For the week of: Wednesday, January 14th 2004
Available at: http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/week2.shtmlWelcome to the second issue of Fedora News Updates, the weekly (or
bi-weekly) newsletter for the Fedora community. We aim to release this
often and can do so with the help of the community. It should contain
user information as well as some useful developer discussions that will
shape the outcome of Fedora. Thanks for all the wonderful comments for
the first issue, and keep those e-mails coming!
A nice gesture from Tom Mitchell, is where he posts little
snippets of information to the mailing list, with regards to doing
basic stuff with Fedora. Some of the useful findings include: how
to find an appropriate manual page for a program you didn't know
existed (or use of the apropos command), how to force
fsck to run (with a little note
on aliases), and differences hinted by the rpmnew
and rpmsave files.
Just for your information, passing the -F swicth to shutdown will
also force fsck to be run upon the next reboot. So executing shutdown
-Fr now will reboot the system, and cause fsck to be run.
Running Fedora on machines with 32MB of RAM might not give you much
joy, however the RULE
Project is attempting to build Fedora for low-end machines.
Some people have many machines to update, but just not as much
bandwidth. Using yum and a local repository is a solution, and Kwan
Lowe has a cron
script that will do this for you via rsync. Bevan
Bennett has an lftp
script, so these are two ways of getting the same
thing done.
If you're using the apt utility, you can create a local apt repository of your downloaded files. Panu Mantilainen posted a little guide at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-December/msg05154.html, and being apt, you can do it similary in the apt.conf file as stated http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-December/msg05223.html.
Jon Atkinson wanted to know how to make Fedora more
friendly for his 85-year young grandfather, and the thread though
interesting, didn't really give him many solutions. There's stuff
within there about automatic log-in's, but much more feedback is
possible, from a UI-standpoint.
These popular external storage devices work under Fedora, with
Rodrigo Malara writing a good guide at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-December/msg05049.html.
However, if you find that the ppa module doesn't work for you, Tim
Waugh has suggested using the imm
module instead.
If problems arise during package updates mentioning incorrect GPG
signatures, Alexander Dalloz shows us how
to import the correct GPG
keys.
It has been a well
known fact that Red Hat Linux created the BlueCurve theme, but what are
the main differences between the default GNOME and the Fedora released
GNOME 2.4? Havoc Pennington, head of the desktop team, has mentioned some
of the core differences between the two; and if anyone wanted, they
could check the spec files for the patches applied.
With the release of AMD64 based processors, Fedora needs to be able
to run on a 64-bit architecture (most of us currently are on a 32-bit
architecture, which the official download covers). Reading the AMD64 Preview Release FAQ
is handy before performing the download.
An updated Fedora-based LiveCD which contains GNOME, KDE as well as
TWM is in Beta 2 now. Dirk Westfal is
building it, and its available for download at http://www.linux4all.de/downloads/fc1lc2.iso.bz2.
This is beta software, and they have their own list for discussing
problems with it, so read the announcement thoroughly: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-January/msg00333.html.
It seems the concept of having Fedora installed outside the first
4GB of a drive might be new to some, but most boxes aren't old
nowadays. But the real answer is that yes, Fedora runs outside of the
first 4GB of the disk drive, and Tom Mitchell takes us on a fairly
useful explanation at: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-January/msg00016.html.
Using the Fedora Core 1 installer with a Firewire CD-ROM drive will
not render Fedora to install. However, Alexandre Oliva has release a Firewire-based
Fedora Core 1 installer. Reading the README
file will be very beneficial if you're going to be using this.
Ow Mun Heng asks how he could get Fedora Core 1 installed on an external
USB based drive, to which Alexandre Oliva responds to saying that 'linux
expert' during the boot-prompt can be used.
Feel the urge to configure your gamma
settings under Fedora? It turns out that you need to edit the X
configuration, so please remember
to backup first.
Fedora has a huge monitor database, but just in case it doesn't
include your monitor type, and it turns out to be an "Unprobed
monitor", Brent Fox has a good guide
as to how you'd gather the data and file a Bugzilla report for its
inclusion.
With Fedora, you can track the core updates, or move up to testing,
which become the next round of core updates. Tracking rawhide
(development) provides bleeding edge software, but testing in general
make their way into the next round of updates. Dave Jones shows us how
to get on the testing releases. From this, it can be understood
that if changes to the up2date servers need to be made, its all a
matter of simply editing the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources
file.
The Fedora Legacy Project
website has been redesigned thanks to Eric Rostetter. The site now
looks very much like the original Fedora site. More at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-list/2004-January/msg00156.html.
When GDM appears on the screen and shows you the login prompt,
you'll hear a beep. Travis Fraser show's how
easily it is disabled.
Kristof Vansant proposed
to get supermount included into the kernel, so people wouldn't have
to go through the trouble of mounting any longer. Dave Jones instead
points to the fact that it can be done
almost entirely in userspace by using udev and D-BUS.
There's been some request to wanting to change the default Apache
404 error message, and Garrett LeSage has agreed to accept anything
interesting and create
a supplemental package. All Fedora
related graphics are available for download as well.
It turns out that Fedora doesn't get all the vendor approvals, like
Red Hat Enterprise Linux gets. However, this doesn't mean that Fedora
can't run all that software! Running Oracle is supported, you just have
to do some work. There are instructions at http://www.puschitz.com/ and an
excellent posting by David Muse at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-December/msg04714.html
shows how you get by the
installation.
Jeremy Katz has test
packages of Evolution 1.5.1 available.
Address book migration needs to be done manually, the software doesn't
segfault often, and it looks like something good is coming out of this
with built-in spam checking. Submit bugs to Bugzilla, and the usual
disclaimers apply.
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