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.

Adding flags to Gnome keyboard layout switch

One of the little things that has been bugging me for a few years now is the Gnome keyboard layout switch. I am using two layouts – English and Russian – and instead of having two nice flags, like in KDE, I had to live with ‘USA’ and ‘RUS’ letters in my task bar. Not that big of a problem, but annoying. Icons are much easier and faster to understand than text. And all the other things in my task bar are graphical, so the text stands out too much.

Today I finally decided to do something about. Thanks to this forum post I had a solution in hand which almost worked. The steps were:

Download en.png and ru.png icons into ~/.icons/flags/ folder.
Run gconf-editor.
Change the value of /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/indicator/showFlags to true.

The only thing that went wrong for me were the actual images. Gnome scaled them to 24×24 pixels and they looked rater ugly. So I created my own icons using Gimp. I created a new image 24×24 pixels with transparent background and then dropped in the center of it the flag icon that I got from the FamFamFam icon set. Saved the results back into the ~/.icons/flags/ folder and vuala!

Free Software Conference 2010 in Limassol, Cyprus

Here is an announcement from my friends at UbuntuCy.org forum, who are organizing yet another event to promote Free and Open Source Software.

The Ubuntu Linux Cyprus Local Community in cooperation with the Information Systems and Technology Service of Cyprus University of Technology and the New Technologies Club of CUT, invite you to the Free Software Conference which will be held at the Andreas Themistokleous Building (Old Cadastre) of CUT on the 6th of October. The agenda follows:

Presentations (Pefkios Georgiades Amphitheater) :
6:00 – 6:30 pm: Introduction to Free Software (in Greek)
6:30 – 7:00 pm: Linux Clusters (in Greek)
7:00 – 7:30 pm: Free software: past, present, and the future (in English)
7:30 – 7:45 pm: Projection of the Creative Commons epic short film “Sintel”

Workshops (KXE1 Computer Lab):
8:00 – 8:30 pm: Presentation of the Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop
8:30 – 9:00 pm: Academic Applications for Math, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering.

An installation workshop will be running in parallel with the above, where can practice on how to install Ubuntu and its applications.

There will be free Ubuntu CDs with Free Software for everyone! You can also bring you laptop to test them.

Just so that you don’t get confused – this is tomorrow, October 6th, 2010. It’s going to be in Limassol, on campus of Cyprus University of Technology. And in case you’ll be running late, make sure you get there before 7 o’clock. Yes, I’m going to deliver a speech in English on the subject of past, present, and future of the Free and Open Source Software. Maybe we can talk more and catch a beer afterwards. Don’t miss it! Here is a leaflet for you if you need something printed.

Installing Google Talk plugin for voice and video on Fedora Linux

With recent news of Google adding support for telephone calls from GTalk, I thought it was time to finally setup voice and video plugin on my system. The good thing is that Google provides the Linux version of the browser plugin. The bad news are that the plugin is only packaged for Debian-based systems, while I am a Fedora Linux user. But thanks to a couple of Google searches, the solution is known and is quite simple in fact. Here is what I had to do.

Download the browser plugin-in (.deb file, 6 MB).
Extract the content of the google-talkplugin_current_i386.deb file, using ark, or file-roller, or, like me, using Midnight Commander.
In the extracted files, you’ll see data.tar.gz . Extract it to your system folders (/opt, /usr, /etc). In fact, you can skip /etc part that sets up a cron job to update the plugin daily. It relies on apt, which you probably won’t have installed and configured on your Fedora system.
Try running the plugin in command line, using: /opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin
If you see the error like “/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, fix it by creating a symbolic link: cd /usr/lib && ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0a libssl.so.0.9.8
If you see the error like “/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, fix it by installing Adobe Reader: yum install AdobeReader_enu-9.3.3-1.i486 , and then creating the symbolic link: cd /usr/lib && ln -s /opt/Adobe/Reader9/Reader/intellinux/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 . If you don’t have adobe repo configured or want an alternative to having Adobe Reader on your system, examine the output of “yum provides libcrypto.so.0.9.8“, which will tell you which other packages have the required library.
Restart your browser.
Check that the plugin is installed and enabled by looking at “about:plugins” or a similar page of your browser.

Now you should be able to use voice and video chat in GTalk. Here is a screenshot I made of a video chat after I did all of the above steps.

If your browser still complains about not having the plugin installed, or plugin crashes for some reason, just run it from the command line (step 4). Examine the output and act accordingly. Usually everything should just work, and pretty much the only scenario when it doesn’t is when you don’t have required libraries installed on your system, or you have them installed in a different path than the plugin expects them. Symbolic links should fix the path issue. Yum should help you with locating any missing library.

Enjoy!

Where did all the Linux netbooks go?

Adam Williamson asks the question after doing a bit of research across several major vendors and online shops.

where the hell did all the Linux netbooks go? In 2007 you couldn’t buy a netbook with Windows; in 2008 to 2009 you could still walk into a big box store just about anywhere and pick from a few with Linux; now, you can buy one from one store in England with an Android dual boot, one from a hidden page on Ubuntu’s site with an inferior configuration to its equally-priced Windows equivalent, and one from a very well hidden bit of HP’s site with a $132 premium over its identically-specified Windows equivalent.

I am not a big expert in this matter, but I tend to agree with some of his conclusions:

the cynical side of me can come up with a lot of explanations as to where all those pre-loads went, and all of them involve large amounts of money going out of Microsoft bank accounts

And I think that’s pretty reasonable. After the netbook market is different from the desktop one. In the desktop world, Linux has a number of ongoing problems, such as office applications, games, and so on and so forth. But most netbooks aren’t powerful enough to run those applications. Their primary use is of a simple Internet device – browsing the web, reading email, chatting, etc. And for this purpose, the operating system is pretty much irrelevant. Most of these tasks are done in the browser. And browser-wise Linux is rich – Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and more.

So, how come all these netbooks are now selling with Windows and not Linux. It can’t be just Microsoft Internet Explorer. After all, most end users don’t even know what the browser is. There must be another reason. And probably it’s not a technical reason. And as Adam says, it must be some of those reasons that involve large amounts of money going out of Microsoft bank accounts.

If you have any other ideas, please do share via comments.

Shell keyboard shortcuts

I came across a very useful post with the listing of many shell keyboard shortcuts. The article covers a mix of bash, csh, zsh, and Cisco shell keyboard shortcuts. The article is in Russian, but I think it will be helpful for more people, so I took the liberty to translate it. Continue reading for the translation.

Continue reading Shell keyboard shortcuts