Slackware Switch to MariaDB

So, it's more than 2 days since my last post, but here's something interesting. Slackware and ArchLinux is now migrating to MariaDB and dumping MySQL in their repository. For Slackware, this change only happen in -Current tree, so the first official Slackware release with MariaDB will be on the next release, not in Slackware 14.0.

More and more Linux distributions are migrating to MariaDB after they feel that Oracle might do more changes to MySQL in the future that restrict Open Source developers and users to work closely with them. OpenSUSE and Fedora has done this and others might follow soon. Since MariaDB is backward-compatible with MySQL, replacing them should be easy to be done.

You can just remove MySQL and then install MariaDB without losing your data. Of course you are advised to backup your data first, but on my system, i don't really backup the data first and it's still safe.

WiFI connection at Home

I have a strange problem about WiFI connection at my house. I have set up 2 WiFIs and both are working properly with my devices (nOkia E71, iPad 1 and New iPad 3) and my laptop (slackware). The problem is with my old laptop (ArchLinux) which can't connect to the access point even though i have set the correct passphrase.

Strange thing is that when i installed the ArchLinux for the first time, during installation i ran wifi-menu eth1 and it worked. When the base packages has been installed, it didn't work anymore. I have set the wpa_supplicant configuration correctly, but still no luck. I will try to compare with my Slackware laptop later since they use the same tool to connect, which is wicd.