Linux Neophyte

This week the Fedora folks released A LOT of updates for Core 6. Among them was an updated kernel and thankfully, it addressed one of the problems I blogged about in this post.

I can now mount CIFS shares to a genuine mount point and access them via the GUI or the command line. This REALLY makes my day. Its now possible to transfer files to my home machine, update them and send em’ back. Hallelujah!

The annoying SATA startup probe hasn’t been resolved. I suppose I’ll suffer with this a while longer. I should probably take some initiative and register a bug report.

In other news, I finally know how to view the changelogs on a Fedora box. I should have read a little more on the rpm command, I might have known about it sooner…

Entering rpm -q kernel-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6 –changelog |less displayed the changelog for the current kernel. Seems the CIFS fix was implemented on November 9th.

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

I’ve been working on backing up my home directory automatically, generally when I automate a process I like to get an email notification of completion and perhaps a log file as proof. Ubuntu doesn’t seem to have a command line mailer installed by default and many of the apps in the repos have heavy dependencies (such as exim or postfix). I don’t plan on running a mail server, and these programs add a level of complexity that just isn’t necessary (not to mention I’m just not ready to mess with them). I found a small script that does exactly what I need, sendEmail. It’s only dependency is perl and that should already be installed on your system.

sendEmail -f [from address] -t [to address] [another to address] -u ['subject'] -m ['body'] -a [attachment] -s [your SMTP server]

As the example above shows, you simply call the script, specify your from address, specify the to address (one or many), define a subject and body (if you are including spaces in the subject or body wrap them in quotes), attach a file if you like, and then give it the address of your SMTP server (which was provided to you by your ISP). It’s just that simple and it just works.

I couldn’t locate sendEmail in the Fedora repos (Ubuntu has it in the Universe repo) but it’s VERY easy to install yourself. Download the official release from http://caspian.dotconf.net/menu/Software/SendEmail/ to your home directory, then enter the commands below.

Note: At the time of this writing the current version is 1.54 and the downloaded filename is sendEmail-v1.54.tar.gz. The filename may change later so you’ll have to adjust the commands below accordingly. You will need the root password to install this script to the locations below.

Open a terminal window and go to your home folder (or the location of the downloaded file)

su -c ‘tar -xzvf sendEmail-v1.54.tar.gz -C /usr/lib/’
su -c ‘ln -s /usr/lib/sendEmail-v1.54/sendEmail /usr/bin/’

The first command will extract the files to /usr/lib/sendEmail-v1.54/. The second command just creates a symbolic link in /usr/bin/ that will allow you to call sendEmail from the command line. For those interested, su -c switches user to root, executes the command following the -c and then returns you to your normal user level. I tend to use this method so I don’t forget to log out of the root account and accidentally break something.

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

I’m having two problems with my FC6 install at work (I’m running a Dell OptiPlex GX270, ya know, a basic office machine). One of the issues is more of an annoyance, the other limits my capabilities and I’m bothered that it’s still a problem on this machine.

The lesser of the issues causes slow boot times. While the kernel is loading and before the GUI boot screen, Linux is probing my SATA ports and not finding any drives. That makes sense since there aren’t any SATA drives in this box. I found 2 posts about this issue on Red Hat’s bugzilla, ID 212581 & ID 212737, I see no confirmation of the problem, so who knows when there will be a fix. Its not really a show stopper as the scan times out, gives up, and eventually boots normally.

This issue is the bugger! CIFS mounts with roughly 100 or more files cannot be read. If you’re unfamiliar with CIFS, its the filesystem type used when mounting Samba/Windows shares. As I’m using this machine at work, this one makes me growl. I have up to 15 shares I need to mount from time to time in order to get my work done. Most of them have well over 100 files just in the root of the share. When attempting to navigate offending mounts with Nautilus, I receive an error that reads “The folder contents could not be displayed“. The error I receive when trying to list the contents of the folder via the command line reads “ls: reading directory .: Invalid argument”. This is a real problem for me as I’m responsible for a lot of documentation, I sort them by directory, I have thousands of folders/files (I’m anal about it and document everything) and I can’t access them through file system mounts.

There is a workaround, I can mount using Gnome VFS (Places > Connect to Server), and I can browse using Nautilus (smb://server/share). This isn’t ideal, I would prefer to have a genuine mount. Not all programs are Gnome VFS aware and I don’t see a way to direct Gnome to mount to an actual file system location. That means that if I create a file with an app that can’t utilize Gnome VFS, I need to save the file to my home dir and then copy it off to the VFS mount. If you know of a way to force VFS mounts use a genuine mount point, PLEASE let me know.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=212123 says that this problem has been fixed in CVS and an update will be released shortly. That was posted on October 28th and I still haven’t seen an update addressing the issue.

When Looking at this from a Linux newbie point of view (and I do know that Fedora isn’t a newbie focused distro) this is a real problem. There is no fix for the CIFS problem, well, not unless you want to compile your own kernel from CVS (and that’s nothing more than a drug store chain to many people new to Linux) and the potential fix listed for the SATA problem (mentioned in bug 212581) isn’t something a newb would/should be comfortable doing. If I was just giving Linux a shot and started out with Fedora I might be tempted to just say that Linux is broken and go back to Windows.

written by M@ \\ tags: CIFS, Desktop, FC6, Fedora, Gnome, Gnome VFS, Hardware

Over the last few days I’ve been exploring the wonders of Beryl. You can read a bit about it on your own over at http://beryl-project.org. If you don’t feel like reading up on it, I can break it down like this; Beryl (which is a fork of Compiz) adds eye-candy and productivity features to your desktop. I’ve found a few handy features that will allow me to work faster and you just can’t beat all of the fancy-schmancy toys.

Sooo, I went to work early this morning (all excited) to install the latest Fedora on my machine. I did the base install for a workstation, installed the apps I use the most and then turned on the nifty desktop effects. It was far less impressive than it was last week (see FC6 First Impressions). After using Beryl on my Ubuntu machine, Compiz is just kinda lame. You get a subset of what is available in Beryl and Fedora didn’t include any way to manage Compiz themes (at least none that I could find).

Is that such a big deal? To me it is.

The Beryl settings manager allows you to tweak features to what feels like an infinite level. You can change default settings (which is good, the wavy menu thing was buggin’ me), disable the effects that annoy or make your system feel slow, and experiment with what makes your desktop experience better. Since I’m running it on an older/less powerful machine here at work I’m tweaking the settings so that things don’t feel so laggy.

Beryl’s Emerald theme manager has (as installed on Fedora) 39 themes available. More than enough to pick your favorite colors to get started with.

Compiz had neither of those nifty config apps and I couldn’t find a suitable substitute in Fedora’s repos. Time to install Beryl.

You’ll have to do a little manual labor to install Beryl on Fedora, the Fedora forum has this post that will make it easy to install. If you’re using FC6, you can skip way down to ” HOWTO : FEDORA CORE 6 – BERYL”, download each RPM to a directory, open a terminal session, change to the directory you downloaded the RPMs to, switch to the root account (su) and enter “rpm -ivh *”. Once all of the packages are installed you can follow the instructions for starting Beryl on the same forum post. Poof! You’re done!

Ahhhh, now the gotcha. Since you’re not installing from your standard package manager, you won’t find Puplet or Yum telling you that there are updated packages when new versions of Beryl are released. I’m hoping the author of the post will keep the RPMs updated but you can’t count on that. If it comes down to it, you could compile new releases yourself. If you’re anything like me, that thought could make you a little nervous (esp if you’ve failed to compile things on Fedora as many times as I have). I personally believe that the benefits outweigh the risk. I find Beryl to be a bit more stable than Fedora’s Compiz (which surprised me). Using Compiz I found my Gnome terminals crashing frequently and that hasn’t happened yet with Beryl.

Going back to my tweaking now.. I’ve found that disabling Trail Focus and shortening the animation durations have really improved the feel of things on this GX270

written by M@ \\ tags: AIGLX, Beryl, Compiz, Desktop, Eye Candy, FC6, Fedora, Gnome

Thanks to my trusty Fedora box, I was able to please one of the Big Cheeses here at work. I had a PDF that needed to be converted to a Word document. The first thing I tried to do was open it in Acrobat Pro and run a quick Save As. On a normal PDF this would have been the fastest way to get the job done. Of course this PDF was restricted with password security (Save As failed due to those restrictions). How annoying! I remembered using a command line tool a few months ago to convert a PDF to some other file type and figured I’d give it a shot. I installed the “xpdf-utils” package from Fedora’s core repo and ran the file through pdf2ps (Ubuntu installs the pdf tools by default). I then copied it back to the machine running Acrobat Pro, opened the postscript file and saved it as a Word doc. Task completed and lessons learned. The lessons?? Linux has a tool for that, and just because something is supposed to be secure (like a PDF that isn’t supposed to be changed) doesn’t mean it is.

To satisfy my own curiosity, I took a few minutes to create a PDF that required a password to open. I attempted to run it through the pdf2ps tool and I was unable to convert the file without providing the password. I should note that Acrobat Pro issued a warning when I saved the pdf stating that Adobe products enforce the restrictions set by password security but some third party products might be able to bypass some of the restrictions.

Note: This PDF did belong to the University, since it was ours I don’t feel that it was immoral to circumvent the restrictions.

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

Hey hey!

The very first thing I did this morning was to burn the DVD copy of FC6 that I downloaded overnight and install it to a spare partition on my machine here at home. The install doesn’t take very long, I chose to do a default desktop install and let it go…

Visually, Fedora is the best looking distro I’ve used. They’ve updated the graphics and theme (as they do with every release). The logo is just sexy, it’s darker than Core 5 and IMO looks a LOT better. I couldn’t stand the light blue bubbly look of 5. The boot splash, login theme and default desktop all flow and have a common look. I’ll be keeping the desktop background for a while, it has an under water feel to it and I’m digging on it.

Boot times are similar to FC5, to me it’s just fast. I’ve heard people call Fedora bloated, I’m just not understanding why. It doesn’t load a lot of services that I don’t need and feels fast to me.

The software selection is minimal in a default install, and I like that. You end up with a Gnome desktop, OpenOffice, Gimp, Gaim, Firefox, Evolution, Rythymbox and a few other apps. All in all, a decent place to start.

Firefox is at version 1.5.0.7 and Gnome is at 2.16. I’m not surprised that FF isn’t up to version 2 yet, FF2 just went gold this week. I’m a little surprised that Gnome isn’t up to 2.18 though. I didn’t follow the development of this release so I’m not sure what the reasoning was. I’ll just take a guess and say that by the time 2.18 was released they had already put too much effort into development to just up and change to the latest version. Gaim and OpenOffice are the latest releases, Gaim is the latest v2 beta and OO.o is v2.04.

*** Edit ***

I was wrong, Gnome 2.16 is the latest stable release. My mistake.

** End Edit ***

Out of the box there are some 10 updates that need to be applied. Pup lets you know and performs the update with about 3 mouse clicks and one password prompt. It’s a nice simple way to keep your machine up to date. Who doesn’t like that??

My first impressions are good. My only complaint about Fedora comes from the fact that I’m a newb and I’ve been using Ubuntu. The package selection isn’t weak, but it doesn’t even compete with Ubuntu’s.

So now I’m off to play, I need to install some of my applications. Add some repos and get to playing. This is actually the first time I’ve had to configure a Fedora release without the assistance of fedorafaq.org. Should be interesting

** Edit **

I’ve spent a couple of hours playing with FC6 now. I’ve got AIGLX/Compiz running (oh and doing that was just a few mouse clicks, System > Preferences > Desktop Effects) on my Intel card, using the i810 driver. I’ve got most of the software I like to use (mplayer, amarok etc) running, and running well. The only issue I’ve had is there are times when I open an instance of gnome-terminal, all of my existing terminal windows close (ack, now that is annoying). This only happens when I have the desktop effects enabled. I’ll look into that when I have time.

If you want to check out Linux eye candy and have a helluva good distro running, take some time to install FC6 and give it a shot!

written by M@ \\ tags: AIGLX, Compiz, Desktop, Eye Candy, FC6, Fedora, Gnome

In my last post I covered reading man pages via the console. Depending on your distro, you may find that man pages are available via your desktop’s GUI help center.

Ubuntu does this very well, while Fedora had some wonkiness.

Ubuntu/Gnome users can select System > Help > System Documentation. The Help Topics page contains a few categories dedicated to Ubuntu specific documentation, scrolling down will show Other Document Categories. Here you will want to click the Command Line Help link. You will be shown two more categories; GNU Info Pages and Manual Pages. Info pages tend to be more in depth where man pages give you the basics and then leave you to experiment. Once you select one of these categories, you’ll find yet another collection of categories, you can select one of them or simply enter the command you’re interested in learning about into the search field. Entering shutdown will give you the man page for the shutdown command.

Note: When I first entered the help center and attempted to search for some common commands, the results didn’t include any man pages. Once I browsed through some of the available man pages, the search results began including manuals. YMMV.

Fedora works much the same way, within Gnome you select System > Help. You’ll have fewer categories, but the command line help is there. I’ve found that browsing the command line help works perfectly, however I usually prefer to just search for what I want. Here is where Fedora has some issues. Entering shutdown into the search field results in the help center displaying a link to the man page, clicking on that link gives nothing more than an error about an invalid uniform resource identifier. My Google-fu might be lacking today, I just can’t locate any fixes for it.

If you’d rather not read your man pages via the terminal, this is the graphical way to get it done.

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