TOPIC: YUM
A few more shell commands
8th July 2015Here are some Linux commands that I encountered in a feature article in the current issue of Linux User & Developer that I had not met before:
cd -
This returns you to the previous directory where you were before with having to go back through the folder hierarchy to get there and is handy if you are jumping around a file system and any other means is far from speedy.
lsb_release -a
It can be useful to uncover what version of a distro you have from the command line and the above works for distros as diverse as Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora (it automatically installs in Fedora 22 if it is not installed already, a more advanced approach than showing you the command like in Linux Mint or Ubuntu), openSUSE and Manjaro. These days, the version may not change too often, but it still is good to uncover what you have.
yum install fedora-upgrade
This one can be run either with sudo or in a root session started with su and it is specific to Fedora. The command performs an upgrade of the Fedora distro itself, and I wonder if the functionality has been ported to the dnf command that has taken over from yum. My experiences with that in Fedora 22 so far suggest that it should be the case, though I need to check that further with the VirtualBox VM that I have created.
Adding Microsoft Core Fonts to Fedora 19
6th July 2013While I have a previous posting from 2009 that discusses adding Microsoft's Core Fonts to the then current version of Fedora, it did strike me that I hadn't laid out the series of commands that were used. Instead, I referred to an external and unofficial Fedora FAQ. That's still there, yet I also felt that I was leaving things a little to chance, given how websites can disappear quite suddenly.
Even after next to four years, it still amazes me that you cannot install Microsoft's Core Fonts in Fedora as you would on Ubuntu, Linux Mint or even Debian. Therefore, the following series of steps is as necessary now as it was then.
The first step is to add in a number of precursor applications such as wget for command line file downloading from websites, cabextract for extracting the contents of Windows CAB files, rpmbuild for creating RPM installers and utilities for the XFS file system that chkfontpath needs:
sudo yum -y install rpm-build cabextract ttmkfdir wget xfs
Here, I have gone with terminal commands that use sudo, but you could become the superuser (root) for all of this and there are those who believe you should. The -y switch tells yum to go ahead with prompting you for permission before it does any installations. The next step is to download the Microsoft fonts package with wget:
sudo wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
Once that is done, you need to install the chkfontpath package because the RPM for the fonts cannot be built without it:
sudo rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/chkfontpath
Once that is in place, you are ready to create the RPM file using this command:
sudo rpmbuild -ba msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
After the RPM has been created, it is time to install it:
sudo yum install --nogpgcheck ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
When installation has completed, the process is done. Because I used sudo, all of this happened in my own home area, so there was a need for some housekeeping afterwards. If you did it by becoming the root user, then the files would be there instead, and that's the scenario in the online FAQ.
On upgrading from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14
7th November 2010My 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 got 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, only for my opting 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 problems before doing it for a real PC installation.
Ridding Fedora of Unwanted Software Repositories
4th November 2010Like 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, only it doesn't. What you need to do instead is switch to root in a terminal using the command su - and enter your root user 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 the command that I use because 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, belonged to Dropbox and even disabling it didn't make yum operate from the command like it should, so it had to go. Maybe Dropbox hasn't caught up with the latest release of Fedora, but that can be resolved another day.
Command Line Software Management
2nd December 2009One 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. While some may prefer a GUI, but I find that the command line offers a 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.
One thing that 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 experimental 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.
Adding msttcorefonts to Fedora
28th July 2009Once you have enabled the appropriate software repository, you can install the msttcorefonts (Microsoft TrueType core fonts like Arial, Times Roman, Verdana, Georgia, etc.) package on Debian and Ubuntu. With Fedora, it surprisingly isn't so straightforward. There is a recipe using the command line that worked for me, and I'm not going to repeat it here, so I'll leave you to go where I found it. In fact, it forms part of a wider unofficial Fedora FAQ that may be of more interest to you than solving this.
Update for Fedora 12 (2009-11-24):
You also need chkfontpath so the following needs doing before the final part of the command sequence, changing the filename as appropriate for your situation:
yum install xfs
rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc12.i686.rpm