Articles, Reports & Tips

Linux - The freedom does matter.

Our choices of Linux desktop operating systems have to do with everything from personal needs, technical ability, to our machine hardware. I have always hosted our websites on Linux servers because I learned in this environment, and up until the last few months I’ve done most of my work and play in a Windows PC environment with the aid of great free and open source software like XAMPP and OpenOffice.org for the same reason.

However, after deciding not to upgrade our four small office machines to Windows Vista (only two of which could actually run Vista) and with support running out soon for XP, I started taking the Linux desktop environment more seriously. Once I did, I became fully conscious of the restrictions of one and the freedom of the other, it was only logical to shift my use and support to Linux and the free and open source software communities and their philosophies.

I think the main thing is to find a distribution you like as quickly as possible and then invest some time in learning it. That is if you want to get some work done. Linux distro hopping and actually getting some real work done do not go well together.

The CentOS 5.1 - Fedora 8 & 9

As a semi advanced Linux Desktop user, CentOS and Fedora (both Red Hat based) provided the perfect combination of available automation with the right amount of flexibility. Allowing the freedom of customizing the environment as far as my technical ability would allow.

By the way, I knew that I wanted consistency with the operating systems on all of our computers. Both CentOS and Fedora installed and updated flawlessly on everything from an eight year old 850 MHz machine, a four year old mid-range machine, to a two year old (built for the future) power house.

CentOS 5.1

NOTE: I no longer use CentOS as a desktop OS because to me it is best suited as a reliable server and I needed a solution that provided newer software. When and if I ever set up a production server, CentOS will be my choice.

Thanks to third party repositories and Yum Utilities like yum-priorities, CentOS, more often thought of as an enterprise class server solution can in fact become a very useful, rock solid (tough I dare say) Desktop OS.

I use this OS as a one-step away from Windows. Installing all the binaries needed to have full multimedia support, including all of the so called bad and ugly plugins, w32Codecs etc.. I also installed mpalyer, mplayer-codecs, mplayer-codecs-extra, wine and of course fuse, fuse-ntfs-3g, dkms, and dkms-fuse. All of these coming from one third party repository listed below.

Resources

* Yum Priorities
http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities

* CentOS and Third Party Repositories.
I would recommend installing only one third party repo, that being the rpmforge repository. Give it a priority of 10.
http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories/RPMForge

* Setting up Multimedia Applications on CentOS.
http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/MultimediaOnCentOS

* Get CentOS and other news at http://centos.org

* This site offers a great tutorial on CentOS 5.1. Check it out after you have gone over the CentOS Wiki links above.

http://www.howtoforge.com/installation-guide-centos5.1-desktop

Fedora 8 & 9

Note that Fedora 9 provides the latest in cutting edge (newest) software and utilities. This is usually a good thing for me. However from time to time this can cause temporary problems. There are almost always work arounds and these problems are usually discovered and quickly fixed by the Fedora team. See the Tips section below.

Resources

* This site offers another great tutorial on Fedora 8 & 9.
http://www.howtoforge.com/installation-guide-fedora8-desktop
http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-fedora9-gnome

* Get Fedora 9 and other news at http://fedoraproject.org

* Popular Fedora third party repository mentioned it the tutorials above.
http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki

File System Backup

It can take many hours to customize your systems configuration, settings and software. You don’t want to do all this work only to lose it for whatever reason. My choice was partition image backups of only used file system data minimizing backup storage needs. I am now using Ping, which is a very tidy wrapper for Partimage. You can learn more about it at the link below.

http://ping.windowsdream.com/ Don’t let the name fool you.

Tips

* After installation disable the screen saver. You do not need or want it starting up while updating your new system.

* Edit your /etc/yum.conf file. By default, Fedora does not keep cache stores in /var/cache/yum, and only keeps two kernel versions available after updating. If you don’t know why you would need to do this, you probably do not need to worry about it.

To change this edit the following in your /etc/yum.conf file.
Change keepcache from 0 to 1: keepcache=1
Change installonly_limit from 2 to desired amount: installonly_limit=5

* Your first system update will be quite large. Resist the natural impulse to update all packages at once. I would recommend updating yum (your installer/updater) and kernel first. Then update the rest of the packages. Make sure to reboot after the kernel update. Also reboot after your first large update.

Command:
yum update yum yum-packagekit yum-utils kernel

* At the time of this writing, there is a bug (I believe having to do with the newest udev) that makes CD or DVD burning a pain. When burning as a normal user, your CD/DVD burning software cannot get permissions needed to properly access the ROM drive and burning/copying will fail. Also, as soon as your drive is unmounted and ejected, it will quickly close with your disk still inside.

I get around this by starting my burning software as root via the terminal. This takes care of the permissions problem. As for the ROM drive closing on its own with your disk still inside, well, my solution is not technical but it works: Be ready to grab the sucker before it closes. You have about two seconds.

Problems & Solutions

Repository Connection Errors

As always, your questions and comments are welcome.

Tim Valentine
Access Website Design
AccessWebsiteDesign.com
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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Software.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.