Utah Open Source Planet

I have updated the ’sup’ bash script so that you can see some useful stats about your Linux box at a glance. Here is some output:

  User:         scott (uid:1000)
  Groups:       users dialout video
  Working dir:  /home/scott
  Home dir:     /home/scott
  Hostname:     suse-linux
  IP (lo):      127.0.0.1/8
  IP (lo):      127.0.0.2/8
  IP (eth0):    192.168.12.144/24
  Gateway:      192.168.12.2
  Name Server:  192.168.12.1
  Date:         Wed Jan 21 09:38:57 MST 2009
  Uptime:        9:38am  up 15 days 23:36,  6 users,  load average: 0.22, 0.22, 0.24
  Kernel:       Linux suse-linux 2.6.25.18-0.2-pae #1 SMP 2008-10-21 16:30:26 +0200 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
  Memory:       Total: 2016Mb   Used: 972Mb     Free: 1044Mb
  Swap:         Total: 4102Mb   Used: 150Mb     Free: 3952Mb
  Architecture: i686
  Processor:    0 : Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2160 @ 1.80GHz
  Processor:    1 : Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2160 @ 1.80GHz

I’ve added the processor info and gateway and nameserver info. I’ve commented out some other stuff that will give you your sound card info, video card info, and basically everything you can get with “lspci -v”. That would be why it’s commented out. Anyway, take a look at the new version:

Linux ’sup’ bash script

The Utah Open Source Foundation “Mind Map”

After creating the Fedora Project Mind Map, I was better able to understand how UTOS was currently structured.  I was able to put together the main pieces pretty quickly, although it seems there are several gaps in my thought process still.  For that reason, I’m opening the UTOS structure up as well.  It might not have as many contributors, but I’d like to see the structure grow.

Related Posts

• Mind Maps: The Fedora Project
• Over the last few days
• UTOSC 2008: Day 2
• UTOSC 2008: Day 1
• Writers Block and things that need to get done

Recently, I’ve been plagued with trying to come up with an organizational model for the Utah Open Source Foundation and it’s relationship to the Utah Open Source Conference.  This is in addition to the new Non-Profit structure we’re building.

To that end, I created a very shabby hierarchical structure which I passed around a week ago at the Core Team after conference dinner.  It went over okay, but people had a lot of questions about how the structure was organized and what not.

Organizing My Thoughts is Hard!

I didn’t know what exactly to do.  As it is, I’ve never been an integral part of an organization before like this one.  Nor have I ever created organizational charts that were very well done.  I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.  But, something amazing did happen in the span between last Friday and today, that was VYM, or View Your Mind.

When a “Mind Map” was first suggested to me by my buddy Doran Barton, I thought “well, I’ll look into that later”.  However, the more I kept trying to cram jobs into places they didn’t go, the more I got frustrated that there wasn’t a good application to accommodate the structure I was trying to build.

VYM is an application that helps get your thoughts out onto a structure.  It lets you move it around quickly and easily and even associate pictures and notes where applicable.  The problem for me was understanding how to use VYM in an environment I already knew and UTOS was not the right place!

The Fedora Project “Mind Map”

It turns out that a lot of people always wonder how the Fedora Project is structured, where the pieces go and who, what, where and how the project is put together.  Because I could at least see all the pieces, I decided that would be a good place to start.  While it’s not complete by any means, I present to you the Fedora Project VYM “Mind Map”.  From VYM, one can create pdf, png and other output sources, so I created a pdf as well

Contribute!

I’d like to see the Fedora Community take this up and add many pieces to it as it grows and builds into something more than I could make.  It’s fairly simple to add pieces as well.  You can create separate maps which can be integrated into the larger map.  Or, since the format is a zip file (essentially) with an xml definition file, I believe patches could work.

Cheers,

Herlo

Related Posts

• Mind Maps: The Utah Open Source Foundation
• UTOSC 2008: Day 2
• Writers Block and things that need to get done
• Wait for it… Wait for it… NOW!!
• Utah Open Source Conference 2008

I’ve been throwing hints on Twitter over the last week or two that I’ve been working on this, and with a little extra time I finally got it together. Today I’d like to announce that, as of this moment, we have some really cool new features for Twitter users on SocialToo.com, all in one place!

SocialToo, which is trying to be “Your Companion to the Social Web”, is seeking to build the tools and utilities that compliment your experience on the social networks you belong to. Up until now, anyone could sign up and automatically get the ability to have it follow all those on Twitter that follow you. The script ran once a day, and would do all the work for you, while also enabling you to blacklist users you don’t want it to follow. This enables you to automate, while making exceptions, making management of your friends on Twitter much easier. In addition, by providing Facebook credentials it would redirect “yourusername.socialtoo.com” to your Facebook profile.

Today, I’d like to announce some new features:

• First of all, for those with less than 2,000 followers (this is due to a Twitter limit), we’re now updating your followers up to the hour - as Twitter improves their API I’ll update this to work even more realtime. We’re working with Twitter on getting their API improved to handle this. If you have 2,000 followers or more instead of just once a day, we’re now updating every 6 hours, so even your followers will update faster than before.
• Today, we’re adding the ability to add a message that we’ll send to all your new followers via direct message. This can be a great opportunity to thank your followers, or, as a business account, tell them about a unique promotion you are running. However, if you’re just signing up and aren’t already following those who follow you, we recommend waiting until your account syncs up before turning this on, or all those we follow will get dm’d, even if they’re not new followers. This should only be applicable to new accounts - if you have an existing account, check your preferences and be sure to turn this feature on!
• In addition, if you have a bunch of people who followed you, you followed back, and then they stopped following you (this is the case for many Twitter spammers), we’ve added the ability to turn on a feature that unfollows those that are not following you back. I think it’s who you follow that matters, so my recommendation is to use this feature sparingly, and turn it off when your account is back in sync. You can use it however you want though.
• We’ve got a fresh new design! - okay, I admit, we’re not perfect yet, and were this the golden days I’d say we’re still technically in “beta” (I hate that excuse though), but we got a superstar designer to offer some help on the design for this - thanks so much to our designer!! You know who you are. The new design will come into play much more in the next round of features.
• My favorite feature: follower statistics. Not only are we now tracking those that follow you, but we’re also tracking those that stopped following you. You’ll now get an e-mail every night telling you the followers that stopped following you, and who your new followers are (and consequently who you followed). This is turned off for all existing users - go into your preferences to turn this on and find out details about those you’re following and those who may have unfollowed you (and we’ll soon provide other statistics to help you find out why).

As planned, I think we’re changing the game in making your social experience better all in one place with these tools. You may be familiar with other sites that do similar things out there, but you will quickly find that SocialToo.com is easier to set up, more automated, more accurate, and much less hassle than some of the other services out there.

Oh, and there’s one more really big thing. You’ll have to wait a few weeks to hear our next announcement though. Much more on the way!

You can sign up at http://socialtoo.com (that’s T-O-O, like “tool”, or “also”). Follow us on Twitter at @socialtoo for more updates!

In the next 3 weeks, I will be among the busiest people I know.  Probably the only people busier are Presidential hopefuls, Olympic organizers and sadly, those fighting in Georgia.  The reason I am writing this post is to help me remember what I have left to complete between now and the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 on August 28-30, 2008.

Recently, I learned that our website doesn’t render well in Internet Exploder, Safari and some older versions of Firefox.  I’m guessing its due to the inability I have to create and maintain css, because well, I’m not a design guy.  Because of this, we’re having a hackfest tonight, both at my house, and online.  Feel free to come by at 8:30 and help out.

Prior to the hackfest, I will be working with Fedora Ambassadors to grow the North American region.  We’ll be discussing such things as AmbassadorKit, EventBox and of course, Fedora’s presence at UTOSC 2008.  This meeting tends to get a lot of good people making the world a better place.  I am interested in making this happen starting with North America.  If you are interested in helping out, or just lurking, feel free to drop by #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net at 1:00UTC (9pm EDT).

Prior to the Fedora NA meeting, I’m planning on working on the PCs that we’ll be using for the Utah Open Source Conference.  This will be done over at a friends house, who is loaning the PCs to UTOSC for the week of the conference.

I am attempting to record every presentation this year with either audio or video.  We have been rewarded again this year by having our friends over at KnowledgeBlue come and video record much of the conference, but they don’t have enough staff or equipment to simultaneously record 4-6 rooms.  So the plan went to me to setup recording devices in each room.

The plan is simple setup 6 PCs with Linux, install audacity and darkice.  This way we can stream the keynote audio live over our streaming server and also just record the audio from other presentations to be published at a later date.  I anticipate I’ll be able to install and complete this task pretty quickly.

Well, its now 7:40am here at my desk in my house.  I still have head into the office today for a bit of work, so off I go.  Feel free to come by #utos anytime today and wish me luck (or help if you are so inclined) with anything you can suggest.  Hopefully, today won’t be too long.

Herlo

From the OpenSUSE Newsroom:

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the 1.0 release of the openSUSE Build Service. The 1.0 release provides all the features necessary to support building openSUSE in the public build systems and allowing direct contributions to openSUSE from all contributors. Developers can now submit contributions to openSUSE directly at build.opensuse.org.

The openSUSE Build Service allows developers to create and maintain packages for openSUSE and many other Linux distributions, including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. With the 1.0 release, the openSUSE Build Service expands its scope to building the entire openSUSE release, and provides everyone with the same access and transparent interface to work on the openSUSE distribution.

The openSUSE Build Service has offered a simple collaboration system since its inception for groups to work closely together on packages or solutions stacks. The 1.0 release improves on existing functionality to allow the Build Service to scale to larger projects like openSUSE’s Factory distribution, and to allow building openSUSE’s stable releases in the open.

What the changes mean for contributors:

• Anyone can find a package’s working copy as maintained by the official packager or packaging team. Contributors can submit changes against the working copy.
• The submission handling and notification system has been put in place, allowing any contributor to request a merge of their changes to a project.
• Quality assurance happens before contributions are merged. Test builds of a suggested change are accessible to anyone.
• Improved branch handling. It is easy to set up a branch of a package. The branch will build in the same way as the original package, but can be modified.
• Source handling is improved in 1.0. It’s now possible to easily maintain a branch, and modifications are stored without creating a full copy. This makes it easier to maintain features based on the latest copy of package. The Build Service builds the latest packages, including modifications, automatically.

The majority of this functionality is implemented on the server side. The rest can be implemented by the various Build Service clients, so that contributors can take advantage of the new features.

The Build Service team has also introduced a number of smaller improvements and bugfixes to make the system more scalable and usable.

The openSUSE Build Service is now considered “feature complete” for collaboration. The Build Service team is looking for additional feedback on improving the openSUSE Build Service as it will now be the standard tool for working on the distribution.

While I am working on a post-fudcon report.  Its kind of hard to work when the network continues to drop packets.  Currently, I’m on-site in Los Angeles, teaching a course.  Why, oh why does this happen?

Cheers,

Herlo

My T60p.

[clints@herlo-lap ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
144 svn
144 cd
108 ls
104 ./manage.py
101 ssh
69 su
43 screen
26 vim
25 rm
15 ping

[clints@thor ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
266 git
260 make
71 cd
57 ls
55 vim
55 rt
26 rm
19 bin/send-patch
18 grep
16 bin/validate

I guess I love RCS’.

Cheers,

Herlo

I was perusing today, and maybe its just because its April Fools day and I’ve not posted, but I thought this was pretty hilarious…

If you click to add a new calendar item into Google Calendar, you get a new button “I’m Feeling Lucky”…

After clicking this new button I recognized, here’s what I got:

Woohoo!  So right before the Ubuntu/Fedora Release party on May 3, I have a date with Jessica Alba!  Nice!  I might blow off the release party if the date goes well…

I tried this a few more times and here’s the results I’ve received.  I’ve got dates with:

• Anna Kournikova on May 5 at 4pm
• Eric Cartman on May 10 at 6pm
• George W. Bush on May 6 at 4pm
• Matt Damon on May 8 at 8pm

Wow!  I’m popular.  Who else, what else did you get?

Cheers,

Herlo

So I’ve done it.

Yes, I really have done it this time!

Well, maybe…time will tell.

I’ve gone and posted an idea for a project on the Fedora wiki page for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), but that’s not all, no!

In addition, I took the time to apply to be a mentor at the Google Summer of Code Project page.  And what’s weirder, is I hope I get the opportunity to make this idea a reality, because I think its something that Fedora could really use.

I’m somewhat surprised it hasn’t already been created. A couple of people found this idea too, and have emailed me about it, and I need to reply.  Soon that will happen.

I am really excited.

Cheers,

Herlo

Recently, I’ve been very interested in getting involved more and more with the Fedora Project.  In fact, the latest project in which I’m involved, the Getting Involved Guide (GIG).

I started with this guide because my so-called friend Jared Smith (hi Jared!), introduced me to the original creator of this document, Paul Frields at FUDCon a couple months ago.  I started the hackfest portion, not entirely clear where I’d end up, but somehow I rolled back to hang with Jared and Paul while they were working on this Contributor Guide, if I remember the name correctly.  I got involved late in the day, and either my misunderstanding, or pure genius took over and the Contributor Guide (intended mainly for developers), quickly turned into the Getting Involved Guide or GIG, which had a much broader focus.

While I am happy to be a part of this guide, and have had a hand in changing its purpose, I’m not at all familiar with much of the Fedora Community processes.  Which, for this document to be successful, I am going to have to learn, since that’s the point of this guide to begin with, helping others get started when they want to help the Fedora Project.
Think of it this way, if you are a corporate entity, an individual, or a small non-profit group (like my UTOSF group) and want to give back to the community that has helped you so much.  How do you do that?  What’s involved in getting started?  What projects are out there where we can help?  Do we need to be developers? If not, what else is there for us to do?  Well, those are all good questions, and I am sure there are many, many more we haven’t yet considered.

I guess what I am doing here is soliciting from the general communities at large, what they’d like to see in this guide.  What confused them about joining a large project.  I’d also like to hear stories about being a contributor to the Fedora Project, and why you think its a good idea.  I want to take these ideas and integrate them into the Getting Involved Guide.  I want to take these issues and make it clear for others how to get involved, why its important, and show that value.

Currently, if you are a Fedora Project member, I have a document in gobby.fedoraproject.org called GettingInvolvedGuide, which you are welcome to modify as you feel necessary.  I may also be hitting you up to answer questions regarding particular processes in your group as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

Its been a very long time since I’ve done the Product of the Week, so I am going to change the name to Product of Whenever. This suits me better.

In July of 2001, I was introduced to a little editing tool many of us now know fondly, the wiki. I was travelling to New Zealand looking for work. During my month’s stay, the fellow I traveled with showed me his wiki-wiki. He explained how collaboration could work and the simplicity of the system made it even great for a one person quick web page. Immediately, I was hooked. When I returned from New Zealand and enrolled in school, my mind quickly went back to this funky wiki-editor thing I’d seen. Being a geek even back then, I promptly installed one.

Fast-forward almost 7 years. We’ve seen the wiki evolve from a little app that could be used to make an entire website of information so grand that even the largest collectors of physical data can’t compete. We’ve seen tools like DocuWiki - the documentation wiki, MediaWiki - which needs no introduction and Tomboy - the little desktop wiki. Many other wiki’s emerged to help people collaborate all around the world. How great a time it was…

This article isn’t about wiki’s, rather it is about collaboration. This article is about a different type of collaboration, one that’s more real-time than a wiki can be. In some ways its more limiting and in others, much less. The feature I’m referring to is real-time collaboration. And the tool that enables this, gobby, and its closely related cousins, sobby and obby.

INTRODUCING GOBBY

Gobby is a collaborative text editor, with a bunch of cool features. While gobby is still young and not quite feature-full, its quite amazing what it can do out of the box. The collaboration abilities of gobby come straight out of the box. One can choose to create a session on the local network, or create a server version, with sobby, where everyone can connect to a centralized server to collaborate. I’d like to also point out this application can also run in Windows according to the authors’ website, though I’ve heard rumors that it doesn’t work as I’ve not personally tried.

To get started with gobby, its easily installed:

# yum install gobby
.. snip ...

Once its installed, gobby will easily load from Applications -> Internet -> Gobby Collaborative Editor. Up pops the window we showed you above, albeit a little more bare. The toolbar is the most important piece here.

There are two distinct features here, plus the ability of a regular text editor. On the left, are the connection buttons, one can join or create a session. On the right hand side, are user and document lists, and a chat button. The left hand side controls how to connect, the right controls once you are connected. Of course, the middle does have tools of a normal editor.

Clicking the Create session button provides this dialog, allowing for a local session to be created and maintained.

This session can be just one person, but is definitely better with at least two. Notice that you’ll need to pick a colour. This feature is what makes it easy to tell who’s edited what parts of every document in gobby.

The other option is to join a session. Joining a session also lists any local sessions currently available.

Once the session is created and/or joined, its just a matter of using gobby like an editor. The fun part about gobby though, is when the collaboration begins. When working on a document, others can work on it as well, at the same time. Which can be confusing, and troublesome the first time you play with this tool. Give it some time and you’ll be hooked.

In addition to creating an obby session with the gobby application, its also possible to create a persistent connection with the sobby server. Unfortunately, sobby doesn’t have features that let it run as a SYSV service, but it is possible to get a server up and running quite easily even still. The organization I run, UTOSF, has one currently up and running at gobby.utos.org. If you want to join up, please let me know and we’ll get you connected.

Take the time to get to know this awesome collaboration tool, and start working with your friends who code, or document or even just for simple brainstorming sessions.  The possibilities are endless.

Cheers,

Herlo

I will be home for the entire week next week, which is the first time that’s happened this month. Not that I am complaining, but once I get home I have a very long laundry list of items to complete and only 6.5 days to complete it in until I go back on the road. So here’s the short list:

• Generic stuff that can be done anytime during the week
  • Laundry from the past week
  • Put my bed together at my new home - I have been in this house now for two months, still no real bed
  • Finish unpacking all of the boxes left under the stairs - working on not being a packrat so much of the stuff is bound to get tossed out
  • Put an ad in the paper for a roommate - save money this way
  • Work on the Fedora GI Guide
• CodeAway Saturday from noon to 6pm - good times
• UTOSF HackNight Saturday night, 7pm - more good times (gotta get call for papers out)
• Sleep in all day Sunday - my only real day of rest, but that’s the life I lead, this may lead a little into Monday as well
• BoardGames on Tuesday night with friends I’ve not seen for a couple months - that’ll be nice
• Lunch with my friend Tristan on Wednesday afternoon
• Two meetings Wednesday night at Applebees in Draper
  • Centralized Calendaring among multiple communities - 6p
  • UTOSC Planning Meeting - 8p
• Two events as well on Thursday I’d like to attend
  • CTO Breakfast Thursday morning would be worthwhile, we’ll see if I make it down there
  • Geek/Blogger Dinner on Thursday night
• Friday will bring something, but currently, there’s nothing. Maybe I’ll try to keep it free.
• Oh, and I still have to work on Thursday and Friday, so I guess I’ll work that in somehow as well

Whew! I’m excited to be home though, and am sure this list will grow!

Cheers,

Herlo

Just left Jono Bacon’s presentation on “The future of the Linux Desktop”. He’s quite an awesome presenter. Afterward, I went down to the exhibit floor and got to say hi to Tom Callaway and actually met Thomas Chung from the Fedora Project. Both of these guys have such exuberance and joy, I love being part of the fedora project.

The next presentation was ‘ifdown -a Now! Becoming productive offline’, by Don Marti. It was awesome! He spent a bit of time talking about git, ikiwiki, blosxom, OfflineIMAP, Mairix and some ssh config rules to help productivity. There is some definite things that will help me become more productive with these tools.

The next presentation I attended was the video codecs presentation, but what was being discussed was stuff I’d already learned. So I headed over to ‘10 Years of GNOME’, with Ken VanDine (also the creator of Foresight Linux). GNOME features are definitely getting cooler, and discussions about Gimmie and the OpenSuse SLAB menu were held. Ken wants to see more involvement in the GNOME project, called GNOME Love. If you love GNOME, they’re making it easy to share the GNOME Love.

I was able to catch the last half of the Second Life presentation as its always been a curiosity to me.  I’m thinking of actually running it and seeing what its all about.  Thanks Liana!

At the end of the day, I skipped the reception in favor of a spirited talk with the folks from BakBone, then spent time talking with the organizers of SCaLE and was able to chat with the developer for the conference management system here.  Looks like they’re open sourcing there django app too, so we might be able to work with them too.

Tom Callaway was in the Fedora BoF, so I was required to go by that at 8pm and annoy him.  Turned out, I spent the next 3+ hours discussing everything from PulseAudio, RPMS, RHCE and PackageKit to Obama, Iraq and Ron Paul and the value system of patents in our nation.  It was a great evening.

Its time to sleep and another day of SCaLE will be upon us.  See you all then…

Cheers,

Herlo

UPDATE!

A quick update for those who are planning on attending tonight’s UTOSF HackNight. Its been moved to Guru Labs in Bountiful. If you still need a ride, feel free to email me, herlo1@gmail or you can twitter me at http://twitter.com/herlo.

If you still need a ride up, we’ll carpool/caravan up from my place @6:30 (instead of 7pm) in Murray. I’ll be leaving promptly at 6:30, however. If you’ve never been to Guru Labs, here’s a map.

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

Cheers,

Herlo

This little machine is pretty nice. I’m getting used to the interface right now as the keyboard is a bit smaller than my normal T60p. A few keys are in a different spot, but overall, this little machine rocks!!

Probably my biggest headache right now is the right Shift key is further over than I regularly expect it to be. Have a look at the specs:


# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 630.081
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe up bts
bogomips : 1261.18
clflush size : 64

# cat /etc/*release
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)


I’m hoping to take this over to FUDCon later today and help get it more solid for F9.

Pictures to come.

Cheers,

Herlo

Hi all,

While at work today, setting up test environments for Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10), I needed to check something with the ubuntu.com DNS entries. So I ran the following:

# dig -t ns ubuntu.com

And got something very interesting and entertaining. Can you see what it was? Yes, the mythic-beasts are definitely alive and well within Ubuntu! Now that you are having fun, try these commands immediately afterward:

# dig -t ns mythic-beasts.com

And

# whois mythic-beasts.com

Note the other nameservers. Quite an entertaining 5-10 minutes of your life.

Enjoy,

Herlo

Wow, I’m excited by the response, and while I still believe that openSUSE is not the distro for me, it definitely has grown on me. I believe on my last review, I might have been a bit hasty in stating that just about everything was useless. And while I do have a few more complaints about this distribution, getting settled in might have been all it takes to shake of the pure hatred I recently expressed.

Much of my response has been in fact aimed at my personal opinions of certain features, and while a few of the failures I noted were indeed things that bugged me, they were personal preference and thus, I will be revising my scoring system a little. In fact, how I will award points will not so much be based upon personal preference unless its completely unbearable to me. And to that end, I’ll make a new PREFERENCES section, which will not receive scores, but will have things I personally like or dislike.

In addition, I so appreciate all of the comments I’ve received, many were very helpful in pointing out errors in my representation of openSUSE. Others were part of the reason I decided to change the scoring a bit. And even others I’d like to take the time to reply:

First, to my friend Heartsbane, thanks for the smartass reply. I should’ve known it was coming!

Sontek pointed out that there were bugs in the iwlwifi driver when 10.3 was released. While I agree with not releasing something before its ready, I find it interesting that 2 months after its release openSUSE doesn’t have iwlwifi drivers available in their updates. Why is this? Did I miss them somewhere? My problems with the ipw3945 are more to the fact that it never seems to work with the WPA PSK setup I have at home/work. The iwlwifi driver has less issues with this specific problem.

apokryphos had several comments, and I will address a few of them.

1. The 1-click-install feature is to help reduce much of the repo setup and installation that used to be a long drawn out process has been reduced to 1 click. While I agree that this is a major improvement, it is such a misnomer to call it a 1-click-install when it clearly isn’t. I only suggest we rename the process as someone coming from another world to Linux who find openSUSE may be disappointed when a 1-click-install indeed requires more like 7 clicks.
2. zypper shows what will be installed was another response I received contrary to what I saw. He asked me for an example, and in return I would suggest that indeed it does tell you what will be installed, but only after you agree to install the extra dependencies. Please provide me a command/option that shows me the dependencies prior to my agreement to install the package(s).
3. The root prompt was another failure on my end, however. Mostly, I have it ingrained in my head to look for the “root” part in the prompt. The entire prompt indeed turns red as suggested, this is something I just have to get used to, or change to my preference I guess. I do still think the prompt is ugly, but its growing on me. Others mentioned this as well, thanks for pointing out this to me.

Another, which I received from Ani and lejocelyn (as well as apokryphos), was in regard to my complaint about the Windows-like look and feel. First off, its not a cop-out and secondly, it does look like Windows. Where is the multiple-workspaces? Isn’t that a big plus, I had to add them and enable the panel object. What about this “control center”, feels a lot like Windows “control panel” to me. There is much more I think, and it also might be somewhat because I’m a GNOME user. But like I said, if I wanted it to look like Windows, I would just run Windows.

Ani also pointed out that some of my complaints about the lack of horizontal bars were because of the wasted space, especially with the new widescreen displays coming out. In retrospect, I agree that its useful to only have one bar on widescreen displays or because it takes up so much space. The “one glance” aspect I get from my status bars sure helps me, however, so I’ll define this as just a preference.

benji.weber@gmail.com pointed out his installation time was much shorter than mine. I’m not sure how he got this, but I installed from DVD offline so maybe its a bit related. He also mentioned that there are many more users testing KDE over GNOME. I suppose this might be the case for openSUSE, but overall, I think that number is pretty evenly split between the two major desktops.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments, I really appreciate the contrasting views and look forward to the next round of comments.

As I didn’t use openSUSE as much yesterday and today, so I have a little less to report:

GOOD

• YaST is growing on me, but I’m still adjusting to living in this world. Its still not my favorite tool (0)
• Suspend works like a charm. Although this also works in Fedora. (+1)

Positive Score: +1

BAD

• The YaST printer tool does not deliver reliable results when setting up printers. YaST discovered my printer, but failed to deliver the correct IP address (-1)
• My bluetooth mouse is still not working, even after following several good tutorials I found online. As per this tutorial from Andrew Jorgensen, I already have the bluez-gnome and bluez-utils from the GNOME Community repository installed. Not sure why, but it looks this one will have to wait for an update, whenever that occurs. (0)
• Enabling the fingerprint reader only asks me for files. I thought that was odd, clicking on the help indicates that providing files from another installation that uses the fingerprint reader will set it up. I didn’t see a way to set this up from scratch with openSUSE in YaST, however. (-1)

Negative Score: -2

Total Score for the last two days: -1 (not bad for day two, you never know, I might actually give a positive score by the end…)

Overall score: -6

PREFERENCES

• I still prefer the system-config-* tools from Fedora over YaST. I don’t like its interface and it still seems to be unfriendly. I do think that its much improved over the original YaST I used back in SUSE 10.0

Its been a little couple weeks since I posted anything useful in my Program of the Week (POW) series. And while I still plan to keep that up in the near future, I am going to be doing a new series, Distro Comparisons, with Flare!

My plan is to install the other two major distros of Linux (OpenSUSE and Ubuntu) and compare them with Fedora, my favorite distribution. I’ll be comparing them on installation, features, tools and any other thing that I regularly use in my day-to-day life. Once the distros are all installed (in a triple-boot, no less), I’ll be keeping each one for a week at a time over the next few months.

Over each week, I’ll write down things that are awesome, good, bearable, or just plain bug me, and each will get a score. To be fair, I’ll make sure to rank them with a maximum of +5 and a minimum of -5. Its possible that a negative score can happen, but I expect that this will not be the case for any of the distros.

Anyway, wish me luck on my triple-boot installs and my future blogging with these comparisons. I also hope this will enlighten others about the options available in each of the distros and encourage the developers to continue to improve the usability and functionality of their particular distribution.

Tonight, I’ll be installing and setting up OpenSUSE 10.3 and running it for the next week. During the holidays, I’ll be taking a bit of a break, so blogging might be a bit slower. In early January, I’ll install Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) as well. See you all on the flip side.

Cheers,

Herlo

The charter of the Utah Open Source Foundation is to help Open Source grow in Utah. As part of this charter, we focus on the local community and especially the User Groups.

Because of this goal, we’ve been working hard to come up with some simple, yet effective ideas to help the User Groups overall. Just recently, myself and Will Smith (undertakingyou) were discussing the LugBin. The idea is simply just a big plastic bin with good stuff that User Groups might need or want. In fact, we think it might be a good idea to get others involved so we’re asking for help.

If you would take a few minutes after you read this to visit our wiki page for the LugBin and give suggestions for what would be useful inside. Keep in mind that User Groups may be about operating systems, programming languages, business organizations, or anybody that just wants to get together and talk about any Free/Libre Open Source (F/LOSS) software.

Thank you for your input. We really appreciate every comment/suggestion.

Cheers,

Herlo

Let me get this out first, I’m a avid fan of all things Mozilla. Even with the limitations they cause, the problems I’ve heard about Firefox and Thunderbird and all that Jazz, I’m still a big fan, current and future consumer of these wonderful applications.

BUT!

Why is it that a bug that has been logged for some time can go so long without being fixed. It sure seems like a very simple fix, but no, its still broken.

What, you ask, am I talking about? Well, its this bug on mozilla’s bugzilla that’s bugging me. While its not a major bug, its annoying and causes me heartache every time I look into my /tmp directory.

The problem is that as Thunderbird creates and moves data around when using a filter rule. It creates temporary files which is all fine and good, but the problem is the code is broken that removes the temporary files. My /tmp directory just fills and fills with these useless little files. It’s driving me insane. Every time I go into the directory to look at something, I’m bombarded with files that are named tmprules-##.dat , where the ## is a number.

Have a look into the directory:

$ ls /tmp/tmprules*.dat | wc -l
492


Why do we need to have 492 files in there? I don’t even have 492 messages I read each day. Come on Mozilla Foundation, take a few minutes and fix this annoying little bug that’s been hanging around since this March!

Cheers,

Herlo

An interesting tool I came across in the last week or so is this week’s Program of the Week: Agave, from the GNOME Community. Recently, we’ve been working on a new logo for the Utah Open Source Foundation, and needed to come up with some simple color schemes that would work well with our logo. In doing so, I came across Agave and started playing with possible combinations of colors we could use.

This tutorial will cover some of the simple, but effective features Agave provides to help provide a good contrast in designing logos, websites and more.

To install Agave, I simply did the following:

# yum -y install agave
.. snip ..
Installed: agave.i386 0:0.4.2-5.fc8
Dependency Installed: gconfmm26.i386 0:2.20.0-1.fc8
Complete!


Once Agave is installed, it is immediately available from the main Applications -> Graphics menu in GNOME. If you use a different desktop, its possible to type agave at the command line. Agave starts up similar to this screenshot:

As is shown above, its simple to see that the three colors here would go nicely together, maybe a bit bright for a website, but not too bad for a logo maybe. In our logo, however, we didn’t want such bright colors, plus we wanted to base it on a color that already existed in our already established brand logo seen below:

This logo is well known in our community, and thus we wanted to make sure to keep the look and feel as our org morphs into its true form. Out game GIMP and with the color picker tool, I obtained the bluish color needed for contrast. Agave only needs the value to give several different options through its several available views. The first view shown is the triads view, in other words, a scheme with three colors that fit well together:

yields the triad

But the real power of Agave is in this section of the application:

The color picker provides for easy to choose colors on the left.

On the right hand side, is the color scheme chooser which allows 6 different choices; Complements, Split-Complements, Triads (3 colors), Tetrads (4 colors), Analagous and Monochromatic. In addition, on the toolbar near the top, is another feature that allows random color schemes to be chosen.

When we’ve finished our site and logo, I’ll update this article with the results.

Try out Agave today and maybe even paint your house using its recommendations!

Cheers,

Herlo

This week’s program may seem like a bit of a cop out, but it really isn’t. I’ve regularly found myself in need of some quick passwords to hand out to users that are both semi-secure and easy to remember. With apg, this can become a reality.

First, install apg:

# yum install apg
.. snip ..
Install      1 Package(s)
.. snip ..
Total download size: 101 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
.. snip ..
Installed: apg.i386 0:2.3.0b-5.fc8
Complete!

apg does provide several switches which help to provide an easy way to distribute passwords. Recently, I generated random, yet pronounceable passwords for about 30 users of an application I was using. it was quite nice to let the users login and feel safe with my choices of passwords.

To start with apg is quite easy to generate a set of passwords:

$ apg
NatnawmIx
GhisImAv*
Bahiwaihet
adMuhevep
Ombachat
cier]bipt

These passwords are the default set from apg, providing six pronounceable, 8-10 digit, In my opinion, its better to lose a bit of security to make a password easy to remember, than to have a user have to write the password down, more or less defeating the purpose of the password in the first place.

Because of my opinion, (and no, I’m not a security expert by any means, just using common sense), its probably a good idea to have a look at some of the switches provided by apg:

-a : 0 (default) will make the passwords semi-pronounceable, 1 on the other hand, will be pseudo-random

-n : tell apg how many passwords to display

-m/-x : the minimum/maximum length of the generated passwords

Here’s an example of these options in use:

$ apg -a 1 -n 2 -m 7 -x 10

apg has more to give us though. We can use some standard Linux password checking utilities to help us:

-r : checks the generated passwords against a particular dictionary file.  /usr/share/dict/words, for example.

Adding this to our previous example (and removing the -a option) will verify the password doesn’t have any dictionary words:

$ apg -r /usr/share/dict/words -n 2 -m 7 -x 10

The last component is -M mode, which can request/require that a password has a particular set of attributes. Its a bit more complex than the others above. The mode consists of eight letters, S, N, C and L, in both upper and lower case.

S :  must use special symbol set for every generated password.
s :  should use special symbol set for password generation.

N : must use numeral symbol set for every generated password.
n : should use numeral symbol set for password generation.

C : must use capital symbol set for every generated password.
c : should use capital symbol set for password generation.

L : must use small letters symbol set for every generated password (always present if pronounceable  password generation algorithm is used).
l  : should use small letters symbol set for password generation.

As you might be able to tell, the list above is almost directly from the man page for apg. This is on purpose as it is very well explained (and recommended to read each and every man page for any tool used). Many a good trick has come directly from the man pages.

Let’s see these options in use:

$ apg -n 2 -m 7 -x 10 -M SCnL
Hej=Nio
nefMit/

What is noted right away during several iterations of these modes is the fact that rarely, if ever, is a number included. It seems the lowercase modes are not strong suggestions except in the case of “lower case letters”. However, using the uppercase mode values works every time as expected.

apg is a simple, yet effective tool for generating passwords. My hope is that you decide to use more secure passwords in the future with tools like apg.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tonight at the Ubuntu Utah User Group I presented about Locate vs Find.

The slides are here and written in S5.

Kevin Kubasik also presented on Desktop Search in Gnome. It was pretty cool as well.

The presentations went very well and was streamed and recorded by Utah Open Source Foundation.

The POW is going to be the improvements made in the Bluetooth functionality in Fedora 8. I’m actually quite impressed with it as its been a bit of a challenge to keep my little mouse connected in the past.

Fedora 8 provides a new extended technology with its bluez-gnome package. In fact, the simplicity of it is that I only have to be able to click and approve a new device.

When I first turn on my bluetooth mouse and start to move it around, it doesn’t work, but up in the top right hand corner of my GNOME desktop is the bluetooth manager. It has a message for me:

The message indicates a click to authorize the device, namely the bluetooth mouse. (One note here, I was originally unable to use my touchpad, so I had to resort to other tactics [not pretty] to enable my mouse. Probably ought to have some other options available instead of clicking.)

Clicking on the notification window above brings me to an authorization window.

At this point, authorization is quite simple. Click yes for a one time authorization of the mouse (Note the Bluetooth Travel Mouse indicated in the description), and to authorize it more permanently, choose Always Grant Access.

That’s it. My Bluetooth mouse is now enabled and working. I’d say this is much friendlier than what I used to have to do, including running hidd –connect <bluetooth id> after pressing the little connect button on the bottom of the mouse. This is sure nice now!

Its possible, that at some point, disconnecting the device might be necessary. To do this, right-click on the nice little Bluetooth logo at the top right of your screen.

Choose Preferences. Up pops the Bluetooth Preferences window. From this window, three tabs are available. In the first (and also selected) tab, there is a section at the bottom of the window which lists the devices that are currently bonded and/or trusted. Choose the device from the list and then the appropriate action. The choices are Disconnect, Trust or Delete.

In addition to just configuring your devices, it appears it might be possible to do things like Bluetooth DUN with a Treo, or enable data synchronization between laptops. One thing I’ve always wanted to try is to get my bluetooth headset working so I could do Skype or Asterisk phone calls through my headset, to my computer and out through the service.

Cheers,

Herlo

Recently, there was a request in one of my comments on this post. The request was for an easy way to upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8. So I took this on as a bit of a challenge. I feel pretty comfortable with yum and I thought it would be a good and easy task.

A bit of warning here, make sure your current Moonshine ( Fedora 7 ) release is update by running yum update. Also, it is recommended that backups be made of files being modified. If you don’t backup the file, it may be impossible to fix in the future. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Let’s upgrade Moonshine ( Fedora 7 ) to Werewolf ( Fedora 8 ) in three easy steps:

First things first, lets print out some version info:

$ cat /etc/*release
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)

$ uname -r
2.6.23.1-21.fc7

Its easy to tell that this machine is indeed using Moonshine ( Fedora 7 ), so let’s upgrade!

Step 1 - Modify the yum repo files

Located in /etc/yum.repos.d directory are where the yum repository files are stored. We need to modify one line so that yum will know where to look:

$ su -
# vim /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo

Find the first line that starts:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch

and change it:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=$basearch

What changed? Well, the $releasever value is the current value for our version of fedora, in this case 7. By changing it to 8, it’ll load the correct repositories for Werewolf (F8) instead of Moonshine (F7). Save the file, and now we’re ready to move onto the next step.

Step 1 (Alternate)

Since posting this, I’ve learned that another option is available. To update the repositories, its possible to install an rpm to accomplish the same as above and it won’t require Step 3.

Choose your mirror from http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org. I picked University of Oregon’s site because it was close to me.

# rpm -Uvh \
ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-*.rpm

Your ftp/http line here may be different, that is fine. This command installs the updated repositories for Werewolf ( Fedora 8 )

Step 2 - Upgrade

In this step, we just need to run (as root):

# yum update
fedora               100% |===============| 2.1 kB   00:00
primary.sqlite.bz2   100% |===============| 4.9 MB   00:03
Setting up Update Process
Resolving Dependencies
.. snip ..

A few prompts will appear, after the repository data is loaded, a list of several hundred megs (possibly a gigabyte or more) of packages will be ready to install. This is the moment of truth.

Transaction Summary
============================
Install     88 Package(s)
Update     836 Package(s)
Remove       1 Package(s)

Total download size: 1.0 G
Is this ok [y/N]:

Start the download of over 800 packages (in my case) and install and update your system. If you feel a bit of trepidation, I concur. Its still exciting though, isn’t it?

Is this ok [y/N]: y

Now aren’t you excited! In about 30-45 minutes, you’ll have a newly upgraded Werewolf ( Fedora 8 ).

Downloading Packages:
orca-2.20.0.1-1. 100% |=========================| 1.5 MB    00:01
.. snip ..

Step 3 - Cleanup and Reboot

Welcome to your new Werewolf. Treat it wisely. First things first though, we need to clean up our editing from step 1:

# vim /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo

Find the first line that starts:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=$basearch

and change it:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch

Save the file, or if you prefer, copy the backup you made over the modified repo file.

In addition, there are some items that aren’t in Fedora 8 the same way they were in Fedora 7. For these, read this guide. I didn’t have these problems myself, ymmv.

To get the newly updated kernel and all the new goodness of Werewolf, a reboot is necessary. Enjoy your new Lycanthrope on the flip side.

Cheers,

Herlo

While doing my normal reading about new features in Fedora, I came across this snippet in the rsyslogd man page. The section I was reading was in regards to how to deal with security threats.

4.     Disabling inet domain sockets will limit risk to the local machine.

5.     Use  step  4  and  if  the  problem persists and is not secondary to a rogue program/daemon get a 3.5 ft (approx. 1 meter)
       length of sucker rod* and have a chat with the user in question.

       Sucker rod def. — 3/4, 7/8 or 1in. hardened steel rod, male threaded on each end.  Primary use  in  the  oil  industry  in
       Western  North  Dakota  and other locations to pump ’suck’ oil from oil wells.  Secondary uses are for the construction of
       cattle feed lots and for dealing with the occasional recalcitrant or belligerent individual.

Quite a good chuckle!

Cheers,

Herlo

This week’s Program of the Week is a bit ahead of its release. The package is Codec Buddy, and is currently slated for release in Fedora 8 tomorrow.

Codec Buddy, with a little help from the Fedora and Fluendo development teams has grown into something that could be great. I see Codec Buddy really helping those who want to use and play non-free media sources from within Fedora. If you are currently running rawhide, you probably already know about this, but very soon, many other people will start to understand how Codec Buddy works as well.

One of the goals of the Fedora Project is to be free of any proprietary software. Though I don’t see that many people using Fedora without at least a few proprietary components, media codecs, drivers, etc. Maybe one day…we can always hope.

To that end, I am a big media buff. I regularly watch TV shows and movies that use proprietary codecs. As an example, most people don’t realize that using the reverse engineered DVD encoding provided by DVD Jon could be considered illegal. Fedora doesn’t want to be encumbered by these risks, and truthfully, I don’t blame them one bit. Considering that my backlog of mp3s and DVD rips will require an additional bit of software not normally included with Fedora, I think this is a great software solution. Give the user what they want without compromising the integrity of the project.

Codec Buddy is provided to help the average Joe understand the world of media formats. Its job was originally to provide a short description of why Fedora doesn’t include this in its distribution. Then point to where one might find more information about these formats. Codec Buddy has been altered a little, but attempts to accomplish the same thing using the Fluendo website.

Fluendo is the company that employs many of the individuals that work on the gstreamer project. Its quite a noble project, providing media codecs (installable formats) for many of the audio and video we like to use every day. Its great to have open source companies like Fluendo helping open source grow.

Codec Buddy works by launching a small application when someone tries to access a media codec not currently on the system. For instance, I’ve attempted to play a show I’ve downloaded.

Launch Totem

Open the file

Start the video

As the video attempts to play, a prompt appears, indicating the media isn’t supported. Codec buddy then provides a few options to enable playback for this particular media format.

The available items are MP3 Audio Decoder, MPEG Playback Bundle and MPEG4 Part 2 Video Decoder. By default only the MP3 Audio Decoder, which is also the only codec that will be installed without payment, is checked. The other two codecs are available for a small fee, which helps Fluendo to provide these codecs.

Clicking the “Get Selected” button will immediately start the download of the MP3 Audio Decoder (if it was selected).

A license agreement then appears, make sure to read this and if you agree, click Accept.

Once the agreement is complete, its time to purchase the remaining codecs. Choose Start Web Browser and in a few moments, the Fluendo website should appear. This should allow you to purchase the remaining codecs needed for the video I want to watch.

The Fluendo website has a good list of available codecs beyond the choices available in Codec Buddy.

The purchase will seem similar to many others on the web, add things to the cart, and pay.

Fluendo is a good start. I’m sure there will be many people interested in purchasing these codecs here. However, I believe however, that the biggest problem is that most people can get these codecs for free on Windows, Mac and even other Linux distributions. So far, the thing I feel is missing here is the explanation for why charge for these codecs and who benefits.

Fluendo is a great resource and provides some kick-ass codecs. If there is no explanation as to why we need to pay for something that one can get for free. Potential customers who don’t understand the reasoning behind it might go elsewhere, or worse even, choose another distro or operating system.

I love fedora for the freedom it gives me to choose my path. I love fedora for its focus on making sure things are free and open, both monetarily and in liberty. I love fedora for trying things like Codec Buddy, I want it to succeed. I hope that with a few suggestions, both fedora and Fluendo can make Codec Buddy the informational tool that it was originally intended.

Cheers,

Herlo

The second in the Program of the Week (POW) is here.

Yum, the Yellowdog Updater Modifer, has a very interesting feature. One which you might find useful if you want to install an entire set of packages for say a new “Windows File Server”.

Yum provides this feature right out of the box these days, and its quite a nice feature. SUSE 10.1 has rug which is a very similar feature, called bundles. I would guess that Ubuntu either already has this feature, or will in the near future.

So how does installation by groups work? Pretty simple really, first we must learn a few new options in yum:

First is “grouplist”. Grouplist will tell you which groups of packages you have installed and which ones haven’t been installed.

$ yum grouplist

Setting up Group Process

Installed Groups:
  Office/Productivity
  Engineering and Scientific
  .. snip ..

Available Groups:
  .. snip ..

  Windows File Server
  .. snip ..

  Development Tools
Done

In my case, you can see that I’ve not yet installed “Windows File Server”. Interestingly enough, I’m not sure what’s in that group of packages, so its time to check:

$ yum groupinfo "Windows File Server"
Setting up Group Process

Group: Windows File Server
 Description: This package group allows you to share files
 between Linux and MS Windows(tm) systems.

 Mandatory Packages:
   samba
   samba-client
 Default Packages:
   system-config-samba

Wow, quite a few packages, there’s also some good information here. We now know that there are 10 optional packages and 1 conditional package that can be installed. To get the details on any of these packages, yum can tell us:

$ yum info samba
  .. snip ..

Available Packages
Name   : samba
Arch   : i386
Version: 3.0.26a
Release: 0.fc7
Size   : 3.1 M
Repo   : updates
Summary: The Samba Suite of programs
Description:Samba is the suite of programs by which a lot of
PC-related machines share files, printers, and other
information (such as lists of available files and printers).
The Windows NT, OS/2, and Linux operating systems support
this natively, and add-on packages can enable the same thing
for DOS, Windows, VMS, UNIX of all kinds, MVS,
and more..

Yum informs us that the “samba” package is useful for setting up file sharing between Windows and Linux. Other packages from the list above will also be installed so we’ll get to play with some of those as well. If desired, ‘yum info’ can be run for each of the packages found in the grouplist. However, for us, lets move on and install the group of packages:

$ su -# yum groupinstall "Windows File Server"
.. snip ..

============================================================
Package               Arch    Version        Repo      Size
============================================================
Installing:
system-config-samba   noarch  1.2.52-1.fc7   updates  287 k
Installing for dependencies:
samba                 i386    3.0.26a-0.fc7  updates  3.1 M
Transaction Summary
============================================================
Install      2 Package(s)
Update       0 Package(s)
Remove       0 Package(s)

Total download size: 3.4 M
Is this ok [y/N]:

At this point, we need to choose whether we’re going to install the 2 packages that will enable samba for us. Hitting enter will answer no, so we need to type a ‘y’ and hit enter. The packages are then downloaded, and installed:

Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
(1/2): system-config-samb 100% |=============| 287 kB  00:00
(2/2): samba-3.0.26a-0.fc 100% |=============| 3.1 MB  00:02
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: samba                 ################## [1/2]
Installing: system-config-samba   ################## [2/2]
Installed: system-config-samba.noarch 0:1.2.52-1.fc7
Dependency Installed: samba.i386 0:3.0.26a-0.fc7
Complete!

As you can see, its pretty nice to be able to install a group of packages together, letting yum do the work to figure out the details. In another article in the near future, I’ll cover how we create these relationships and build a back end yum server from the ground up.

Cheers,

Herlo

In an attempt to consistently blog, I am starting a new series here on fedora-tutorials.com. Program of the Week (POW). Hopefully, this will excite and inform all of us about the cool programs available in Fedora. So see you next Wednesday for another program.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been on the hunt for several things that I find in other Linux distros that I cannot find in Fedora. Its not very common, but on occasion I do run into something that’s not there on Fedora. One of them was the ability to automagically complete many of the command lines for many things.

One of them, and probably one of the biggest, was the fact that yum did not have tab completion for available packages. Today is my lucky day! While chatting and helping my students with their labs today, one of them mentioned to me that he could tab complete a particular command on his box. I of course inquired, because it interested me, as to the package name. It turns out my bash tab completion dreams were just about to come true! He told me about this amazing package that would let me use tab completions for things like the service command, man and of course, yum.

I was blown away! So immediately after this discussion, I started searching for this elusive package I’ve never heard of before. Sure enough, as he informed me, bash-completion does exist and does some amazing things. After hunting around a little on google, here’s some of the stuff I found. I’ll also include the links at the bottom of this post.

as root try this: (note [Tab] means you should hit the tab key)

# service ht[Tab]

What you’ll notice is that one of three things happen. If you’ve got the bash-completion package installed already because you’re ahead of the game, it should auto-complete for you. Without bash-completion, this doesn’t happen, but its also possible that since bash already has some completion in place, it might auto complete a directory for you, but that’s definitely not what you want.

If you’ve not already installed bash-completion, I’d suggest you do it now. On Fedora 7, run the following command:

# yum install -y bash-completion
..snip..
Installed: bash-completion.noarch 0:20060301-3.fc7
Complete!

Now that bash-completion is installed, we need to invoke the tools. Normally, this is not needed, and a reboot/re-login will take care of this as well, but since I wanted to use this right away, I did the following as an unprivileged user:

$ source /etc/bash_completion

This doesn’t seem to do much, but its actually quite powerful. The source (or .) will load the environment variables from the /etc/bash_completion script into my current environment. Luckily for us, when we now log into root, /etc/bashrc will accomplish this for us without any intervention. To test that it worked, try running the following command as the same unprivileged user:

$ unalias[Tab]
.=     ll=     ls=     vi=     which=

Note that when I pressed twice, a list of the currently available aliases appeared. Nice ey? Let’s complete this:

$ unalias w[Tab]

Now produces:

$ unalias which

And completes the string as expected. Now we’re getting somewhere! But why did I really want to explain this?

Oh yeah! yum

With bash-completion, yum can now provide us with a list of available packages, similar to the auto completion capability in apt-get or aptitude from Ubuntu or Debian. Say for instance you want to see all of the packages available for install that match what you’re looking for, but don’t want to run yum list or yum search because, in truth, it just takes to long! Now you have an alternative:

# yum -y install bal[Tab]

Produces:

ballbuster.i386  ballz.i386       balsa.i386

Adding another ‘lb’ to the end of that string (and then the tab key of course) should help us to complete to the package we’d like to install.

# yum -y install  ballb[Tab]

Then completes to:

# yum -y install  ballbuster.i386

Hitting enter then installs the ballbuster package, and its quite a fun game!

.. snip ..
Installed: ballbuster.i386 0:1.0-1.fc6
Dependency Installed: ClanLib.i386 0:0.8.0-4.fc7
Complete!

Of course, there are hundreds of others tab completions available (and there’s a good way to list many of them too, even if its a bit cryptic). Try these on for size:

Are you a developer?

$ svn c[Tab]
cat checkout  ci     cleanup   co     commit    copy    cp
$ make [Tab]
all clean dist-clean

What about a systems administrator?

# modprobe -r b[Tab]
battery    bay        blkcipher  bluetooth  bridge     button

$ man cron[Tab]
cron     crond    crontab

$ ssh herlo[Tab]
herlo-f7   herlo-lap  herlo.org

$ grep --[Tab][Tab]
 --after-context=  --directories=   --invert-match   --only-matching
 --basic-regexp    --exclude=       --label=         --perl-regexp
.. snip ..

To help you wade further through, try out the following two commands:

• complete -p

• declare -f

Be aware that these are advanced components and can really be confusing if you’re not a developer and just want to use the features. The complete command seems to provides some tools to do additional auto-completion. I also think that its nice to be able to extend this functionality to other applications as well.

As promised, here’s a few links to help your completion introduction. Note: Some of these links provide more than just the simple tab completion:

• http://www.caliban.org/bash/index.shtml#completion - The GNU page on bash-completion, still needs more.
• http://www.keyboardcowboy.co.uk/bash-completion/ - Provides some interesting scripts to improve your bash-competions
• http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/316 - An introduction to bash completion: part 1

Yes, that’s right folks. I’m looking for a new image to adorn the top of my blog. I’ve got this pretty new theme (not shown on my site yet) but it needs a fresh new coat of penguin love.

So I thought I’d share with the community and see if anyone could come up with a new image for my blog. The general idea is it has to go with my blog title “Sexy Sexy Penguins”. I’m imagining a few “very attractive” penguins or something related in that way. To help generate some interest in helping me with my sexy penguins search, I might offer a bit of a reward, say $50 to the winner.

To help you in your search, I’m planning on using this theme. There could be slight adjustments, but the image should be in several desirable formats, including banner, screensaver, and a any others that might seem useful. The main reason I am doing this is to motivate myself into blogging more, both for your benefit, but also for mine.

Fedora-Tutorials needs a face lift, help the Sexy Sexy Penguin(s) come to life! Thank you all for enjoying my posts, I plan on providing much more in the near future.

Cheers,

Herlo

One of the coolest new things coming out for Fedora 8, the Gnome Online Desktop! Its an amazing device, provides a simple interface for working with the new web world in which we live.

It reminds me a bit of spotlight for Mac, but this thing has much more. With all of the web integration it has, including google docs, calendar, last.fm, digg and more, you can’t pass up the opportunity to try out this amazing desktop.

I’ve attached an ogg/vorbis screencast of some of my interaction with it in Fedora 8 Test 3. Although it claims to be just a demo, it sure looks good!

onlinedesktop-screencast - 23MB (could take a while)

Cheers,

Herlo

Recently, I’ve been quite overwhelmed with keeping up with my latest ambition, the Utah Open Source Foundation, which has made it a bit difficult to keep up on my blog here. I’ll be doing some updates to this blog soon and you should start seeing regular updates from me here in the very near future.

In the meantime, I’ve got a post that may knock your sock off! If you’ve not yet heard about it, there’s a new transport protocol on the way, and its called Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). Its an amazing new way of looking at the network, providing multi-stream transmissions through one port.

Have you ever thought it would be nice to take three network connections, one ethernet, one fiber and one wireless and bond them?  What about using those three connections to stream video?  Or to manage data on one and have a control connection on another?  TCP/UDP can’t really do this for you without some external elements, but SCTP might just be the thing you’re looking for, and its already here.  Currently in testing, SCTP looks to be a great replacement (augmentation) to the already popular TCP and UDP prototols.

Linux Journal is doing a 3 part series on this protocol which started in last months article: Introduction to Stream Control Transmission Protocol.  This article is a quick look into how this protocol works.  The follow-up, in this month’s issue (not yet available for non-subscribers) talks about how the protocol is implemented in the Linux kernel and even gives some good code references.

I suggest you take a look at SCTP if you’ve not yet heard of it.  I am very excited to see where this protocol could take us in the future.

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Oh joy, I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Fedora 7 on my laptop. I was really nervous because my previous experience upgrading from Fedora Core 5 to FC6 was harrowing at best. Lots of errors and other junk happened back then.

But this…. this –was flawless. So simple, so easy. My grandma could install it its that simple. I was so impressed! So blown away at the improved upgradeability that has been made in Anaconda using yum.

I upgraded using the Fedora 7 DVD. I literally chose upgrade, followed the prompts and a short while later, I was told the installation was complete and to reboot. Being the geek that I am, I poked around while the upgrade was taking place. Nothing looked strange, no errors, nothing. Just a perfect upgrade.

My fears were unfounded. In my previous upgrade, I ran into problems with LVM. No issues here whatsoever. It was just awesome!

I rebooted my machine and waited for the kernel to boot. Here is where I found the first quirk, it tried to boot FC6 and failed. Obviously they need to clean up just a little more, but this was easily remedied by choosing the Fedora 7 boot option from GRuB. And yes, I removed the option from the grub.conf (menu.lst)

Literally 45 seconds later and I was at the login screen. Wow!! That was fast! My boot time in FC6 was over 2 minutes. Fedora 7 cut more than half the time off!

Have you seen the login screen? If not, its very pretty. Here’s a screenshot:

Its just so beautiful! I love the fact that you can interact with the login window (gdm) with your mouse and choose your user. Linux on the desktop is well on its way up and love being a part of the revolution!

What about the other features. Oh, right! Let’s get to them.

After logging in, I was psyched to see that my network card, the Intel ipw3945, worked out of the box. I have never been able to regularly use NetworkManager and nm-applet, but Fedora 7 fixed that too. Boy do I love the simplicity of it all. My networking is now so easy to set up.

Another tool that has been included is the new Pidgin. Previously named GAIM but because of legal pressures from AOL, was forced to change their name. Seems odd I’d be talking about this, but I just thought the logo was cool.

I also like the fact that I can build my own LiveCD without much effort. Try out revisor today, you’ll have your very own LiveCD you can give away, tweaked the way you want.

There are many more features of Fedora 7 available, including Fast User Switching, Dynamic Kernel Ticks, new and improved NetworkManager and Multi-Display hotplugging with the new Xorg Server 1.3.

Have a look around at the new Fedora 7 today and enjoy all that it has to offer…

Cheers,

Herlo

I’ve debated this for some time. How long should it be to be notified of an instant message (IM), or private message (PM), or someone saying your name in internet relay chat (IRC)? I’ve still not answered this question, but I’ve got at least a tool that will help you when irssi receives a message directly to you.

This tool was first described to me here. And I blogged about it in this previous post. The general idea is to set up an irssi script that will write out data to a file. That file, in turn was read by the tail command over ssh and a notification window would appear anytime a new message was sent directly to you.

That capability hasn’t changed. Instead, I’m trying to improve how that is done. In the old way, a persistent ssh connection was needed to tail the file on the remote machine running irssi. This caused headaches and problems; some were easy to deal with, others much harder. I think for the most part, I’ve addressed these issues.

What does the new script do you ask? Well, the perl part from the original hasn’t changed, the other script have changed, however. Its been divided up into two scripts in fact. The original script irssi-script.sh now obtains the flat file written by the irssi perl plugin using a cron job that runs every minute. The new file fnotify.sh will run every 10 seconds and check to see if the flat file has been downloaded. Once it detects a new file, it will display the contents of that file as messages using the notify-send tool.

All of the scripts are available from my svn repository at http://www.herlo.org/fnotify. Please feel free to check it out as its set up for anonymous checkout.

I’ve provided a README and an INSTALL file which should help you get the script set up for you. Please send an email to clints At UToS . OrG or comment here on the blog with any questions and I’ll happily try to help.

Back to my original question. How long should it take? Will you let me know?  Currently, this script can take as long as 1 minute 10 seconds to send notification of a message.  Is this too long?

Thank you,

Herlo

A little over a week and a half ago, I wrote an introduction to rtorrent that covered the basic functionality of rtorrent. This tutorial should have made it easier for those of you out there to use my favorite torrent client.

Because I love rtorrent so much, I thought I’d share a simple way to configure this awesome tool. I’ll also take the time to share a few of the command line options I use from time to time and why I value them as well.

Take a minute to look through the rtorrent man page. Along with some of the interactive keystrokes and functions pointed out in the previous post, you’ll find that there are many options that can actually be passed directly on the command line. Many times its much easier to use a configuration file; in this case, its called .rtorrent.rc and it should be found in your home directory.

In this tutorial, I’ll cover the options one by one that are regularly used. Then, I’ll cover some simply cool advanced configurations that will help you manage your torrent downloads.

---

As you might recall, I run rtorrent within screen. This affords me the ability to access it at will and pretty much run it 24/7. Because of this, I have specific upload and download speed requirements. This is where rtorrent really shines!All of the options covered below must be set after the -o option. The next options I am going to cover are the ones that control the speed of both the upload and the download. These should be pretty self-explanatory:upload_rate=50 — Set the maximum upload rate at 50Kb/s. All active torrents will be cumulatively constrained to this limit.
download_rate=250 — Set the maximum upload rate at 250Kb/s. All active torrents will be cumulatively constrained to this limit.What does this mean for you? Well, if you have 10 torrents uploading to other peers and 5 torrents downloading, the maximum for upload will be 50Kb/s overall and 250Kb/s overall for those downloads. Executing these two options on the command line is easy:$ rtorrent -o upload_rate=50,download_rate=250rtorrent begins and at the bottom, you should see something similar to this:

[Throttle 50/250 KB] [Rate 49.9/ 31.4 KB] [Port: 19814]

Now, this is nice, throttling downloads and uploads overall, but there’s more.

How about setting the directory where all of the downloads will be stored? What about setting port ranges to use? And what about verifying the hash is valid of a partially downloaded file? These are all great things to have, so lets set them in our next rtorrent call:

$ rtorrent -o directory=/data/torrents/current,upload_rate=50,download_rate=250,check_hash=yes,port_range=19340-19400

Now isn’t that great!? Try saving a couple of files with this and see what you get.

Cheers,

Herlo

I’ve been curious lately as to how I could print labels for my Fedora 7 DVDs.  Because I am officially a Fedora Ambassador for Utah, I would like to give out nice looking DVDs with labels on them.  Well, I found a very nice lady who’s put up eps versions of such labels and I plan to take them and print a few for myself and for those I give the DVDs/CDs.  Here’s the link:

http://www.isity.net/blog/?p=60

Enjoy these labels and send me pictures of your DVD happiness.

Cheers,

Herlo

As of 8 AM MDT, Fedora 7 is available!

There are several to choose from so choose wisely. This Fedora is one of the largest undertakings by the Fedora Project. Here are just a few things you’ll get with Fedora 7:

• CD Creation Tools - Build your own custom Fedora CD/DVD with its own rpms and cateogories
• Live CD for both GNOME and KDE - Something cool to give away to somebody who has never tried Linux. Or use it for rescuing a machine.
• KVM Virtualization - A new way to make multiple operating systems run on your box.
• Tickless Kernel - Better power consumption for laptops.
• Extended wireless functionality - My wireless card will work now, yea!!!

There are many more than what are listed here. Go out and get your Fedora 7 today. There are two ways you can get the release, one by internet:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Download — Currently, down. Keep trying!
http://torrent.fedoraproject.org - Currently working.

Or you can come to the release party tonight, where I’ll be demonstrating (hopefully) many of these cool features. You can find that announcement:

http://www.utos.org/2007/05/29/utah-open-source-the-open-source-technology-center-and-fedora-7/

And the map to the event:

http://tinyurl.com/25394b

Hope to see you with your sparkling new Fedora 7 box very soon.

Cheers,

Herlo

Recently, I’ve been asked a few times how to use rtorrent so I thought it time to introduce it to others who might be interested in configuring my favorite bittorrent client.

First off, this is a Fedora tutorial, but much of what you’ll see in this tutorial is applicable to just about any Linux distro.

rtorrent is a ncurses based (meaning text user interface) client for bittorrent downloading. I’ve used bittorrent for a few years now and run a couple trackers of my own as well.

Getting rtorrent is quite simple:

# yum install rtorrent

This provides you the rtorrent binary, some documentation and an sample .rtorrent.rc file which we’ll use later on to make it easier to configure rtorrent to start it’s torrents automatically. So far the file list is about 7, but that’s what makes rtorrent great.

# rpm -ql rtorrent
/usr/bin/rtorrent
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/AUTHORS
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/COPYING
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/INSTALL
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/README
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/TODO
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.6.4/rtorrent.rc.example
/usr/share/man/man1/rtorrent.1.gz

Now that rtorrent is installed, there’s some knowledge your going to need to get it started. Once you’ve played with rtorrent for a while, you’ll feel right at home with all of the keystrokes you are about to learn.

Simply start rtorrent:

$ rtorrent

A screen appears something like this:

I tend to use screen with rtorrent so you may be interested in this as well. screen provides the extra functionality of closing the window and reconnecting to rtorrent at will.

The keystrokes you need to learn will come in two parts. One set for starting the download and one for maintaining the downloads and uploads. Lets start with the former.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - Each of these keys represent a different view inside rtorrent. The views are main, sort by name, started, stopped, complete, incomplete and hashing respectively.

Enter - Will allow you to load a particular torrent into rtorrent. Once you do this, you’ll get the following prompt:

load>

Enter the filename of the torrent you’d like to download. URLs are accepted as well

load> /home/clints/SSS_WIN_2007.01.torrent
load> http://mirrors.xmission.com/softwarefor.org/iso/SSS_WIN_2007.01.torrent

Once you have the torrent loaded, you’ll need to start it up. This requires the up and down arrow keys. Because this part is a little bit tricky, you’ll need to play around with it to get a feel for it. Try just hitting the down arrow, you should see something like this:

Once you’ve selected it, the three vertical * (asterisks) will appear next to your selection. Starting and stopping the torrent can easily be done:

Ctrl-s - Start the torrent
Ctrl-d - Stop the torrent

Once the torrent file is running, it should connect to the appropriate tracker and start the download to the directory where rtorrent was invoked. Now that the torrent is started, its easy to manage using the following keystrokes. Mind you, these are global controls:

a, s, d - Increase the upload speed by 1, 5, 50 Kb/s respectively.
z, x, c - Decrease the upload speed by 1,5,50 Kb/s respectively.
A, S, D - Increase the download speed by 1,5,50 Kb/s respectively.
Z, X, C - Decrease the download by 1,5,50 Kb/s respectively.

In all honesty, this is as simple as it gets, but there’s more you can do. In one of my next posts, I’ll cover the .rtorrent.rc file and some other advanced features of rtorrent. Until then, enjoy the coolest tool for downloading your torrents.

Cheers,

Herlo.

You’ve probably heard of RAID 0, RAID 1, and even RAID 5. But RAID 6?

What is Raid 6 you ask? Well, first we need to take a look at RAID 5 and understand how it works. If you understand RAID 5, then RAID 6 is an easy transition.

RAID 5 is what is referred to as a striped set with distributed parity. Essentially, the data is spread across the disk, and one bit is flipped each time a piece of data is written. This helps the RAID 5 set compute the missing data if one of the drives fails.

RAID 6 extends this concept one further by providing an additional drive for distributing the parity. Essentially, there is one more disk that can fail before data is lost. Comparing this with RAID 5, you get more redundancy. Comparing this with RAID 10 might be something you’d consider as well, but RAID 6 is better if for nothing more than the cost and efficiency.

So how do you configure linux with Software RAID 6? With Fedora Core 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, RAID 6 is easily configured. Here’s how:

Four disk drives are recommended (3 are required) to set up the raid, five if you want a hot spare. This initial sacrifice of two (or three) drives will come in handy later on when something fails. This demonstration will use 4 512MB usb drives, sdb, sdc, sdd and sde.

First we need to partition the drives and assign them the correct partition type. As a general rule, partitioning the entire space on the disk is appropriate:

# fdisk /dev/sdd

Create a new partition using the entire disk:

Command (m for help): n
Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-1019, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-1019, default 1019):
Using default value 1019

Change the type of the partition from the default (83 Linux):

Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): l

. . . snip . . .

17 Hidden HPFS/NTF 64 Novell Netware b7 BSDI fs fd Linux raid auto

Hex code (type L to list codes): fd
Changed system type of partition 1 to fd (Linux raid autodetect)

Now the device is created, lets have a look at it and write it out to the partition table:

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdd: 501 MB, 501088256 bytes
16 heads, 60 sectors/track, 1019 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 960 * 512 = 491520 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 1019 489090 fd Linux raid autodetect

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Make sure to do this for each of your devices. Once that the partitions are created, we need to load the module that will support RAID 6.

# modprobe raid6
# lsmod | grep raid
raid456 123985 0
xor 18249 1 raid456

Now create the software RAID 6 device:

# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=6 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sd{b,c,d,e}1
mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.

Yes, the array is started, but it does take some time to build. Try the watch command to show the array build in real time (almost).

# watch cat /proc/mdstat

Every 2.0s: cat /proc/mdstat Tue May 22 20:12:47 2007

Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid6 sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[0]
978048 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
[====>................] resync = 21.3% (104760/489024) finish=23.8min speed=266K/sec

Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid6 sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[0]
978048 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
[===================>.] resync = 95.6% (468472/489024) finish=1.2min speed=267K/sec

Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid6 sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[0]
978048 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]

Make a filesystem on the new RAID 6:

# mkfs -t ext3 -b 4096 /dev/md0
. . . snip . . .

Mount the new filesytem:

# mkdir /storage; mount /dev/md0 /storage
# mount
. . . snip . . .
/dev/md0 on /storage type ext3 (rw)

Enjoy the RAID 6. Later on, I’ll write another tutorial on failing and recovering this RAID 6 and other software raid devices.

RAID 6 will grow more and more as its adopted and understood, get your Software RAID 6 configured soon.

Cheers,

Herlo

So, I recently installed Thunderbird 2.0 on my Fedora Core 6 box. Here is what I did to get it working:

# yum --enablerepo=development list thunderbird
. . . snip . . .
Available Packages
thunderbird.i386 2.0.0.0-1.fc7 development

# yum -y --enablerepo=development update thunderbird
. . . snip . . .
Updated: thunderbird.i386 0:2.0.0.0-1.fc7
Complete!

The great thing is Thunderbird 2.0 comes with some really cool features which I have completely enjoyed:

• Save searches as folders
• Type as you go search in the message body
• GMail and .mac accounts in two clicks
• Custom message tags

This is also fun to write as a comparison to the Thunderbird installation on Ubuntu.  I thought you’d like to hear the experience from another side.

Cheers,

Herlo