G-Loaded Journal » Fedora http://www.g-loaded.eu An open-source software and technology related journal Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:55:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ How to change the Timezone http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/10/07/how-to-change-the-timezone/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/10/07/how-to-change-the-timezone/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:44:03 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=1183 Usually, the only time I make a change to the timezone setting of the operating system is during the installation time. But it may happen that a change to that setting is necessary. There are several ways to do this, but, as usual, there is only one Right Way™ to set the timezone info in your Linux distribution. I investigated it for a while and I think I have figured out how to do it right using command-line utilities on Fedora and all RHEL rebuilds (CentOS, Scientific Linux, etc). I am quite certain that many people miss this piece of information, so I describe it in detail right below.

Configuration

The procedure must be performed by root.

First of all, you need to edit the /etc/sysconfig/clock file:

ZONE="Etc/GMT"
UTC=true

Please, read the notes below for more information about the settings above.

Then run the tzdata-update utility. This copies the correct zonefile to /etc/localtime:

/usr/sbin/tzdata-update

Finally, update the system time by either running ntpd or the ntpdate utility. Both are part of the ntp RPM package, so if this is not installed, just use “yum install ntp” to get it installed.

/usr/sbin/ntpdate -b pool.ntp.org

This will make sure your time is correct.

You can set a cronjob to update the system’s time using ntpdate, like this:

#
# Update the system time
#
55 23 * * * root /usr/sbin/ntpdate -4 -b pool.ntp.org 2>&1 >> /var/log/ntpdate.log

Notes

Here are some notes about the configuration of the timezone:

  1. You can find the valid timezones by changing to the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory. From there, any relative path to a timezone file is a valid timezone. For example, “Etc/GMT“, “Europe/Athens“, “America/New_York” et cetera.
  2. GMT and UTC time are practically the same and they both refer to the Greenwich Mean Time, so setting the timezone to “Etc/UTC” or “Etc/GMT” is practically the same.
  3. In /etc/sysconfig/clock you can set whether the hardware clock is set to UTC/GMT time or to Local Time. I am not sure in what way the hardware clock gets involved is the time of the Operating System. But, anyway, if you know how the hardware clock is configured, set this accordingly to true or false. Usually, if I set the OS to use GMT time, I also set this to true regardless of the actual hardware clock configuration. More info on this is still needed.
  4. In /etc/sysconfig/clock you may see the options ARC=false and SRM=false. These change the way the “epoch” is assumed by the console on Alpha systems and have no effect if you do not use such a platform. Delete them or leave as is, unless you know you need to set one of them to true.
  5. In order to set the correct timezone, you could just create a symlink at /etc/localtime pointing to the correct timezone file in /usr/share/zoneinfo/. Then again, this would render the system configuration file /etc/sysconfig/clock (and thus all other applications that use it) useless and ineffective, so this method is generally not recommended.

Final thoughts

Setting your server to use the correct time is very important. Generally, I hate it when I see web sites or other services having incorrect time. This reveals the web server or the web application administrator’s laziness or inability to properly configure the time. I hope this guide will help get rid of this issue.

How to change the Timezone, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/10/07/how-to-change-the-timezone/feed/ 4 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Fedora Server vs CentOS http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/10/05/fedora-server-vs-centos/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/10/05/fedora-server-vs-centos/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:52:02 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=1225 End of era for my Fedora based server after almost five years of service. The box now runs CentOS. I had this box at home and it was the only Fedora Server I ever maintained at home or elsewhere. I should state from the beginning that it was only Fedora’s short life-cycle that practically forced me to switch. Other than that, I’ve never encountered a single issue with its performance, stability or security, even if I had been upgrading through yum since Fedora Core 3 (upgrading through yum is probably still an officially unsupported feature).

You have probably read several times on this website about the stability issues I had faced on my Fedora Desktop. All those issues were entirely related to graphical applications and are common among all Linux distributions that are used as desktop operating systems. There is a huge gap in quality between the software that is used to run a WWW, SMTP, FTP, et cetera server and the software that is used on Linux desktops. Anyway, I won’t go into the details of this topic in the current post. I would like to say only this: If Fedora’s short life-cycle and the frequent updates are not a problem to you, then Fedora automatically becomes a very strong candidate for your server.

Having used Red Hat Linux, CentOS and Fedora over time I have finally come to several conclusions about each of them (well RHL has reached EOL). Below, I try to summarize the advantages and downsides of each of the last two distributions both as an operating system for a server and as a project to which you might want to contribute (since you use it on your boxes):

CentOS

Advantages:

  • Almost guaranteed stability. The distribution includes old but proven versions of software which are very unlikely to have serious security or blocker bugs. “Almost” is used because you get true guaranteed stability only by using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is available under contract by Red Hat Inc.
  • The CentOS or better the RHEL Life-Cycle is 7 years.

Disadvantages:

  • The included software on the base repositories does not fully cover the needs of a modern server. Using software from 3rd party repositories has become a common practice among CentOS users. There are some well-known repositories, but it may happen that you have to use a package from a repository that is not so popular or (many times) completely unknown. Using software from 3rd party repositories renders your installation less secure.
  • If a bug is not security-related, it may take several months (sometimes more than a year) to get fixed. Although the sources are the same with RHEL, except for the artwork, logos and release notes, CentOS has its own bug tracking system, which is completely unrelated to the Red Hat bug tracking system, meaning that they do not monitor or notify each other for bug submissions and fixes, despite the fact that the two OSes are almost alike. In practice, this is worse than it sounds. Things *could* be better.
  • The organization of the community behind CentOS is not very clear. Even if you want to contribute some time and effort you will have to accept some things “as is”. In general, it is nowhere near the organization and openness of the Fedora community.
  • CentOS does not differ from the vast majority of Linux distributions when it comes to your relationship as a contributor to the project, which is mostly governed by “bro” rules and practices.

Fedora

Advantages:

  • Software availability. The project’s repositories contain a huge amount of packages, which have been built with common, well-documented packaging guidelines. Almost any software a modern server may require can be found in the main RPM repository. Only in rear occasions you will need a 3rd party repo.
  • A well-organized community around the project. All procedures are open and well-documented.
  • Professional procedures and practices govern your relationship to the project as a contributor.
  • Bugs are resolved rather quickly, especially blocker bugs.

Disadvantages:

  • Short life-cycle of about 13 months.
  • Theoritically, less stable versions of software than CentOS or RHEL. Even the server software is updated too often. Despite of the high quality of the server software, the frequent updates makes it “feel” less stable. From my own experience though, I’d say that, if CentOS gets an “100% Stable” label, a Fedora Server gets a 99.5%. Personally, although I had set up several services on the box, I never had any stability issues, but that does not necessarily mean that they do not exist.

As you can see, both distributions have their downsides. Now that I have written all the above, I think that there is a gap between the two OSes, which could be filled by a 3rd operating system. A system that would be more modern than CentOS, but less “cutting edge” than Fedora, and which would have a life-cycle of about 3-4 years. That would be very interesting.

Personally, I have successfully used both operating systems as servers for several years. I cannot make up my mind and decide which one better meets a server’s requirements. As I have previously mentioned, I decided to fully switch to CentOS because of the significantly longer life-cycle.

Fedora Server vs CentOS, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/10/05/fedora-server-vs-centos/feed/ 5 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Sticking with CentOS, RPMforge and yum-priorities for now http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/04/07/sticking-with-centos-rpmforge-and-yum-priorities-for-now/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/04/07/sticking-with-centos-rpmforge-and-yum-priorities-for-now/#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:14:22 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=1018 Having spent some days with CentOS on my desktop and having tried several 3rd party RPM repositories, I’ve finally decided to mix the official repos (base, updates, addons, extras) with RPMforge and also make use of the priorities yum plugin. Read on if you care about the details…

My initial effort involved using EPEL and RPMfusion, which contains stuff that does not “fit” into EPEL and, of course, is built on top of EPEL. What I like about EPEL is the fact that RPMs are being built using Fedora’s RPM packaging standards, which I can say, from my 4 year experience with Fedora, results in very high quality RPMs. Currently, the problem with the EPEL+RPMfusion combination is that the number of the available packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible distributions CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL) is rather limited when compared to the number of the available RPMs in the RPMforge repository.

While using EPEL+RPMfusion I tried to rebuild several Fedora SRPMs for use in CentOS. Many of them were built without dependency issues, but soon I came to a dead-end with some packages (also known as Dependency Hell™) which required me to upgrade some core CentOS packages which in turn required the upgrade of some other core packages, which is generally considered a Very Bad Thing™ to do. This was an expected thing to happen, since Fedora uses newer versions of software than RHEL. Also, this somehow reminded me the reason why I had switched to CentOS; spending the least possible time hacking around the operating system, that is. So, I quickly abandoned EPEL and RPMfusion. I liked the idea behind that effort though, so it won’t be a surprise if you find me in #epel.

Having read the above two paragraphs, one might think that I somehow do not value RPMforge as much as EPEL. This is not correct. While EPEL sticks to the Fedora procedures, thus leaving almost no room for collaboration with other 3rd party repositories, RPMforge is the result of the collaborative work of some well-known RPM packagers for RHEL and compatible linux distributions and also provides high quality RPMs. BTW, there are times that I prefer projects driven by a small community rather than a very big one, such as the Fedora Community.

Apart from the above repositories, I also use Adobe‘s yum repository for the Flash plugin and the official Open Office RPM distribution (excluding JRE) from OpenOffice.org.

So, I’ve found myself happy with CentOS and I think I’ll stick with it for a while. Hopefully, not having to deal with so many bugs like it happened in Fedora will leave me with some more free time to get some things done in my own open-source projects or contribute to other projects.

Sticking with CentOS, RPMforge and yum-priorities for now, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/04/07/sticking-with-centos-rpmforge-and-yum-priorities-for-now/feed/ 2 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Update on the Fedora Infrastructure Break-In in August 2008 http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/04/02/update-on-the-fedora-infrastructure-break-in-in-august-2008/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/04/02/update-on-the-fedora-infrastructure-break-in-in-august-2008/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:51:26 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=1013 The Fedora Project has published an announcement about the infrastructure break-in back in August 2008. In this announcement Paul Frields goes into some of the details of that breach. Well, please read the announcement for those details. To tell you the truth, this announcement does not leave me fully satisfied, as I would like some more details about how the Fedora Infrastructure team realized that security had been breached. OK, cron reported a strange error about a cronjob. A little more info on that cronjob and how the error had been connected to an intruder would be really great and appreciated. Another thing I would like some more info about is how the intruder got the administrator’s account password. OK, getting the passwordless SSH key can be explained in various ways, but how has the intruder acquired the admin’s account password? Did he manage to break the encrypted form of the password? Was it too weak? Last but not least, there is absolutely no information about the Fedora Project, possibly with the help of Red Hat, proceeding to any legal actions in order to find out who the intruder was. That would be very interesting information too. Apart from all these, it is quite obvious that the Fedora Project managed to recover from such a difficult situation in about a week. Also, from a user’s perspective, I have to say that the project’s recovery process was completely transparent to me as a Fedora user at that time.

Update on the Fedora Infrastructure Break-In in August 2008, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/04/02/update-on-the-fedora-infrastructure-break-in-in-august-2008/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/12/11/centos-debian-freebsd-opensolaris/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/12/11/centos-debian-freebsd-opensolaris/#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:06:08 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=782 During the last week, I’ve installed several operating systems in Virtualbox or VMware in an attempt to discover the one that manages to balance between innovation and usability. What is funny is that there is one desktop environment I want to use, GNOME, but I cannot decide on the backend, aka the operating system! Of all the above operating systems, OpenSolaris was a surprisingly positive experience. While it uses the latest GNOME release, it wisely does not include other immature pieces of software like pulseaudio. Generally, it seems like an operating system aiming at office desktops. This is good enough and I will definitely install it on a physical partition to check it out extensively in the near future.

As for the others, FreeBSD was exactly as I expected it to be. A system aiming at stability and backwards compatibility, but I am not sure if it would be the right choice for the everyday desktop computer. Like it happens with OpenSolaris, the user needs to do some extensive reading before this OS can reveal its full potential.

CentOS and Debian are two widely used linux distributions. Well, I had never really used Debian before (constantly stuck with RedHat Linux, Mandrake and CentOS), so some reading is also required for this OS too (not as much though as in FreeBSD/OpenSolaris).

What is the conclusion of all those test installations? In terms of easy-migration from Fedora to my new desktop OS, CentOS is probably the #1 candidate to take Fedora‘s place. But, I think I will delay the migration a bit longer in order to have time to check OpenSolaris more thoroughly.

CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/12/11/centos-debian-freebsd-opensolaris/feed/ 8 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Almost saying goodbye to innovation http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/12/10/almost-saying-goodbye-to-innovation/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/12/10/almost-saying-goodbye-to-innovation/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2008 17:23:54 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=764 Having used Fedora 10 for several days, I can say that this release is by far better than Fedora 9 in terms of desktop-related software quality. Of course, it is not bug-free and I still cannot consider it a desktop on which one can work efficiently. Having to deal with numerous known-bugs every six months is totally incompatible with any form of productivity. The last days, I have been considering trying to use CentOS as my primary desktop. It is a distribution I know very well. Even while Microsoft Windows was still my primary desktop, I had been using RedHat Linux, Mandrake Linux and later CentOS, which I currently use both on the Xen Dom0 and on DomUs, in a LAN-only headless home server. My real concern though is that this dull and predictable operating system is not suitable for a desktop. Despite the various community-driven RPM repositories, software availability is a big issue. It is nowhere near the number of packages that are available for Fedora. I recall the days of Fedora Core 3/4 when I was creating RPMs like crazy and I seriously do not wish to do it once again. Another serious drawback is that while usability bugs take months to get fixed on Fedora, it might take ages to see them fixed in CentOS. I’ve been using Fedora as my primary desktop for over 4 years and switching is not an easy decision. On the other hand, I use Fedora on my second server machine, on which this website is hosted, and I’ve never had any issues with it. It is rock solid. No matter which operating system is used, either the conservative CentOS or the innovative Fedora, server software runs perfectly. The real problem is the graphical applications. I’ve never used RedHat Linux in the past or CentOS as a desktop. What I am concerned with is that, if I finally try CentOS as a desktop and do not like it (very likely for the reasons I explaned above), then my only option would be to return back to a Windows desktop as I wouldn’t have any other choices left. This is something I will not like, but, on the other hand, I do not wish to become my computer’s slave for the sake of the freedom of computer software. Period.

This post is not supposed to start a flame about linux distributions, so please allow me to disable comments.

Almost saying goodbye to innovation, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/12/10/almost-saying-goodbye-to-innovation/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Fedora Server Edition? http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/12/05/fedora-server-edition/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/12/05/fedora-server-edition/#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:49:27 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=725 I don’t know if you have noticed it, but the Fedora download page includes the following: “Get Fedora 10 Desktop Edition Now“. Until Fedora 10, there was no “edition” statement. Fedora is a release aiming at desktop computers. Does this title mean that RedHat Inc and the Fedora community plan to release a separate edition of Fedora aiming at server computers? I don’t know if I have missed such an announcement, but the phrase “Get Fedora 10 Desktop Edition Now” definitely implies that. One might wonder though why a Fedora Server Edition should be ever released? Which problems would it solve?

Fedora Server Edition?, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/12/05/fedora-server-edition/feed/ 9 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Updated to Fedora 10 http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/11/27/updated-to-fedora-10/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/11/27/updated-to-fedora-10/#comments Thu, 27 Nov 2008 04:27:11 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=673 Yesterday night, at the moment rTorrent finished downloading the Fedora 10 ISO image, I rushed to burn it to a DVD and perform a clean installation of the operating system. No, I was not that excited about the new features of F10. I just wanted to replace what had been the buggiest desktop I had ever used, GNOME 2.22. All I hope for, as far as software is concerned, is that the 2.24.1 version -included in F10- has less bugs. Please, do not get me wrong. I highly respect the hard work and effort of all GNOME and Fedora contributors. It’s just their decision to release unfinished and therefore unreliable software as stable for the sake of the 6-month release-cycle-madness I criticize! Of course, the same goes for Ubuntu. Lately, I’ve been thinking about trying to use CentOS as a desktop operating system. The software it contains might be a bit outdated, but at least it will help me preserve my sanity.

Updated to Fedora 10, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/11/27/updated-to-fedora-10/feed/ 2 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Use the Alternatives System to switch to a custom Firefox release http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/06/18/use-the-alternatives-system-to-switch-to-a-custom-firefox-release/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/06/18/use-the-alternatives-system-to-switch-to-a-custom-firefox-release/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:46:25 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=496 From a user’s perspective, having to use an old beta version of Firefox in my primary desktop, while, at the same time, a final stable release of the browser has been released, is a bit annoying. But, the fact that this happens due to technical issues makes it partially acceptable. The following article aims to provide step-by-step instructions about how to use the alternatives system to set a custom Firefox release, downloaded from mozilla.org, to be the system’s default. Using this method the user is relieved from having to go through all the firefox launchers and menu entries in order to edit the paths to the firefox executable. Moreover, this post should also be a good example of how to use the alternatives system in the Linux distributions that support it.

Update: Firefox 3.0 final has become available from the official fedora updates repository. It seems that the technical issues of the past do not exist any more! Kudos! This tutorial will still give you an idea though about how to quickly and easily switch between the default and custom versions of the same software in your system.

Fedora 9 has been used as the desktop system for this article. The provided information will certainly work in CentOS and RHEL, but might also work for other linux distributions which use the alternatives system, such as Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE etc. As far as I know, Gentoo and its derivatives use their own system.

In order to check if “alternatives” is available in your system, try one of the following commands:

which alternatives
which update-alternatives

Firefox Installation

First of all, we install a precompiled (binary) Firefox distribution, downloaded from mozilla.org, in the /opt directory. All the following commands should be issued by ‘root‘ or by your regular user using ‘sudo‘.

Change to the /opt directory, download and extract the firefox package:

cd /opt/
wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0.tar.bz2
tar -xjf firefox-3.0.tar.bz2

Now change to the /opt/firefox/ directory, delete the plugins/ subdirectory and create a symlink to the system’s directory containing the firefox plugins (/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ in Fedora).

cd firefox/
rm -fr plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ plugins

The installation of the custom Firefox version is complete.

Set the system-wide default Firefox version

In this section we will use the alternatives system in order to provide us with two options:

  1. Use Fedora’s default Firefox release. This means that /usr/bin/firefox should be executed whenever we issue the ‘firefox‘ command.
  2. Set our custom Firefox release as the system’s default. This means that /opt/firefox/firefox should be executed whenever we issue the ‘firefox‘ command.

Note: Describing the details of the alternatives system is out of the scope of this article, so it is highly recommended that you study the alternatives manual page (man 8 alternatives)

In the following steps we will add a group, named “firefox“, of alternative options for the location of the firefox executable. These options are actually filesystem locations which will be linked by the /usr/local/bin/firefox symlink. Note that we use the /usr/local/bin/… path for our symlink, because /usr/bin/firefox is occupied by fedora’s firefox executable. The latter will not be called directly any more, as the executables located in /usr/local/bin/ override the ones located in /usr/bin/, so whenever the command ‘firefox‘ is invoked, /usr/local/bin/firefox will actually be used. The latter is a symlink, which links to either fedora’s firefox executable or our custom firefox executable.

So, we add the ‘firefox‘ group of options:

/usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/local/bin/firefox firefox /usr/bin/firefox 10
/usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/local/bin/firefox firefox /opt/firefox/firefox 20

Now we can manually set which firefox executable to use as the system’s default. In other words, the following command links /usr/local/bin/firefox to the desired executable (/opt/firefox/firefox in our case):

/usr/sbin/alternatives --set firefox /opt/firefox/firefox

Instead of the --set option as shown above, we can use the –config option, so that a list of the available alternatives is displayed and we are prompted to make a selection:

# /usr/sbin/alternatives --config firefox
There are 2 programs which provide 'firefox'.
  Selection    Command
-----------------------------------------------
   1           /usr/bin/firefox
*+ 2           /opt/firefox/firefox
Enter to keep the current selection[+], or type selection number: 2

Finally, we can issue the following command to get an overview of our current configuration for the group ‘firefox‘:

# /usr/sbin/alternatives --display firefox
firefox - status is manual.
 link currently points to /opt/firefox/firefox
/usr/bin/firefox - priority 10
/opt/firefox/firefox - priority 20
Current `best' version is /opt/firefox/firefox.

Revert to the original state

If for any reason you need to revert things back to the default state, all you have to do in order to remove all the “alternatives” we had configured in the previous section is the following:

/usr/sbin/alternatives --remove firefox /opt/firefox/firefox
/usr/sbin/alternatives --remove firefox /usr/bin/firefox

No other configuration is required. From now on, whenever the ‘firefox‘ command is invoked, fedora’s old /usr/bin/firefox is executed.

Final Thoughts

Technical issues in the linux distribution preparation process might limit the user to certain software versions. The alternatives system provides users with the choice to configure the system in a way that it is extremely easy to switch between default and custom versions of the same software.

Use the Alternatives System to switch to a custom Firefox release, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/06/18/use-the-alternatives-system-to-switch-to-a-custom-firefox-release/feed/ 4 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Desktop now uses Fedora 9 http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/05/16/desktop-now-uses-fedora-9/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/05/16/desktop-now-uses-fedora-9/#comments Fri, 16 May 2008 00:02:24 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=494 This is just a quick note that I have upgraded to Fedora 9. Generally, I am against upgrading an operating system at the time of a new release. The new OS version might be tagged as stable, but it is a fact that, during the first weeks after the release, many new bugs are discovered. Although I knew this very well, I decided to go for Fedora 9 and, so far, I haven’t regret it, despite the several rough edges it contains.

I usually upgrade my server or desktop through yum, but this time I performed a clean install. I wouldn’t expect a yum upgrade to work just one day after the OS’s general availability, taking into account that Fedora does not officially support upgrading through yum. Truth is: I tested it and it would cause much more trouble than good.

What I would consider as the highlight of this release is PackageKit, a program that is used by GNOME in order to stand between the user and the various package managers, so users don’t have to worry about what happens behind the scenes. Personally, I believe that approaching free software’s “chaotic” development model in such a way is good for both the end-users and the active contributors, as it makes their effort more focused and coordinated. PackageKit also includes a command line interface.

The release notes for Fedora 9 contain all the information you need to know about the changes and the new features. If you find it difficult to go through the release notes in their entirety, make sure you at least read the section about the new features of the GNOME desktop environment included in this release or read the relevant section about the desktop environment you use. Finally, if GDM looks a bit ugly, read GDM 2.22 Configuration. Although, I hate the term “known bugs”, this is where you find the Fedora 9′s common bugs and known issues.

Having used Fedora 9 for a day or so, I can say that it is a fine release that deserves your attention. But, I would recommend upgrading to it after a week (or two) hoping that until then most of the annoying bugs will have been resolved.

PS: I tried to take advantage of the new kernel-based mode-setting feature as described in this article at Phoronix, but it did not work. The hardware I tried it on is the following motherboard: ASUS P5KPL-VM using the onboard Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 (GMA 3100). If you have any more clues, please let me know.

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