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bash-completion

nick — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 19:47:00 +0100

If like me you can be a little slow at times you need this in your life.

Centos/Fedora Linux:

#!/bin/bash
$sudo yum install bash-completion

OSX: https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/bash-completion

Beefy Miracle

nick — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:22:00 +0100

I really hope that the next version of fedora gets called "Beefy Miracle"

You can vote for your favourite name at https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/about/relnamef16 but I can't see how anything can beat the beef!

Fedora 14 Images on EC2

nick — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:32:00 +0000

Browsing the Fedora 14 release notes and I notice that the project will be creating amazon machine images (AMI's) going forward... now that's tempting!

See: Fedora 14 Currently Supported EC2 Images

The only issue currently stopping me is that Fedora boxes need updates all the time, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad with a minimal image!

Fedora 10 & ffmpegthumbnailer

nick — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:36:00 +0100

I've recently upgraded from F7 to F10 and was surprised to see that ffmpegthumbnailer hasn't made it into the yum repo's yet!

As I use ffmpegthumbnailer for PS3 Video thumbnails I needed to find a solution to this.

If I had the time I'd knock up a .spec file & rpm, but for the time being I thought I'd post my bodge.... NUMBER ONE, if you've never typed "configure;make;make install" before you need to install the development tools.

sudo yum groupinstall "development tools"

Next pick up a couple of extra dependencies...

sudo yum install libpng libpng-devel ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

You should now find that, if you download the source, unpack it - gunzip ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0.tar.gz;tar -xvf ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0.tar and cd ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0 hopefully you can complete ./configure without any errors.

If you try make at this point it'll probably fail with errors, this is how I fixed that....

cd /usr/include/ffmpeg/ ln -s libavcodec/avcodec.h ./ ln -s libavformat/avformat.h ./ ln -s libswscale/swscale.h ./ ln -s libavformat/avio.h ./

Now you can... get back to the build

cd ~/ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0 make sudo make install

If all has gone well you should have a working install :)

Windows Key on Fedora, Thank you Ruben

nick — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:44:00 +0000

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 :D

Fedora HP Compaq nc6320: Overheating CPU

nick — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:25:00 +0000

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!

I need to get some colleagues to run coretemp for a while to see if my laptop is broken or if it's normal for this model of latop to run hot; in the meantime I thought I'd post some tips on what I've done to cool my laptop down. I've managed to get Fedora to idle at around 58ºC which is much closer to my windows base-line.

CPUSpeed is a service/daemon which controls what the processor is doing, i.e. if you're not running a lot it scales down the processor to run slower and use less power, thus runs cooler. I found that my daemon was actually crashing at boot up....

#/etc/init.d/cpuspeed status
cpuspeed dead but subsys locked 
#

The config file for cpuspeed is /etc/sysconfig/cpuspeed, I've changed the govenor from blank (default: auto detect) to GOVERNOR=ondemand which seems to have solved my crashing issue. The second thing I've changed is IGNORE_NICE=1 (default: 0) which is now restricting which processes can scale up the CPU. The only performance impact I've seen is that this setting now stops VMWARE from consuming my CPU, and since I'm a patient man this is no bad thing :)

Whilst comparing my windows temp to my linux one it occurred to me that it wasn't entirely fair, in linux I've got compiz graphics enabled, and a load of gnome applets which tell me information about networking, cpu speed, cpu temperature, the weather etc.... since windows has none of these it's fair to say that my linux desktop should run a little hotter.... so the "other" trick I've done to bring the temperature down is to renice the applets to a lower priority...

ps ax | grep "applet" | grep -v grep|cut -c 1-5|xargs sudo renice 1

This seems to have done the trick, anything called "applet" now runs at nice 1 rather than 0, the net effect is these processes are queued up behind the "important" ones rather than continuously scaling up the processor.

I'm happy with the results so far, the desk is a lot cooler!

MediaTomb makes its way into fedora

nick — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:13:00 +0000

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 :D

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

A big thanks to mwiriadi for this!

Fedora 7 to 8

nick — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 12:21:00 +0000

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:

Unfortunately so far I've had a couple of issues (my steps back),

Network Manager won't connect to my Hidden SSID
RHGB doesn't seem to work with encrypted drives
... and I haven't had a chance to look into why vpnc crashes when I try to configure it !

It's a shame that beagle still doesn't index my evolution exchange account other than that all looks good, the wallpaper that changes on the time of day is a neat feature; I recommend the following resources to anyone looking to upgrade or use fedora.

Fedora 8 install guide (aka perfect install)
Fedora FAQ

Fixing Some Life Irritating Bugs....

nick — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:43:00 +0000

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....

Fedora: Java Clobbers/Breaks File Associations in Gnome/Nautilus
Gmail: Can't enable IMAP, because it's not available in UK English.
WMA to MP3: Converted some old tracks I found in a backup.
Gnome: Changed the colour of tooltips as doing it in the theme file didn't work
Eye Candy: Fixed my CPU Temp Gauge (by typing sensors-detect, and following the instructions!)

Enjoy!

Fedora 7: Theming the Gnome Screensaver Lock Dialogue

nick — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 09:29:00 +0100

[![Fedora 7 Flying High Locked Theme](https://www.linickx.com/files/2008/05/locked-150x150.png "Fedora Locked")](https://www.linickx.com/files/2008/05/locked.png)

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 tosomething 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

The only "downer" is that your avatar isn't shown, but for my work laptop I prefer this theme, much cooler fedora advocate when I'm not at my desk ;)