No Open Blockers

I’m a bit late on any sort of post about Fedora 12 being released. That’s not to say I haven’t been taking advantage of it. On release day I did a clean install of my main desktop. From start to finish, I went from booting into the x86_64 install disk to building and running RHQ in about 70 minutes. That includes dual monitor support with no manual steps on my part and sound support. I even plugged in a tablet input I have and it picked it up without an issue.

That’s it. I ran through the installer, added a few packages I use that aren’t part of the default install, and was back up and running (I intentionally didn’t upgrade just to use it as an opportunity to clean off all the random crap I collect over the lifespan of an OS install). I literally did it during a conference call at work. The installation and initial experience has gotten extremely streamlined.

Over the weekend, I decided it was time to attack my wife’s laptop. She’s been using one of my old laptops for about a year and a half now which was running an older, non-updated version of Ubuntu (probably 8.04). After a quick backup, I popped in the i386 install disk to the same result as on my desktop: it just worked. I typed in the wifi password and she was good to go.

My wife is still a die hard Quicken user. She took extremely well to Linux when I first pushed it on her, but I have yet to mentally prepare myself to argue the accountant in her to move off of Quicken. So as part of this laptop install, I setup a dual boot into Windows (the hardware isn’t beefy enough to run it as a virt guest).

I figured I’d push my luck. I popped in the Quicken CD, pointed wine at the installer, and hoped for the best. 5 minutes later, it was installed. A few minutes after that, it had successfully updated itself from the internet and there was a menu item in Gnome for her to access it.

The worst part? Midway through the installer I called my wife over to show her. Here on her Gnome desktop sat the Quicken Windows installer. I didn’t have to do any sort of odd config file hacking, nor did I have to sacrifice any small furry animals. Her reaction?

“Cool.”

I just kinda stared at her blankly for a minute. It was almost physically painful to see her not appreciate the technological awesomeness that stood before her. I sighed and grabbed my phone intent on texting someone who could appreciate the situation.

Congratulations to the Fedora team on an awesome release. There have been some seriously great improvements in what have historically been uglier areas, such as wifi and dual monitor setups (not to mention the fact that I’ve always been cursed when it came to wine).

(Renamed from “Future Fedora Ambassador” because of the hat… not that she can’t be involved in both, but this picture happens to be Red Hat specific )

It’s been a while since I got a good picture of my 2 year old geeking out. My wife actually took this one after my daughter found my red fedora which was still packed from moving.

When I first started out using Linux, I was introduced to FVWM as a display manager. I quickly became, well, addicted to dorking with my .fvwm2rc config file. I was hooked on how many possibilities and customizations could be made. I’ve since stopped using FVWM for various reasons (not the least of which is their abrasive community) and thought my config file tweaking addiction was cured.

Then I found Conky. The easiest description is found directly on their site: “Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop.” The addictive part is that there are hundreds of variables that can be displayed as part of its monitoring. Do I need, at all times, to see the amount of space left on my /home partition? No. Does the fact that I can do it make it awesome anyway? Hell yeah.

In the past week, I’ve had a number of coworkers see it running on my laptop and ask me what it was and how to configure it. The “what” part can be seen in the top right corner of my desktop below (click the image for the full size 1680×1050 version):

The “how”, or at least my settings, can be found here. I’m playing around with a personal github account for backing up and sharing this sort of stuff. I’m still not sure how much I’ll use it, but for now my conky config file can be found there. It’s a bit of a mess, but should be at least enough to give users an idea of what can be done. If anyone knows of any particularly cool use of it that I’m missing, definitely let me know.

Graduation day has arrived. You’ve learned enough sorting algorithms to make you more than mildly annoying at boring parties, giggled every time you misheard your professor say “sets”, and have come to hate the traveling salesman. You are ready to step out into the real world and make your mark.

Right?

There’s only so much time over the course of four years in which students are awake, sober, and mentally alert enough to be taught. It’s impossible for us to cover everything before unleashing you out into the wild. So after a bit of thinking back to my own trial by fire in the real world, I came up with a list of things any self-respecting geek should do before graduation.

SSH (or telnet) into another machine and do something

I’m not trying to scare you, but chances are, you’re going to find yourself working on a machine without the comfort of a GUI available. As the mouse sits there uselessly taunting you, you’ll be left with a blinking cursor and no idea what to do next.

At some point before graduation, develop some command line proficiency. Learn the basic commands for navigating between directories (cd), listing files (dir on Windows, ls on Linux/Unix), and a few other commands to make you reasonably comfortable on the occasions where you need to connect to a remote machine. Everyone from a system admin managing multiple offices to a developer who needs to work on a QA or production box will at some point need to connect to a machine over the network and get something done..

Learn Vi or Emacs

The premise here is simple: learn a real text editor. No, Wordpad doesn’t count. Anyone who suggested Notepad, please sit down and keep reading.

There is a long standing religious feud between vi and emacs, much like Coke v. Pepsi, Yankees v. Mets, and “Tastes Great” v. “Less Filling” (I’m afraid that last one may have just showed my age). Most people fall in love with one and consequently adamantly hate everyone from the other camp. I personally tend towards emacs, but in a pinch I know how to navigate around vi to get the job done.

There are a bunch of reasons this is important. Both editors are powerful, providing users with a number of speed enhancing features. I know developers who use these in place of full blown IDEs. Both offer text-only versions, which will come in handy in the above scenario of working on a remote machine from a command line. Both (or at least vi) will be available on pretty much any Linux/Unix machine you find and can also be installed on Windows. Both also have very active communities, so finding tutorials on the internet should be simple.

Oh, and for the record, vi is pronounced as the two letters that make up it’s name (“vee-eye”). Don’t call it “six” thinking you’re being cute and reading it as a Roman numeral. Best case, you get laughed at. Worst case, someone throws something heavy at you.

Set up a LAMP server

A LAMP server refers to a machine running a suite of the following open source software:

• Linux – Operating system
• Apache – Web server
• MySQL – Database
• PHP – Programming language

The configuration has become so popular that the term “LAMP” has arisen to describe the four aspects (the first letter of each of them if It’s not clear).

Why? It’s a great introduction to a ton of different things you’ll likely need in the real world. If you’re reading this, I don’t need to explain to you why learning the fundamental blocks of building a web server are important. A LAMP server provides all of these pieces. It will also give you experience in dealing with configuring and connecting to databases, which will come in handy on, well, pretty much every project you’ll ever work on.

On top of that, there are some really cool open source apps written in PHP to install and dork around with. Wordpress (blogging software; used for this site), Gallery (photo sharing site), and phpbb (forums) are just a few of the open source applications you can download, install on your LAMP server, and tweak as much as you want. Bonus points if you check out the source code for these applications from their respective repositories.

This also makes for great resume padding, since it shows enthusiasm, curiosity, and technical ability.

Ok, ok, I’ll even bend a little bit. If this seems too daunting, take out the Linux part and do it on Windows. Just know that I’ll be disappointed in you.

Dual boot your system

Ok, I lied about bending. Given the size of hard drives these days, there’s no reason you can’t spare a few gigs to install a second operating system. The Linux installer is extremely friendly towards these types of setups. It will even go so far as to set up a menu when you boot to let you pick which operating system you want to boot into.

Dual booting allows you to hold on to a Windows installation while still giving the option to play around and learn Linux. And using Linux will make you a bad ass.

Install new hardware into a desktop computer

When I was 10, my dad showed me how to install a memory stick into a computer. He then informed me that the 4 seconds it took me to do it would have cost upwards of $30-$50 per stick at any local computer store. That’s not a bad rate for something that takes the same dexterity as putting bread into a toaster.

I’d like to have made this point “build a computer”, but I realize I’m talking to college students who can barely afford Ramen, much less the parts necessary for a desktop. But I do realize that at some point, you’re going to have an upgrade that needs installing. Do it yourself. It’s not as scary as it sounds and you’ll save a ton of money.

And while you’re in there, air dust it. If you’ve never done it I guarantee you’ll find a small furry creature has set up camp in one of your fans.

Last Friday marked three years for me here at Red Hat. The last year has been a fun transition from the RHQ team to the Spacewalk team, and it’s already looking like the coming year is going to be, to say the least, interesting.

I’ll spare everyone the sight of me in my red fedora (maybe next year) and will stick with Red Hat’s solid Truth Happens video instead:

I’ll cut to the chase: it doesn’t work. But have no fear, there’s an OSS solution.

I recently got into using Amazon for buying MP3s. It’s DRM-free and has a great integration with pandora.com, which lets me hear a new song and click directly in pandora’s interface to buy it. It’s technology at its finest, if not its most dangerous (to my credit card).

Amazon is annoying in the sense that you can download single MP3s as an MP3 file, but to buy a full album you have to use their proprietary downloader. This was bearable until a recent change where all MP3s now have to be downloaded using their downloader.

The problem? The most recent build of their client is for Fedora 9 (or Ubuntu 8.10 if you go that route). So their software is, um, I’ll just say “not up to date”. I was able to hack around to get it to run under Fedora 10, but it’s flat out busted in Fedora 11.

As I said at the outset, there is hope. Clamz is a command line app to download MP3s using Amazon’s .amz formatted files. It’s exactly what you think it is. You download the .amz file from Amazon (at the point in Amazon’s workflow where you should be just downloading the MP3 itself) and run the clamz executable passing in the .amz file. Poof, it just works.

I’m disappointed it has to come to this. I know Fedora 11 is still new, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was never a Fedora 10 build (and still is no Ubuntu 9.4 build) of the Amazon downloader. Serious good karma to the Clamz project for stepping up and filling this need (at least until I find a new outlet for buying MP3s; if Amazon doesn’t want to let me buy from them then I’m not gonna go nuts trying to).

This link seems to be being passed around the blogs, but I first saw it at pjp news.

http://www.commandlinefu.com

It’s a collection of user uploaded and ranked useful commands. The idea is similar to the two entries I wrote on shell tricks but on a much bigger and cooler level. Just quickly poking around the first page of the site has already shown a number of things that are going to come in really handy. They also support all the usual useful channels like RSS and twitter, both of which you can use with a filtered threshold for user votes to limit the incoming commands to the truly awesome. There is some serious black magic to be learned on this site.