewalk will not replace Satellite — think of it kind of like Fedora and RHEL. The Satellite product itself will remain supported by Red Hat, and development will continue, drawing from the (eventual) upstream Spacewalk codebase. Well, tell you what. I’ll just let dgoodwin tell you more.

In any case, hearty congratulations to the Satellite team concerning all the hard work that took place to get this done!

So here’s the deal, I upgraded to F9, and things are just kind of funky right now in XFCE. Wanted to go back and check out the new stuff in Gnome anyway, so this was an opportunity to do so.

Unfortunately, Gnome was totally instable for me. Going through the menus would cause X to crash.. and note, no fancy desktop graphics going on or anything.

Now, in the past, I’ve had some degree of luck using smart‘s “reinstall” option to fix things like this.

I also should note that I don’t have the entire “GNOME Desktop Environment” group installed, nor do I want it.

Finally, note that, for some reason, instead of using an “.$ARCH” extension, smart breaks architectures down using “@$ARCH”.

So basically, I want to install a bunch of vaguely gnome-esque packages, but not one at a time, sequentially, lest I run into dependency issues which would lead to the possiblity of downloading multiple packages over and over again. Also, just an “rpm -qa” piped to smart won’t work either due to the $ARCH grouping silliness.

Came up with this crufty bit which seems to do the trick.

First I created a random foo directory and changed dir to there.

Then:

for i in `rpm -qa --queryformat "%{name}\n"|grep "gnome-"`; do touch $i; done ; yes|smart reinstall `echo *`


Although I am sure there are way more efficient ways to do it, this seems to work amazingly well.