Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: migration

New URL: blog.slackware.nl

August 17, 2025 / / 15 Comments

Me

Hi all.
It was time to migrate my blog to a new server. The URL ‘alien.slackbook.org/blog/’ has changed to ‘blog.slackware.nl’.

For years, my hosting server has been https://harrier.slackbuilds.org/ – ever since I had to move away from the original host, the slackware.com server (Pat does not trust PHP code).
I am eternally grateful to the team of people (Robby Workman and friends) who purchased its hardware and have been maintaining it in a US datacenter for all that time. They gave me full root rights over my virtual machine. Also many thanks to Teklinks for offering colocation and bandwidth!
Check out harrier‘s frontpage to get an idea of all the Slackware community services are hosted on that iron.

But the QEMU VM which runs on harrier and which essentially hosted my blog, is still on Slackware 14.2. Over time I had to upgrade httpd, mariadb and php to keep the WordPress code happy, but now WordPress is again nagging me about not having PHP 8 and to be honest, Slackware 14.2 has not received security updates for two years now. I am not feeling comfortable with that.
I had a short chat with Robby and he indicated that there’s just too much to be done and too little time to do it. I fully understand that and I have not bothered him with my worries.

I decided to migrate the blog to a new Slackware -current host. I have done a few trial runs over the years; it is not trivial to move a WordPress blog to a new domain and at the same time to a new host. But I think I figured out the challenges and ironed out the kinks.

Also, this was a good opportunity to reconsider the hosting location. Harrier runs in a US datacenter. I am not at all happy with the racist and autocratic direction the US is taking under Trump and his MAGA cult. I’ve seen people being detained and/or sent back at airport border control checkpoints simply because they have written online posts that are unfavorable to Trump. Look at my previous posts here on the blog – I will not attempt to enter the US as long as Trump is its dictator. And therefore it makes sense to choose the European Union as the new location for my blog server.

Welcome to blog.slackware.nl! Please update your bookmarks.
I am creating a redirect for alien.slackbook.org/blog/ to get that forwarded to the new URL, but it never hurts to spread the word to your friends.

Cheers, Eric

kmail terminates during startup with “Failed to fetch the resource collection”

November 13, 2011 / / 11 Comments

One thing that keeps boggling people’s minds when they use KDE is Akonadi, the framework used to access PIM-like data. PIM being “Personal Information Management”. Akonadi leaves me in the dark too, sometimes!

If you want to know a bit more about how Akonadi sits at the core of your personal data management in KDE, you might want to read these articles first, one being two  years old and the other a bit more recent… http://thomasmcguire.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/akonadi-nepomuk-and-strigi-explained/ and http://vizzzion.org/blog/2010/08/demystifying-akonadi/ . This is also a nice article “Akonadi misconception #1: where is my data?“: http://blogs.kde.org/node/4503 which is definitely worth checking out.

In the meantime, there is an issue I wanted to discuss with you, considering Akonadi. When you upgrade to KDE 4.7.x coming from Slackware’s KDE 4.5.5, the upgrade process is not always smooth. The PIM suite in KDE 4.7.x is now using Akonadi as its backend, meaning your PIM data (kmail, kontact etc) are migrated over to the Akonadi storage the very first time you start your new KDE. This migration is not always proceeding perfectly.

There’s a thread on LinuxQuestions.org about kmail crashing on startup with a very specific error message “Failed to fetch the resource collection“. I provided the solution in that thread but thought it would be good to document it here in the blog as well. The bug is fairly old, it is being discussed in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259355

What you have to do if you encounter this issue, is the following:

  1. Launch Akonadi Console (for instance by pressing “Alt-F2” to open krunner and typing “akonadiconsole”).
  2. In the “Agents” tab, select the “Local Folders” resource.
  3. Select “Configure > Configure natively…”.
  4. If an error appears indicating that “the current folder does not exist” don’t worry. Select a new directory which does not yet exist, for instance: /home/<USERNAME>/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/

This should fix the issue with kmail.

You can fix it the hard way, by removing all of your “.kde” directory content but that is so rude, and you lose a lot of other configurations besides your mail.

A whole section of the KDE User Base is devoted to Akonadi troubleshooting, I recommend you check that out if you run into Akonadi related issues: http://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi_4.4/Troubleshooting

Cheers, Eric

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