Like other Linux distributions, Fedora has the software repository scheme of things for software installation and updating. However, it could do with having the ability to remove unwanted repositories through a GUI but it doesn’t. What you need to do instead is switch to root in a terminal using the the command su - and entering you root password before navigating to /etc/yum.repos.d/ to delete the troublesome [file name].repo file. Recently, I needed to do this after upgrading to Fedora 14 or Yum wouldn’t work from the command line, which is the way that I tend to update Fedora (yum -y update is command that I use and it automatically does all installations unattended until it is finished doing what’s needed). The offending repository, or “Software Source” as these things are called in the GUI, was belonging to Dropbox and even disabling it didn’t make Yum operate from the command like it should so it had to go. Maybe Dropbox haven’t caught up with the latest release of Fedora but that can be resolved another day.
Tag Archive for GUI
A look at Slackware 13.0
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.
Securing MySQL in Fedora
Ubuntu users must be spoilt because any MySQL installation asks you for a root password, a very good thing in my opinion. With Fedora, it just pops the thing on there with you needing to set up a service and setting the root password yourself; if I remember correctly, I think that openSUSE does the same thing. For the service management, I needed to grab system-config-services from the repositories because my Live CD installation left off a lot of stuff, OpenOffice and GIMP even. The following command line recipe addressed the service manager omission:
su – # Change to root, entering password when asked
yum -y install system-config-services # Installs the thing without a yes/no prompt
exit # Return to normal user shell
Thereafter, the Services item from the menus at System > Administration was pressed into service and the MySQL service enabled and started. The next step was to lock down root so the following sequence was used:
mysql # Enter MySQL prompt; no need for user or password because it still is unsecured!
UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD(‘MyNewPass’) WHERE User=’root’;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit # Exit the mysql prompt, leaving the bare mysql command unusable
For those occasions when password problems keep you of the MySQL shell, you’ll find password resetting advice on the MySQL website but I didn’t need to go the whole hog here. MySQL Administrator might be another option for this type of thing. That thought never struck me while I was using it to set up less privileged users and allowing them access to the system. For a while, I was well stymied in my attempts to access the MySQL using any of those extra accounts until I got the idea of associating them with a host, another thing that is not needed in Ubuntu if my experience is any guide. All in all, Fedora may make you work a little extra to get things like thing done but I am not complaining if it makes you understand a little more about what is going on in the background, something that is never a disadvantage.
Service management in Ubuntu 9.10
The final release of Ubuntu 9.10 is due out today but there is minor item that seems to have disappeared from the System>Administration menu, in the release candidate at least: Services. While some reader may put me right, I can’t seem to find it anywhere else. Luckily, there is a solution in the form of the GNOME Boot-Up Manager or BUM as it is known sometimes. It is always handy to have a graphical means of restarting services and BUM suffices for the purpose. Restarting Apache from the command line is all well and good but the GUI approach has its place too.
