Pastor Mark has a great sermon for you.

Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again

If you get this error, and you were running rawhide, do not worry. Just edit your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo file (again?) and change it from enabled=1 back to enabled=0. During the recent release of Fedora, yum has re-enabled your fedora.repo that you had previous disabled.

As of this blog post, it was the Fedora 12 release that did this again. The Fedora 11 release did the same thing. And, no, Debian Sid does not do this to you. I have been on Debian Sid for years, and it has never enabled any repos without at least prompting me first.

The folks on #fedora or #fedora-qa will not believe you though. They will taunt you with phrases like, "normal updates for thousands of people are working just fine", or "there are thousands and thousands of people who had their repo files updated, and they continue to get updates". But don't be discouraged by their "talk to the hand" attitude. Just edit your fedora.repo and set enabled back to 0, and move on with your life, and join me ... I am not one of the thousands and thousands of people who have never had a problem with updating a linux box.

You would not be on this page if your search engine had not led you here. I can tell from the referrers to this page. So I know you are just like me, just some idiot who is having problems udating their fedora rawhide box. We are walking together in this way. We are alike. Do not let the folks in the Linux community convince you that you are the only one on earth who has ever had a problem using their distro.

Note: the root cause of the error "Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again" seems to be some kind of dns issue see this bug report. Again, I did not get this error again after re-disabling the fedora.repo and continued using rawhide.

Don Fransisco

If you have never heard his songs, start now:
Here is a link to the lyrics and chords. Go learn them.

In Him.

yum install meld

Click to enlarge and see meld in action. Melding itself.

The Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library

Either your extractor was unable to extract the lib files, or it was unable to give the lib files the correct permissions. Do not worry. Here is the solution to your problem:

1. If you are a real developer just execute the following commands:

$ pwd
/cygdrive/c/galileo/eclipse
$ find plugins/ -name \*.dll
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.200.v20090519/eclipse_1206.dll
$ chmod 0755 plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.200.v20090519/eclipse_1206.dll

Now you are done. The problem is fixed.

2. If you have never done development from the command-line, and you have not gone to boot camp to learn the new secrets for Vista this year, or whatever sad, proprietary jail cell you are in, then you will need to use a GUI to find the dll named above somewhere down in the eclipse/plugins directory, and give yourself execute permissions to it, and your problem will be fixed. The shortened, but still long, complicated list of clicks and steps probably goes something like ...

0. Stop crying and feeling sorry for yourself. As a windows user, you are simply a second class citizen, so just buck up and deal with it.
1. find the "eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_1.0.200.v20090519/eclipse_1206.dll" file using the Explorer ...
2. Right-click the file and select Properties.
3. Click on the Security tab.
4. Click Advanced in the lower right.
5. In the Advanced Security Settings window that pops up, click on the Owner tab.
6. Click Edit.
7. Click Other users or groups.
8. Click Advanced in the lower left corner.
9. Click Find Now.
10. Scroll through the results and double-click on your current user account.
11. Click OK to all of the remaining windows except the first Properties window.
12. Select your user account from the list up top and click Edit.
13. Select your user account from the list up top again and then in the pane below, check Full control under Allow, or as much control as you need.
14. You’ll get a security warning, click Yes.
15. On some files that are essential to Windows, you’ll get a “Unable to save permission changes… access is denied” warning and there’s nothing that you can do about it to the best of my knowledge.
16. Consider using something other than Windows. And stop your whining, "This didn't work for my favorite version of Windows XP" ... go to boot camp and learn the secrets for your version, or free yourself from learning new secrets. The chmod command has worked for over 20 years, and that fact is not likely to change tomorrow ... no boot camp secrets required.

Hope that helps.