Fedora Linux

fpm – build packages for multiple platforms (deb, rpm, etc) with great ease and sanity

fpm – Effing package management! Build packages for multiple platforms (deb, rpm, etc) with great ease and sanity.

yum-s3-plugin – yum plugin for Amazon S3 hosted repositories

Upgrading to Skype 4.3 on Linux

Today Skype failed to log me in on one of my Fedora Linux laptops. That, I guess, is a part of the force upgrade to Skype 4.3. While doing so, I came across two issues:

Download Skype page is broken in Google Chrome. After choosing the Linux distribution nothing happens. Switching to Firefox helps.
The new, upgraded Skype crashes about 2 seconds after a successful login. When started from the command line, a simple Aborted message is displayed. Nothing more. (Maybe because I have core dumps disabled). After a bit of Googling around, all you need to do is rename your ~/.Skype/ folder into something else and restart Skype. This will lose your history, some settings, and edited contact names. But the Skype will work and your contacs will still show up in correct groups.

No “thank you” to you, Microsoft. Huge thank you to you, Google. Once again you saved the day.

Upgrading Fedora 14 to Fedora 20 is always fun!

I’m upgrading my wife’s laptop from Fedora 14 to Fedora 20. That’s plenty of fun! I’ve done this before with other machines, but memory isn’t my strongest suit. First, preupgrade fails complaining that there are no repositories anymore. That’s to be expected, with even Fedora 18 being passed end of life. The replacement for preupgrade – fedup – isn’t yet available for the releases that old. Digging around I found a DVD with Fedora 19, which would work just fine, if only upgrade option hasn’t been removed from the recent Fedora releases.

So the only option that I see, except for a complete fresh install, is to follow the yum upgrade path. Which is a bumpy ride, but it did get me to the destination before. So here we go …

$ yum clean all
$ rpm -Uvh http://.../releases/16/.../fedora-release*rpm
$ yum upgrade
$ yum update
$ reboot

That’ll get me to Fedora 16. Try the preupgrade/fedup option to go to Fedora 18. If not there, repeat the above. Then go to Fedora 20. Jumping more than 2 releases at a time is not recommended.

Good luck!

Fedora and USB disks going into /run/media/user

As part of systemd/DBus revolution, newer Fedoras have this annoying feature that all USB disks get mounted into to /run/media/[user]/[diskname] (also /var/run/media, which is a symlink).

[…]

To return old behavior back and make udisks2 change mount point to /media, create a file /etc/udev/rules.d99-usb-shared-media.rules:

ENV{ID_FS_USAGE}=="filesystem", ENV{UDISKS_FILESYSTEM_SHARED}="1"

udev should notice and read this file automatically. After this, just unplug and plug your USB drive back to see it in good old /media.