Tag Archive for command

On upgrading from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14

November 7, 2010 No comments

My Fedora box recently got upgraded to the latest version of the distribution (14) and I stuck to a method that I have used successfully before and one that isn’t that common with variants of Linux either. What I did was to go to the Fedora website and download a full DVD image, burn it to a disk and boot from that. Then, I chose the upgrade option from the menus and all went smoothly with only commonplace options needing selection from the menus and no data was lost either. Apparently. this way of going about things is only offered by the DVD option because the equivalent Live CD versions only do full installations.

However, there was another option that I fancied trying but was stymied by messages about a troublesome Dropbox repository. As I later discovered, that would have been easily sorted but I went for a tried and tested method instead. This was a pity because only two commands would have needed to be issued when logged in as root and it would have been good to have had a go with them:

yum update yum
yum –releasever=14 update –skip-broken

These may have done what I habitually do with Ubuntu upgrades but trying them out either will have to await the release of the next version or my getting around to setting up a Fedora virtual machine to see what happens. The latter course of action might be sensible anyway to see if all works without any problem before doing it for a real PC installation.

Linux, Software

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A look at Slackware 13.0

June 5, 2010 2 comments

Some curiosity has come upon me and I have been giving a few Linux distros a spin in fVirtualBox virtual machines. One was Slackware and I recall a fellow university student using it in the mid/late 1990′s. Since then, my exploration took me into Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake and eventually to Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. All of that bypassed Slackware so it was to give the thing a look.

While the current version is 13.1, it was 13.0 that I had to hand so I had a go with that. In many ways, the installation was a flashback to the 1990′s and I can see it looking intimidating to many computer users with its now old-fashioned installation GUI. If you can see through that though, the reality is that it isn’t too hard to install.

After all, the DVD was bootable. However, it did leave you at a command prompt and I can see that throwing many. The next step is to use cfdisk to create partitions (at least two are needed, swap and normal). Once that is done, it is time to issue the command setup and things look more graphical again. I picked the item for setting the locale of the keyboard and everything followed from there but there is a help option too for those who need it. If you have installed Linux before, you’ll recognise a lot of what you see. It’ll finish off the set up of disk partitions for you and supports ext4 too; it’s best not to let antique impressions fool you. For most of the time, I stuck with defaults and left it to perform a full installation with KDE as the desktop environment. If there is any real criticism, it is the absence of an overall progress bar to see where it is with package installation.

Once the installation was complete, it was time to restart the virtual machine and I found myself left at the command prompt. Only the root user was set up during installation so I needed to add a normal user too. Issuing startx was enough to get me into KDE (along with included alternatives like XCFE, there is a community build using GNOME too) for that but I wanted to have that loading automatically. To fix that, you need to edit /etc/inittab to change the default run level from 3 to 4 (hint: look for a line with id:3:initdefault: in it near the top of the file and change that; the file is well commented so you can find your way around it easily without having to look for specific esoteric test strings).

After all this, I ended up with a usable Slackware 130.0 installation. Login screens have a pleasing dark theme by default while the desktop is very blue. There may be no OpenOffice but KOffice is there in its place and Seamonkey is an unusual inclusion along with Firefox. It looks as if it’ll take a little more time to get to know Slackware but it looks good so far; I may even go about getting 13.1 to see how things might have changed and report my impressions accordingly. Some will complain about the rough edges that I describe here but comments about using Slackware to learn about Linux persist. Maybe, Linux distributions are like camera film; some are right for you and some aren’t. Personally, I wouldn’t thrust Slackware upon a new Linux user if they have to install it themselves but it’s not at all bad for that.

Linux, Software, Virtualisation

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Shell swapping in Windows

April 28, 2010 No comments

Until the advent of PowerShell, Windows had been the poor relation when it came to working from the command line when compared with UNIX, Linux and so on. A recent bit of fiddling had me trying to run FTP from the legacy command prompt when I ran into problems with UNC address resolution (it’s unsupported by the old technology) and mapping of network drives. It turned out that my error 85 was being caused by an unavailable drive letter that the net use command didn’t reveal as being in use. Reassuringly, this wasn’t a Vista issue that I couldn’t circumvent.

During this spot of debugging, I tried running batch files in PowerShell and discovered that you cannot run them there like you would from the old command prompt. In fact, you need a line like the following:

cmd /c script.bat

In other words, you have to call cmd.exe like perl.exe, wscript.exe and cscript.exe for batch files to execute. If I had time, I might have got to exploring the use ps1 files for setting up PowerShell commandlets but that is something that needs to wait until another time. What I discovered though is that UNC addressing can be used with PowerShell without the need for drive letter mappings, not a bad development at all. While on the subject of discoveries, I discovered that the following command opens up a command prompt shell from PowerShell without any need to resort to the Start Menu:

cmd /k

Entering the exit command returns you to the PowerShell command line again and entering cmd /? reveals the available options for the command so you need never be constrained by your own knowledge or its limitations.

Scripting, Software, Windows

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Command Line Software Management

December 2, 2009 One comment

One of the nice things about a Debian-based Linux distribution is that it is easy to pull a piece of software onto your system from a repository using either apt-get or aptitude. Some may prefer to have a GUI but I find that the command line offers certain extra transparency that stops the “what’s it doing?” type of question. that’s never to say that the GUI-based approach hasn’t a place and I only go using it when seeking out a piece of software without knowing its aptitude-ready name. Interestingly, there are signs that Canonical may be playing with the idea of making Ubuntu’s Software Centre a full application management tool with updates and upgrades getting added to the current searching, installation and removal facilities. That well may be but it’s going to take a lot of effort to get me away from the command line altogether.

Fedora and openSUSE have their software management commands too in the shape of yum and zypper, respectively. The recent flurry of new operating system releases has had me experimenting with both of those distros on a real test machine. As might be expected, the usual battery of installation, removal and update activities are well served and I have been playing with software searching using yum too. What has yet to mature is in-situ distribution upgrading à la Ubuntu. In principle, it is possible but I got a black screen when I tried moving from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2 within VirtualBox using instructions on the openSUSE website. Not wanting to wait, I reached for a Live CD instead and that worked a treat on both virtual and real machines. Being in an experiment turn of mind, I attempted the same to get from Fedora 11 to the beta release of its version 12. A spot of repository trouble got me using a Live CD in its place. You can perform an in-situ upgrade from a full Fedora DVD but the only option is system replacement when you have a Live CD. Once installation is out of the way, YAST can be ignored in favour of zypper and yum is good enough that Fedora’s GUI-using alternative can be ignored. It’s nice to see good transparent ideas taking hold elsewhere and may make migration between distros much easier too.

Linux, Software

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Using the Windows Command Line for Security Administration

July 24, 2009 No comments

While there are point and click tools for the job, being able to set up new user groups, attaching them to folders and assign uses to them using the command line has major advantages when there are a number to be set up and logs of execution can be retained too. In light of this, it seems a shame that terse documentation along with its being hard to rack down answers to any questions using Google, or whatever happens to be your search engine of choice, makes it less easy to discern what commands need to be run. This is where a book would help but the whole experience is in direct contrast to the community of information providers that is the Linux user community, with Ubuntu being a particular shining example. Saying that, the Windows help system is not so bad once you can track down what you need. For instance, knowing that you need commands like CACLS and NET LOCALGROUP, the ones that have been doing the back work for me, it offers useful information quickly enough. To illustrate the usefulness of the aforementioned commands, here are a few scenarios.

Creating a new group:

net localgroup [name of new group] /comment:”[more verbose description of new group]“ /add

Add a group to a folder:

cacls [folder address] /t /e /p [name of group]

The /t switch gets cacls to apply changes to the ACL for the specified folder and all its subfolders, recursive action in other words, while the /e specifies ACL editing rather than its replacement and /p induces replacement of permissions for a given user or group. Using :n, :f, :c or :r directly after the name of a specified user or group assigns no, full, change (write) or read access, respectively. Replacing /p with /r revokes access and leaving off the :n/:f/:c/:r will remove the group or user from the folder.

Add a user to a group:

net localgroup [name of group] [user name (with domain name if on a network)] /add

In addition to NET LOCALGROUP, there is also NET GROUP for wider network operations, something that I don’t have cause to do. Casting the thinking net even wider, I suspect that VB scripting and its ability to tweak the Windows Management Interface might offer more functionality than what is above (PowerShell also comes to mind while we are on the subject) but I am sharing what has been helping me and it can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look.

Scripting, Security, Software, Windows

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Anquet and VirtualBox Shared Folders

July 18, 2009 One comment

For a while now, I have had Anquet installed in a virtual machine instance of Windows XP but it has been throwing errors continuously on start up. Perhaps surprisingly, it only dawned upon me recently what might have been the cause. A bit of fiddling revealed that my storing the mapping data Linux side and sharing it into the VM wasn’t helping and copying it to a VM hard drive set things to rights. This type of thing can also cause problems when it comes getting Photoshop to save files using VirtualBox’s Shared Folders feature too. Untangling the situation is a multi-layered exercise. On the Linux side, permissions need to be in order and that involves some work with chmod (775 is my usual remedy) and chgrp to open things up to the vboxusers group. Adding in Windows’ foibles when it comes to networked drives and their mapping to drive letters brings extra complexity; shared folders are made visible to Windows as \\vboxsvr\shared_folder_name\. The solution is either a lot of rebooting, extensive use of the net use command or both. It induces the sort of toing and froing that makes copying things over and back as needed look less involved and more sensible if a little more manual than might be liked.

Graphics, Imaging, Software, Virtualisation

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