I’ve been running compiz fusion on Fedora 8 for a while and found that my windows key short-cuts only work half the time; well I found that if I…

add Option "XkbOptions" "altwin:super_win" to the InputDevice section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf

It works every time. I’ve logged in and out of my laptop a few times over the last couple of days and had no problems since.

Thank you Ruben

I’ve been having issues with my laptop overheating recently, in fact ever since loading fedora the cpu has run hot. According to CoreTemp when in windows my CPU idles at 56ºC ( i.e. I’ve logged into windows opened outlook and walked away) considering my AMD Desktop machine runs at 40ºC with two users logged and the CPU peaking at 100%, means that my laptop cooks. In Fedora I’ve found that the CPU actually Idles at around 70ºC which is a joke, it means that the fan is kicking out hot air causing my desk and everything around it to get proper hot - don’t leave any chocolate bars near me!

Looking through the my yum updates for the day I notice that mediatomb is set for an update, is this the version 0.11 with transcoding we’ve all been waiting for? Sadly no, but it is a fedora build for the default repo - YAY

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=5527

A big thanks to mwiriadi for this!

As it’s quiet at work (due to the usual x-mas madness) I decided on Friday to upgrade from Fedora 7 to 8, now this was a bit of a risk for me since I have F7 running perfectly. The fedora release notes advise a clean install over an upgrade, so it’s important when you do this to backup /etc so that you can restore anything you need later.

As with all fedora installs it’s always two steps forward and one step back, my reasons for upgrading were:

• Evolution 2.12
• Pam & Network Manager Integration and a Network Manager Upgrade

As Christmas draws closer, time becomes more of a premium, as a result blog activity suffers… I’ve thought about using twitter for my blog category, in the mean-time I’m using it with googletalk & facebook, so we’ll see if that develops.

I’ve had a chance to fix some annoying bugs with my laptop/life, and thought I’d share them here, they’ll pop-up in delicious when I get a chance to go thought my shared list, but until then here are some links….

I stumbled across this the other day, I’ve no idea why the fedora team would go to the effort of making a really nice theme for the lock dialogue for gnome screen saver then leave it “disabled by default”. After a quick google I found the ubuntu guys have been up to something similar, so here a quick how to enable the fedora art work on the gnome-screensaver lock screen.

To enable paste this into a terminal (NOT root, as your normal user).

gconftool-2 -s --type=string /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_dialog_theme system


To switch it back:

gconftool-2 -s --type=string /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_dialog_theme default


I found this on redhat.com the other day….

It is now possible to limit yum to install security updates only. To do so, simply install the yum-security plugin and run the following command:

yum update –security

Hopefully this will allow fedora users to have the option of running a “stable” install

There are times where you cannot use WiFi, for example my workplace’s WLAN uses LEAP, which maemo doesn’t support. I found that setting up USB networking on my n800 was a bit of a pain since there isn’t a single document… if you check my del.icio.us feed you’ll see I bookmarked all I could find with a usbnet tag.

These are the steps I ran through to enable usb networking between my nokia n800 and my fedora 7 laptop.

It’s not often I blog twice in a day, but after seeing this post I just had to see if I could build a rpm for fedora 7.

I’ve updated my repo for fedora 7, so.. yum install weather-wallpaper should do the trick

Edit: Hidden yum transation behind more tag.

A fedora start page is being tested… the original mine looks a little different tho, nothing a quick css update wouldn’t fix

... note quite working as expected!

I saw this on planet fedora and thought I’d post it,

GNOME Password Generator is now back as a Fedora package.

Reference: Debarshi’s den - gnome-password-generator@fedoraproject.org

It’ll be nice to have an alternative to this perfect password generator as we’re not always online are we

I was doing some testing on my server the other day, and realised that http compression within apache (httpd) was not enabled by default. Further digging showed me that mod_defate was what I needed, and infact it was installed by default on my CentOS box.

How to enable mod_default on Centos: Create /etc/httpd/conf.d/deflate.conf with the following contents

Why has it taken me so long to spot this ? Looks like this draft was written on the 13th May, if I hadn’t have been just about to download FC7 then I’d have missed it !

EPEL - Fedora Project Wiki
EPEL is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs like CentOS or Scientific Linux.

About time, and thank you redhat/fedora, want fedora extra packages in centos, then install this epel-release .rpm frickin’ sweet !

If you look after a remote linux box, the chances are you use SSH, in order to connect to it you may even have to leave PORT 22 open to the whole Internet !

There are some basic security steps that you can do to protect SSH, such as block the root user from logging in, and force users to use STRONG authentication.

A couple of weeks ago, I was proper ill with flu; the problem with looking after your own server is that only you can fix it - it’s well and good having monitoring systems (nagios) telling you about faults, but if you can’t read or see the alerts the fault won’t get resolved.

During this time I was ill, for an unknown reason the mySQL process on my server died, as such my website (and others I look after) were down for 8 hours. The fix was simple, one command, restart the service and normal service was resumed (excuse the pun).