Hugin, great with strange errors...

I love hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/) -- it does a great job of stitching pictures together to make a panorama.  I ran into a weird problem -- i kept getting "unconnected image group" errors.  I tried setting the control point generators (not strictly need in the latest version) but each reported "Configured, not installed".  Strange.  The problem turned out to be that i installed hugin in a subdirectory of /Applications on my Mac and it didn't much like that.  Moved it to /Applications and all was well...

Here's an example panorama from photos I took at Canyonlands National Park outside of Moab Utah.

OSX, Xnest, and the keyboard

It seems many people have found out like i did that Xnest doesn't work if the client is an OSX machine -- the keyboard doesn't work properly.  I also tried a non-Apple keyboard but no happiness...  My workaround?  The free version of nomachine (http://www.nomachine.com/) -- works like a charm.  The weird thing is, nomachine uses ssh and X11 just like ssh/Xnest does, but it fixes the keyboard problem.

Upgrade to FC14 and NIC troubles

While upgrading to FC14, the motherboard NIC on one of my machines completely disappeared.  Happily, I had a spare PCI NIC and that worked fine, so I was able to fix things while have network access.  Lots of things were actually wrong.  The motherboard is entitled 'DQ965', well 'DQ965CO' in its full glory.  The NIC is a '82566DM Gigabit Network Connection'.  One needs to download a driver from Intel; the one I grabbed was entitled 'e1000e-1.2.20'.  A typical 'make install' should have worked, but Fedora (I suppose correctly) took itself from i386 to i686.PAE and the kernel sources didn't come along.  So, I had to 'yum install kernel-PAE-devel' to get the correct headers.  Then 'make install' in the e1000e source directory worked.  It also took BOTH the 'acpi=off' and 'pcie_aspm=off' kernel arguments. For more discussion around this, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=649570

All that said, I have to rebuild and reinstall after each kernel update. See bug at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3116036&group_id=42302&atid=447449