Category: Linux

Linux is my primary operating system. I used it on the servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and even mobile phones since approximately 1997. I’ve tried a number of distributions over the years, and even created a couple myself. I still look around sometimes to see what others are up to. But most of my machines are running some sort of Red Hat – either a quick and easy Fedora Linux, or a stable and secure Red Hat Enterprise Server, or a cheaper CentOS alternative.

And while by now I am very comfortable in the Linux environment (both graphical and command line), I still discover a lot of new and interesting things about it. When I come across something worthy, I usually share it with the rest of the Open Software world, using this category.

How Linux got to be Linux: Test driving 1993-2003 distros

Here’s a trip down the memory lane – “How Linux got to be Linux: Test driving 1993-2003 distros“.  The article looks at some of the early Linux distributions, remember what was already in and what came later.  Complete with screenshots.

I don’t remember for sure which versions of which distributions I used in the early days, but Slackware, Suse, RedHat and Mandrake were definitely among those.  Slackware was probably my first one, when I found the floppies in the only book on Linux at my college library.  Then, somehow, I found RedHat (I think 5.1 or so) in one of the local computer shops.  Later I tried Mandrake and Suse, cause those were laying around at work.  But RedHat stuck with me ever since.  I think I’ve used pretty much every version, including the move to Fedora, CentOS, and even the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which we had the licenses for at some of my early work places.

Fun times!

HexChat IRC Client

Well, apparently I’ve been leaving under a rock for the last few years.  When it comes down to IRC clients, I’ve been mostly using XChat.  Turns out, XChat has been abandoned for years, and it’s still around mostly because Linux distributions care so much about it that they patch it and ship it.

As with anything in the Linux world, there are plenty of alternatives.  And one of them was right under my nose all these years – HexChat:

HexChat is an IRC client based on XChat, but unlike XChat it’s completely free for both Windows and Unix-like systems. Since XChat is open source, it’s perfectly legal.

HexChat is often shipped right next to where XChat is or used to be.  For Fedora users, it’s as close as “dnf install hexchat“.

dotfiles – your unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub

Warning: you will lose a lot of sleep if you follow the link below. :)

No matter how well you know Vim, bash, git, and a whole slew of other command line tools, I promise you, you’ll find something new, something you had no idea existed, something that will help you save hours and hours of your life by shaving off a few seconds here and there on the tasks you perform on a daily basis, in the repositories link to from this site.

I think I’ve spent most of my Sunday there and my dotfiles are so different now that I’m not sure I should commit and push them all in one go.  I think I might need to get used to the changes first.

Some of the things that I’ve found for myself:

  • PHP Integration environment for Vim (spf13/PIV).
  • myrepos – provides a mr command, which is a tool to manage all your version control repositories.
  • bash-it – a community Bash framework.
  • Awesome dotfiles – a curated list of dotfiles resources.

… and a whole lot of snippets, tips, and tricks.

P.S.: Make sure you don’t spend too much time on these things though :)

Amazon Linux AMI : Let’s Encrypt : ImportError: No module named interface

Let’s Encrypt has only experimental support for the Amazon Linux AMI, so it’s kind of expected to have issues once in a while.   Here’s one I came across today:

# /opt/letsencrypt/certbot-auto renew
Creating virtual environment...
Installing Python packages...
Installation succeeded.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt", line 7, in <module>
from certbot.main import main
File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/certbot/main.py", line 12, in <module>
import zope.component
File "/root/.local/share/letsencrypt/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/zope/component/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
from zope.interface import Interface
ImportError: No module named interface

My first though was to install the system updates. It looks like something is off in the Python-land. But even after the “yum update” was done, the issue was still there. A quick Google search later, thanks to the this GitHub issue and this comment, the solution is the following:

pip install pip --upgrade
pip install virtualenv --upgrade
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python27 venv27

Running the renewal of the certificates works as expected after this.

P.S.: I wish we had fewer package and dependency managers in the world…

Conky – light-weight system monitor for X

Conky is a light-weight system monitor for X.  It supports all kinds of metrics – anything from CPU, memory and network, to emails, music players, and more.

It reminds me of the old days, before Gnome and KDE took over the desktop environments – I think everybody had something similar running as part of the screen background.

The installation on Fedora is trivial – conky is packaged and available with a simple “yum install conky“.  The configuration, on the other hand, is not so much.  GitHub repository provides quite a few fancy user configurations, but there was a change in configuration file format in the version 1.10, and things aren’t as smooth as I would like.

It’ll take a bit of playing around, but I’m sure I’ll eventually lose enough sleep over this to just give up and have something semi-decent on my screen.