Fedora:

rpm -ql firefox

This query will give you a lot of information (you might want to pipe it to less). What you want to zero in on is the directory that is referenced most, on my system it’s /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.9/. You’ll notice a lot of references to /usr/share/ and can pretty much ignore them. That directory holds icons, .desktop files and other shared objects.

I did the same for SeaMonkey (rpm -ql seamonkey), the install location for the current version of the monkey is /usr/lib/seamonkey-1.0.7/.

Ubuntu:

dpkg -L firefox

That’s another command that will hand you TONS of information. Again, I only care about the installation directory, I know from using Ubuntu that the standard application install location is /usr/lib/[installdir]. So to clean up the output, I used grep to filter out the data I don’t need (you could do the same on the Fedora example above).

dpkg -L firefox |grep /usr/lib

That gave me something that looked like:

/usr/lib
/usr/lib/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox/libgfxpsshar.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgkgfx.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgtkembedmoz.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgtkxtbin.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libjsj.so
[snip]

From that I can see that Ubuntu installs Firefox to /usr/lib/firefox.

I also use SeaMonkey on Ubuntu, but I had to manually install it. For that reason, dpkg has no clue as to where the software is. I chose to install it to /usr/local/seamonkey, which is the location that the SeaMonkey installer suggests. I just keep that in the back of my mind or I could enter a locate seamonkey. That will return a lot of hits as well and will look something like:

/usr/bin/seamonkey
/usr/local/seamonkey
/usr/local/seamonkey/install.log
/usr/local/seamonkey/registry
/usr/local/seamonkey/libplds4.so
/usr/local/seamonkey/libxpcom.so
/usr/local/seamonkey/libmozz.so
[snip]

Now that I know where my browsers are installed to, I can run the Flash installer and give it the correct path to each browser when asked.

What I wanted was a second (or third) gmail account that I could use just for the WFTL-LUG, and I wanted to be able to manage it in Thunderbird from two locations; work and home. Since there’s no IMAP for gmail, and I’m personally not ready to run an IMAP server on my own, I decided to enable POP on the account, grab the mail, and store it locally. This was a great idea until I remembered that once the email was downloaded into one mail client, the second client wouldn’t see those messages and they wouldn’t be downloaded. Well, this wasn’t going to work, I would either have to use one client, or worry about having some mail in one location and some in another. I can’t be the only one that has this problem. I googled for a solution and came up with “recent mode”. It works like this; you change the username (I did it on both mail clients, but one should have been enough) to recent:username@gmail.com. This retrieves all messages received in the last thirty days whether it’s been collected by another POP client or not. The exact wording for it is here.

Now I only need to worry about marking messages/threads read when I get home. Just thought I’d share as it saved me a headache

Firstly, I powered up the router and performed a hard reset (hold the reset button down for 30 seconds). This just ensures that the router is using its factory default configuration. I then unplugged my Ubuntu Edgy machine from the old router and connected it to the WRT54GL. I reconfigured my network interface from a static address to DHCP and renewed my IP. I did this from the command line so it looked like sudo ifdown eth0 ; sudo ifup eth0.

The firmware installation is done from the router’s web based administration panel, so using Firefox 2.0.0.1 I logged in and navigated to the firmware upload administration tab. I used the browse button to locate dd-wrt.v23_generic.bin (which I had downloaded and extracted when I ordered the router) and clicked upgrade. After a few moments, I received a page telling me that the upload was successful and I walked away from the whole project for 5 minutes (as the wiki instructed me to. I wanted a beer anyway).

Time passes…

Back at the keyboard now, I click the Continue button and I’m presented with a white page and some fields asking for my username and password. I close Firefox, perform another hard reset of the router, open Firefox again and enter the address of router. Just like magic, I’m presented with the DD-WRT configuration pages of the router. Success!

Since it’s late and I just want to get things working, I’m only doing the basics, setting up static DHCP and a new wireless SSID.

Step one, change the default password from “admin” to something much, much better. Next, I collect all of the MAC addresses from the machines on my network and make my way to the Administration/Services tab. There, I assigned the MAC addresses to host names/IP addresses and configured my LAN domain name (just something I like to play with). I started testing DCHP by connecting to each of the Linux machines, changing them from a static to a DHCP configuration and renewing the IP address (same commands as above). Flawless! With the Linux machines done I configure the rest of the machines on the network the same way.

Next, I create a new wireless SSID and configure my two wireless machines to associate with it. This is where I had a little trouble. Everything but the Ubuntu install on the laptop connected without issue. For whatever reason I just can’t get the bcm4306 based wireless card to associate with the router using manually configured NDISwrapper. I’ll revisit this when I’m not so tired

Update: I think I have this fixed, I’ll tell you how in another post

I know I said I was only doing the basics, but I had to try SSH. So back to the Services tab, I enable SSH management (and disable Telnet as I’ll never use it) and click the Reboot Router button. Next, I open a terminal session and enter ssh dd-wrt. I log in with my user/pass and I’m at an ASH shell prompt. The output from a uname -r reads like Linux DDWRT 2.4.34-pre2 #170 Fri Sep 15 20:10:21 CEST 2006 mips unknown. Pretty sexy

All in all it was a satisfying experience. I’m running Linux on my router and there’s a LOT of cool things I can do. I haven’t scratched the surface yet, I’ll be exploring options for a while and when I come across something sweet I’ll post about it here. If you’re at all interested in exploring DD-WRT, start by checking out the compatibility list and reading up on the features. The wiki is a great place to start. I had no trouble ordering a 100% compatible router for around $55.00 US (there was a rebate).

If you’re new to Linux and don’t want to have to manage your router from a command shell, no worries. The web configuration pages are extremely useful and cover the full configuration of the router in a point and click fashion. You just can’t go wrong