Linux Neophyte

I’ve decided, after going back and forth over this for a while, that I’m dropping Fedora on my work machine. I’ve gotten to where I just can’t be bothered with yum and the limited (in comparison to Debian based distros) package selection anymore. Those are my main reasons, but there are others, the amount of time it took for the Fedora team to fix the ATA kernel problems following the release of Core 6 for instance.

I’m not happy about forsaking Fedora, I would prefer to have some level of experience with an RPM based distro. I just can’t justify the time it’s taking to become a knowledgeable user with Fedora. Maybe some day, when I’m more familiar with the internals of more Linux applications and more experienced with compiling what I need from source I can go back.

I’ll be installing Feisty on the machine some time this week or next and will be strictly a Debian (or its derivatives) user for a while. I’ve had almost no problem installing whatever applications I want on a Debian machine. There have been a few times when I needed to compile from source and on Debian I’ve been able to get the job done (my success rate on Fedora is abysmal).

So to me, this feels like a failure. Disappointing but necessary.

written by M@ \\ tags: FC6, Fedora, Feisty, News, Ubuntu

I’ve found that the extended tab-complete functionality in Ubuntu is a major timesaver. I do a LOT of SSHing from machine to machine in my house as well as to machines out there on the Internet. I use my ~/.ssh/config file to set up easy-to-remember names for these machines and then use the command line to connect. For example, to connect to my Anapnea.net shell account, I have a block in my config file that looks like this:

host anapnea
hostname anapnea.net
user fakeusername
identityfile ~/.ssh/id

When I want to log in, I open my terminal program of choice and enter ssh ana<tab> and press enter. Pressing tab expands to anapnea and I make my connection saving 4 keystrokes.

Note: For those interested, SSH tab-complete will expand to the value of host or hostname. That’s handy if you can remember the actual hostname of the machine and you’ve forgotten what you entered as the value of host (yeah, I’ve done it). If that makes no sense to you, you can get more information on SSH config files with man 5 ssh_config.

Tab complete also works with lftp and some other programs when using Ubuntu. I’ve found the lack of it in Fedora a little frustrating (I keep pressing tab and get nothing). I did a little Googling to find out just what program sets up this functionality and checked the Fedora repos for it. Thankfully it can be found in all it’s glory and awaiting installation in Fedora extras.

su -c 'yum install bash-completion'

A few seconds later, you’re ready to bank your keystrokes and tab complete to your heart’s content.

Note: Any terminal sessions that were open when you installed the package won’t utilize it until you either restart the session or enter bash at the prompt. It seems that your shell needs to source the newly created /etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh script. This is done when you invoke BASH by opening a terminal prompt or executing bash at the command line.

written by M@ \\ tags: BASH, CLI, Console, FC6, Fedora, SSH

I’ve been terribly busy over the last few days, I started playing with Mutt and XFCE 4.4 on Fedora. Who knew it (“it” being mutt) would take over my life?? Mutt is going to take some time to explain, and since I haven’t got it doing exactly what I want yet, I’ll hold off on talking about it. I can tell you this, I’ll be damned if I’ll let it beat me. I will own (or should I be cool and use “pwn”?) mutt, and once I do, I’ll try to tell you how I did it.

Since XFCE is easier to get into, I’ll explain that. My work machine is a bit of a dog. At least it’s feeling that way. To improve the feel of it, I decided to give a lighter weight desktop a shot and I installed the latest XFCE. To put it simply, wow! What a difference.

Now this isn’t my first experience with XFCE. Back when I had only been using Linux for a month or two, I installed it to take a peek. I was completely dependent on my desktop environment at that time. If it didn’t take care of mounting devices and network resources, I couldn’t use it. Back to Gnome or KDE I went.

I’m more comfortable with Linux now and can either mount devices on my own or edit /etc/fstab to make mounting automatic. That being the case, I can move on to some of the more “manual” desktops (yayy me!).

Installing XFCE was a breeze, su -c 'yum groupinstall XFCE' and a little coffee to pass the time was all it took. After that, log in and start customizing.

One of the first things I had to do after setting up my desktop was to find out how to lock the workstation. XFCE allows you to trigger a lock by hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL; that sequence executes /usr/bin/xflock4 which in turn, starts the screen saver (I found/figured this info under Keyboard Settings) .

Unfortunately, that wasn’t working for me. There was no error message or any indication that the key sequence was doing anything. I opened a terminal, found the script and checked it out. The script attempts to run xscreensaver-command -lock or xlock. I didn’t have any executables matching those filenames on my box, so off to google I went. The Gentoo wiki offered me this page. With that info, I created /usr/bin/xlock and added the lines below:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/gnome-screensaver-command -l

All that was left to do was to set the proper mode on the file; chmod 755 /usr/bin/xlock (as root). With that done, the magic key sequence locked my box and allowed me to walk away.

***Edit*** I also had to add gnome-screensaver to autostarted applications

Notes:

• I rely too much on Google. If I had taken a minute to think, I wouldn’t have needed the Gentoo wiki to tell me to create the xlock script. This annoys me about myself, I too often look for the easy answer.
• I decided to use the Gnome screen saver because it was already installed and I knew it could do the job.
• I could have just installed the xscreensaver package but that just would have added software I don’t need.

I’ll keep playing and tweaking, so far this is great. I can only complain about the screen lock issue and the fact that adding items to the panel is a little clunky. Other than that, I’m flying around my machine with breakneck speed and it ROCKS. Got some time on your hands? Install it, play with it, see if you like it.

written by M@ \\ tags: Desktop, FC6, Fedora, XFCE

Well, they’ve finally done it! Fedora fixed the kernel problem that was simply driving me mad. Back in November, I posted about Fedora Core 6 – SATA & CIFS Problems which led to painfully slow boot times on my office OptiPlex system.

If you’re suffering from this garbage at startup:

ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient
ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs)
ata1: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata1: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata1: softreset failed, retrying in 5 secs

Then all you need to do is perform a standard update (su -c 'yum update') and restart the machine. The 2.6.19-1.2895.fc6 kernel will fix it.

Now that the issue is resolved, Fedora doesn’t feel broken to me anymore. JOY!

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, FC6, Fedora, Hardware, RPM

I was wondering what nifty utilities were available for monitoring my bandwidth from the console. After a few minutes of googling I found my answer. There were two options that I found right away, bwm-ng and nload. Both programs have similar features so it really came down to look. Since I was slightly happier with nload, I installed it on all of my full-time Linux machines, this included Fedora 6, Ubuntu Edgy and a Debian Sarge server. Don’t take my word for it though, if you have a hankerin’ to monitor your bandwidth, check them both out.

The screen-cap below is shows nload and a few other programs running. The first row is the local machine (FC6), the second row is (from left to right) a Debian Sarge server and an Ubuntu Edgy desktop. The third row shows an available console and an scp command transferring a file from the Fedora box to the Debian box.

Installing on Ubuntu:

Be sure that you have the Universe repo enabled (click here for help)

sudo apt-get install nload bwm-ng

Installing on Fedora:

Installing an nload package on Fedora requires adding another repo to your yum configuration. The steps are below.

1: First create the dries.repo file as root. If you aren’t a Gnome user, you can substitute gedit with kwrite or kate below.

su -c 'gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/dries.repo'

Paste the four lines below into the editor, save and exit:

[dries]
name=Extra Fedora rpms dries - $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/dries.ulyssis.org/fedora/linux/$releasever/$basearch/dries/RPMS/
enabled=0

2: Download the GPG key, install it and then remove the local copy (once it’s imported, you don’t need the key file any longer)

wget http://dries.studentenweb.org/rpm/RPM-GPG-KEY.dries.txt

su -c 'rpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY.dries.txt'

rm RPM-GPG-KEY.dries.txt

Done, now you can install the programs via yum. The Dries repo isn’t enabled by default (I only leave official yum repos enabled on my machine). The command below will enable the repo for this install only. If you want to enable dries full-time, edit the dries.repo file and change enabled=0 to enabled=1.

su -c 'yum --enablerepo=dries install nload bwm-ng'

written by M@ \\ tags: Console, Edgy, FC6, Fedora, Sytem Monitor, Ubuntu

Fedora has decided not to provide an update to Firefox 2.0 (FF2) for FC6. I personally want to use FF2 on my Fedora box and I set out to find a way. It’s not exactly straight forward, but it’s not difficult. There are many ways to do this. This is how I chose to make it work.

First, download the FF2 tarball from http://getfirefox.com/ to your home directory. Then extract the tarball to the /usr/local/firefox directory and rename it to firefox2 (to prevent confusion)

su -c 'tar -xzvf /home/[username]/firefox-2.0.tar.gz -C /usr/local'

su -c 'mv -v /usr/local/firefox /usr/local/firefox2'

You need to close any running instances of Firefox for the next step to work. If you’re viewing this with Firefox, you’ll need to print this page or copy the instructions into a file on your machine.

If you get errors complaining about libstdc++.so.5 when you execute the next command, perform a su -c 'yum install compat-libstdc++-33' then run it again.

To prevent potential damage to your existing profile/plugins, we need to create an FF2 only profile. Start FF2 with the profile manager;

/usr/local/firefox2/firefox -ProfileManager

1. Click Create profile, then Next to create a new profile
2. Name the profile FF2
3. Click Finish
4. Click Exit

There are now two profiles in your ~/.mozilla/firefox directory, the default profile will be used by Firefox 1.5, and we’re going to configure FF2 to use the one we just created.

su -c 'echo -e \#\!/bin/bash\\n/usr/local/firefox2/firefox -P FF2 |tee /usr/local/bin/firefox2'

su -c 'chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/firefox2'

Explanation:

The echo command uses tee to create a simple BASH script in /usr/local/bin. I put the script there so that it would already be in my path and easy to run via the command line (CLI) or a run application dialog. The script will execute FF2 and specify that we use the FF2 profile. To view the script, perform a less /usr/local/bin/firefox2.

The chmod command made the script executable by all users on the system.

Notes:

You now have FF2 running on your machine without mucking up your FF 1.5 install or the plugins. All of the dependencies were maintained so programs like yelp (which depends on FF 1.5) still work.

Your distro has no idea that you’ve just installed FF2, it doesn’t exist in the RPM database and therefore won’t be updated when newer versions of FF2 are released. You should run FF2 as admin (su -c firefox2) and choose Help > Check for Updates on a regular basis. If you don’t usually follow FF releases, I would suggest picking a day each week and just performing that task.

Here’s the less than good news. Your bookmarks, plugins, history, etc will not sync up between versions. If you want to use a particular plugin in both browsers, you’ll need to install it to each version. To be honest, I haven’t looked back since using FF2, all of the plugins I care about have been released for it and I dig the changes to the program.

If you have multiple users on your machine, each of them will have to create an FF2 profile. Because I specified that profile in the startup script, they will be presented with the profile manager the first time they launch firefox2. Just make sure they create an FF2 profile, else they’ll be facing the profile manager every time they launch the browser.

Finally, to set FF2 as your default browser in Gnome, choose System > Preferences > More Preferences > Preferred Applications and change firefox to firefox2. You could also answer yes when prompted by FF2 to make it your default browser.

Optional:

If you want to create a “Firefox 2 Web Browser” menu item for all users on the machine, paste the command below into a terminal window.

su -c 'echo -e \[Desktop Entry\]\\nVersion=1.0\\nEncoding=UTF-8\\nName=Firefox 2 Web Browser\\nGenericName=Web Browser\\nComment=Browse the Web\\nExec=firefox2 %u\\nIcon=firefox.png\\nTerminal=false\\nType=Application\\nStartupWMClass=Firefox-bin\\nMimeType=text/html\;text\/xml\;application\/xhtml+xml\;application\/vnd.mozilla.xul\+xml\;text\/mml\;\\nX-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.10\\nCategories=Network\;Application\;X-Fedora\; | tee /usr/share/applications/mozilla-firefox2.desktop'

written by M@ \\ tags: FC6, Fedora, Firefox

This wasn’t as easy as it should have been. FC6 isn’t generally considered to be a newbie-centric distro, I just wonder if the folks over at Fedora just want to hammer that fact home.

There are some problems when installing VMware server on FC. Firstly, there’s the 2.6.18 kernel, it seems that config.h was removed from the source. This is a file needed by some programs at compile time. If the file doesn’t exist, the compilation can’t complete. I’m guessing that VMware will just need to update its build script for 2.6.18+ kernels. That one can’t be blamed on Fedora, it’s a change in the kernel and I expect the VMware installer to account for the change in a future version.

This one I blame on Fedora, my understanding of the problem is that the installed kernel is based on i586 architecture but the kernel-devel package is based on i686. If you install kernel-devel from the Fedora repos and want to use VMware, you can just forget about it. The fact that the kernel and dev packages are out of sync will prevent the installer from creating the appropriate (and necessary) modules. Does this make sense? Is this something that shouldn’t surprise me? I really don’t understand the logic behind this and any info that you could give me would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway, after some googling, I was able to work around the problem.

Firstly make sure you’re running the latest Fedora kernel, open a terminal session and enter uname -r. At the time of this writing, the latest version is 2.6.18-1.2849.fc6. If you’re running an older kernel, perform an su -c ‘yum update’ before continuing. You will need to restart your computer after installing the latest kernel.

Before going any further, I should tell you that I have SElinux disabled on my box. I don’t know the first thing about managing a machine with SElinux. If you have it on, you may have to do some additional googling to get things working properly.

Download the VMware Server for Linux TAR Binary installer from http://www.vmware.com/download/server/. While your there you should also register to receive your serial number (it is required to complete the install of VMware Server). Once ready, open a terminal session and extract the tarball.

tar -xzvf VMware-server-1.0.1-29996.tar.gz

Download the i586 kernel-devel package from the updates repo and install it:

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/kernel-devel-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6.i586.rpm

su -c ‘rpm -ivh kernel-devel-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6.i586.rpm’

Create a symbolic link to the headers directory in /usr/src/

su -c ‘ln -s /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i586/ /usr/src/linux’

I got the fix for the config.h problem from this post on VMTN

su -c ‘cp -v /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i586/include/config/i2o/config.h /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i586/include/linux/’

Here’s where things start to work as expected. You need to install GCC and xinetd

su -c ‘yum install xinetd gcc’

Now start the installation; accepting the default answers to all of the questions (save for the location of the kernel headers, see below) is a perfectly acceptable way to get VMware Server installed.
cd ~/vmware-server-distrib/

su -c ./vmware-install.pl

Important: When asked for the headers, make sure the path is /usr/src/linux/include

Notes:

Since Fedora installs and enables a firewall by default you won’t need to worry about unauthorized users connecting to your VMware server.

If you’re reading this after a newer kernel has been released, you’ll need to change any instance of 2.6.18-1.2849.fc6.i586 to whatever kernel revision you’re working with.

written by M@ \\ tags: FC6, Fedora

Ever wish that you could right-click the Gnome desktop or a folder and open a terminal window? It’s a simple installation away in both Ubuntu and Fedora. I do sorta wonder why this isn’t included in Gnome by default.

Ubuntu:

Open your package manager and locate/install nautilus-open-terminal or alternatively open a terminal prompt and enter the command sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal

Now restart Gnome (log out and back in) or open a terminal and enter ps aux |grep nautilus then locate the PID for nautilus and issue a kill -HUP [pid]

Fedora:

Open a terminal prompt and enter the command su -c ‘yum install nautilus-open-terminal’

Now restart Gnome (log out and back in) or open a terminal and enter ps aux |grep nautilus then locate the PID for nautilus and issue a kill -HUP [pid]

Happy Thanksgiving! Food, football and naps. Who doesn’t love this holiday????

written by M@ \\ tags: Desktop, Edgy, FC6, Fedora, Gnome, Ubuntu

Something I’ve been missing since my migration to Linux is the ability to print whatever I want to a PDF. I find it insanely useful when I want a copy of purchase receipts or just about anything else that I should have a record of. I usually don’t print anything to paper, simply because I’ll just lose it or recycle it and then regret it 6 months later when I need a copy. Enter cups-pdf, a super easy way of outputting “stuff” to PDF.

Installing on Ubuntu 6.10:

sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Create the printer:

1. From the Gnome System menu, navigate to System > Administration > Printing.
2. Double click on New Printer
3. PDF Printer should already be selected under Use a detected printer, click Forward
4. Select Generic from the Manufacturer drop down menu
5. Select Postscript Printer in the Model section, click Forward
6. Name your printer (I chose PDF-Printer) and click Apply

All set, you can now opt to print web pages, or whatever else to your Cups/PDF-Printer. Ubuntu saves the PDFs to your ~/PDF/ directory (if you want to change the default location, use the last paragraph on this post as a guide).

Installing on Fedora Core 6:

Fedora keeps this package in the extras repo, you can install it using the command below.

su -c ‘yum install cups-pdf’

A few seconds later I had a new printer named Cups-PDF, that when selected would print whatever I wanted to a PDF on my desktop. I personally don’t want all of my PDFs saved to the desktop so I created a PDF folder in my home dir and made a change to the config file:

As root, edit /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf, locate the line that reads Out ${HOME}/Desktop and change it to Out ${HOME}/PDF. I didn’t need to restart the CUPS service to apply the change, it just worked.

written by M@ \\ tags: CUPS, Edgy, FC6, Fedora, PDF, Ubuntu

I was able to leave work early today, I LOVE when that happens.. I took care of some personal responsibilities and came home to beer and some time with my desktop. I haven’t had a lot of time to really play since I installed Edgy.

Beryl:

I gotta say, the Beryl project is extremely cool. I had a great time picking out a skydome wallpaper and just tweaking out the desktop effects. I had to kill off the trailfocus plugin in beryl, I was getting annoyed with the fading out of apps. Other than that, I couldn’t be happier with the software. It’s just amazing. I have a nice fresh looking desktop with fun effects that just may help convince a few others to give Linux a shot (you KNOW anyone coming into this abode will be visiting my machine). Yeah, yeah, eye candy isn’t the reason to switch operating systems. That doesn’t mean that it won’t have an impact on some of those who are more reluctant to make the change. Who knows?

On the topic of Beryl, it seems that the folks over at Fedora are creating packages for it. That’s excellent news! I’ve noticed that Beryl core and Beryl devel have made it into the repos. I’m hoping that they’re planning to create packages for the plugins and extra toys as well.

*Note: if you followed the instructions for installing Beryl 0.1.1 in this post, and you update to the latest version in the Fedora repos, you WILL break Beryl. The good news is that it’s easy to fix. The RPMs referenced in the post have been updated to v 0.1.2. You can just download and install all of the packages except for core and devel (the post explains how if you don’t know what I’m talking about). After that, Beryl will be back, and up-to-date. Be sure to play with the “burn” animation. It looks NICE, but IMO it gets too annoying to use regularly. I wouldn’t mind seeing a “smoke” animation. Something that turns into wisps of smoke when you close an app could be pretty sexy

VMware:

I took some time today to set up some test VMware appliances for LinuxWorldNet. I’ll be using these “machines” to explore software and record my steps so I can post some how-to’s here. I’ve mostly completed the Fedora install, I’ll be working on Edgy shortly and I’ve created a Debian stable server for testing.

Upcoming Things:

I’ll be using the Debian VM to test out some FTP servers for Linux. I currently use Gene6 for Windows and would like to make the move to one of my Linux machines. I have no idea how well this will work out, I’ll post about my ups and downs here. Its going to be tough for any FTP server to beat G6, that’s just an amazing app. As I get into it, I’ll tell you what my requirements are and we’ll see how far I can get

I also plan on covering the configuration of OpenSSH server for both Fedora and Ubuntu. I’ll explain how to set them up in the most paranoid way I know how. I’m hoping that any newbies stumbling upon this blog will be able to open his/her SSH server to the evils of the Internet and still feel confident that they will be as safe as can possibly be.

That’s pretty much it for now. The only other thing I’d like to put out there is this; I’d like to hear from anyone that checks this blog out and has a few minutes to fire off a comment or email (matt at linuxworldnet dot com). Let me know what you think or if there’s a topic you’d like covered (I’ll do what I can, I’m still new to this Linux thing myself).

I need to get back to my beer and play, laydah!

written by M@ \\ tags: Beryl, Compiz, Edgy, Eye Candy, FC6, Fedora, SSH, Ubuntu