Tag: Linux

Set up Enviornmental variables in Fedora

You can easily set up environmental variables which needs to be available globally for all your applications. This can be done by placing scripts in the /etc/profile.d directory which are executed every time a shell instance is being created.

Example: To set JAVA_HOME environmental variable so that it points to where you have installed java, you can either create a new shell script or edit an existing shell script in the profile.d directory. Type in the follwoing line and save it as java.sh in the directory

JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/latest

You are done. Now every application will know where you have installed java. Now that is one of the easiest things you could do in Linux 🙂

Mounting ISO’s files in Linux

Linux systems have a built in ability to mount ISO files which then can be used as normal cd or dvds . The command to do this is
mount – o loop /path/to/isofile.iso /mount/foldername

Things like this make me love Linux more as performing a similar trick in Windows would have required a third party software to be installed which would mean more work for a lazy guy like me 😉 .

Installing Fedora 8 from hard disk

As many might be aware it is possible to install Fedora and many other Linux distributions from media other than CD/DVD’s.

I installed Fedora 8 from my hard disk . My machine is quite old with just a CD writer in it ( am a poor guy after all) . I did have a Broadband connection using which i had downloaded the DVD iso of fedora 8. I had the option of creating and burning 5 CD’s but installation from hard disk had the advantage of speed over regular CD’s. Also my installation would be faster coz i don’t have to keep putting in cd’s during the installation. The only CD i had created was the boot CD which was used to start the Installtion process (although it was not necessary as i later came to know).

Here are the steps which need to be followed for installing Fedora DVD version from the hard disk.

Step1 : Download the DVD iso from the Fedora project website at http://fedoraproject.org/.
You can also copy it to your disk from your friends hard disk who already has the iso.

Step2: Check if a FAT32 partition is available on your hard disk which can accommodate the DVD iso. ( i did try installing with other Linux file systems such as ext2, ext3 but was not successful. Still am not sure whether i did try all combinations) . Save the iso file in the root of the partition and not inside any folder (still not sure why it never worked for me when i placed the iso in folders). I created a partition and formated it with the FAT32 filesystem.
In my case the partition name was /dev/sda9 . I mounted it and copied the DVD iso in the root of the partition.

Step3: Thats it! we are now ready for installation.

Step4: Once the installation starts it would ask for the media you want the installation to start. Select the media as had disk and then in the next screen put in the path eg. /dev/sda9. It would let you choose the iso file and from that point the magic begins.

The installation speed is also much higher compared to a regular CD/DVD installation .These steps are distribution dependent and can be applied for other distributions also.

Fedora 8

Finally I made the jump and installed Fedora 8 on my machine. After using it for some days I can say that it is a quite stable version as i have not come across any thing that is broken till now. Overall a nice polished and more refined version than previous versions. All those looking to upgrade can surely go for it without having second thoughts.

I did have issues installing it but probably thats more due to my lack of knowledge. I did learn some new things while installing it. I will be posting a separate post for the method i used for installation and which i think may be useful to those with old machines.

OpenOffice 2.3

I recently upgraded to OpenOffice 2.3 and was in for a little surprise. Nopes there was not any bright lights coming in. The program simply could not start and would give out an error “no suitable windowing system found, exiting.”

As always the next step was to Google about it. After some googling I did find an solution for this. Open Office 2.3 had a problem if SELinux was enabled and SELinux was enabled by default in my Fedora Core5 and may be later versions of Fedora

The solution was to run the following command in the ‘program’ directory where OpenOffice is installed. In my case i had installed it under /opt/openoffice.org2.3

cd /opt/openoffice.org2.3/program
chcon -t texrel_shlib_t *.so

This did solve the problem and i was able to start the OpenOffice application correctly.

Moral of the story:
Be ready for surprises whenever you upgrade as things may not work out smoothly always.

Google Desktop

Those Linux users who use Google for every internet search will be happy to hear that there exists a Linux version of Google Desktop – the Desktop search tool. Now u can get blazing fast search results in seconds. The tool is amazing. It literally feels like the real Google on your machine.Like most modern search tools it runs in background and utilizes the idle time available on your machine. It maintains an index of all the available files and searches this index when you type in an filename to search. First time usage will be slow and will not show all the results since the indexing process may not be completed. The status of the indexing process can be seen from the index -> Status option available which looks like the one in this screen shot.


The tool also has options to exclude items from indexing so that they do not appear in search results. Also it integrates nicely with the on line version merging the on line search results with the desktop one.

Overall a nice tool but be warned that once you get into the habit of using it you might get addicted and may behave weirdly in situations where you cannot get to use the tool.

XMMS song names in Pidgin Status.

I was wondering on how to display my song title as the status for Pidgin much like provided by 3rd party tools for yahoo messenger or for Gtalk when i came across this piece of info.

xmms has a built in plugin called ‘Song Change’ which allows one to execute any command when a song changes or when the play list ends.

Pidgin also has a command line tool called ‘purple-remote’ where in one can send commands to Pidgin.

This is all the information you will need.Put the following command to the xmms plugin configuration box

purple-remote “setstatus?message=%s”

xmms would replace the %s with the song title.

Now start a song and Voila! the song title appears in Pidgin status.

Messengers!!!!!!!

Pidgin previously known as ‘gaim’ is a kool multi protocol messneger available for Linux.

You can have your yahoo, gtalk contacts in a single place . The interface is cool without the usual bloat added by other messengers.

PS. On my Fedora core 5 system the application installed correctly but would not start. I found the problem already logged in at the pidgin bug database and the solution also . The problem it seems was that pidgin required a new version of library called lib-purple whereas in fedora core 5 a older version was present. Updated my lib-purple library and then pidgin popped up on the screen with its full glory.