Fedora Linux

Fedora 16 : going back to KDE 4

If you follow my Twitter stream, by now you’d know that I’ve upgraded my laptop to the brand new and shining Fedora 16. In case you were wondering how it went, I’m happy to report that everything went smoothly. Even more smoothly than I’ve expected. Given my laptop’s weird wireless card, I always have this problem with kernel-kmod-something package not being available at the time of the distribution upgrade. That usually means that I lose wireless connectivity for a day or two after I upgrade. But not this time. Either the package was ready by the release date or the driver that I’m using is incorporated into the distribution itself. I don’t know, and, honestly, I don’t care. I’m just happy that it works right out of the box without any tweaks on my part.

I’ve upgraded from the DVD, since the torrent was the first downloadable option, before Fedora 16 was available via preupgrade. The process looks very familiar – boot from DVD, choose language, choose whether to install or upgrade and existing installation (that was my choice), and let it run for an hour or so, depending on how many packages you have installed and on how fast your DVD drive is.

On first boot, the biggest difference was the graphical login screen, which looks way better now. Logging into Gnome 3, I haven’t noticed much changes. Yes, there is an option to add your Google Account to online accounts now, which I did, but so far I don’t know what it does and why would you want to do that. I noticed that when I move to Activities and start typing, Gnome 3 searches not only through my installed applications, but also through my contacts. But that functionality is not of much use to me. After using Gnome 3 for about 30-40 minutes, I caught myself thinking that is is a bit faster, snappier if you will, than the previous version. Maybe that’s just me and the feeling of new, maybe it’s the forced reboot after the installation – again, I don’t know and I don’t really care.

Distribution upgrade is always a good time to change habits, so I decided to give KDE 4 another try. In the last 6 month or so I got somewhat used to Gnome 3, but it is still far away from being a productive system for me. I’ve just learned how to do things I need with it, but it still doesn’t feel right or gives me any pleasure. Hence, KDE. My last few tries, which were ranted about at length in this blog, gave me no pleasure either. This time, however, it looks different. Things just work the way I expect them to. All fonts – both for Qt and GTK applications – look good and uniform, icons are on the desktop, panel has shortcuts, the start menu is in place, and, oh boy how much I’ve missed you, the taskbar is there. I’ve almost forgot how awesome it is to see Skype icon with notifications of incoming chats without having to move your mouse to bottom right corner every time.

The performance of the KDE 4 is also much improved these days. It’s fast and responsive. And it can still remember my keyboard shortcuts configured ages ago. That’s mighty useful.

If you are still waiting for me to describe a problem or two that I experienced, then the only thing I can give you is this. Both Apache and MySQL service were down for some reason after upgrade. Restarting MySQL helped straight away, but Apache didn’t want to start. I had a much customized configuration that I have been dragging from place to place, so I decided to clean it up a bit. I disabled configurations for mod_perl, mod_python and a bunch of other features, leaving just the ones I actually need. Restarting the service helped this time, bringing everything back to normal.

So, there you go. In short, Fedora 16 is the next, improved and solid release for which we should thank all the Fedora community and everyone involved. Thanks guys, you are doing a heck of a job. Even with occasional hiccups here and there, I’m still much amazed as to how far you took this distribution in all these years. Kudos!

Fedora 16 dedicated to Dennis Ritchie

According to the release notes of Fedora 16 (work in progress), this release of the popular Linux distribution is dedicated to Dennis Ritchie, who passed away recently. I think this is an excellent idea.

During the preparation of Fedora 16, the computing world lost one of its great contributors: Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie co-invented Unix and the C language. He also co-authored “The C Programming Language”, a book that taught many programmers just at the time personal computing was exploding. Without Ritchie computing would be nothing like it is today.
A humble man, not well-known outside his field, Dennis will always be remembered by those of us who practice the craft. Thank you Dennis.

Free Software Workshop 2011

I totally forgot to blog and let you know in advance about this, but they say it’s better late than never, so here it goes. The Ubuntu-Cy guys are organizing yet another event – Free Software Workshop 2011. It’s going to take place tonight, Friday, October 21st, 2011 at KXE1 Computer Lab at Cyprus University of Technology (CUT) in Limassol, Cyprus.

Below is the English version of the announcement, including the program. Visit this forum thread for any updates and for the Greek version.

Workshops of Free and Open Source Software 2011

The Ubuntu Linux Local Community in collaboration with the Information Systems and Technology Service of CUT and the New Technologies Club of CUT, invites you to a showcase event about the features the Free/Open Source Software in medicine, computing, home entertainment and search methods . The event will be held on October 21, 2011 in the KXE1 computer room of CUT, in the Andreas Themistocleous building (Old Land registry) in Limassol:

Click here for the Google Maps location

The agenda of the event is as follows:

18:00 to 18:30: “Free / Open Source in everyday medical practice” (Greek)
Dr. Eugene Metaxas

18:40 – 19:10: “What is version control software and why do you need it?” (English)
Leonid Mamchenkov

19:20 – 19:50: “XBMC as a core of home entertainment” (English)
Michael Stepanov

20:00 – 20:30: “make install: Installation Methods of Free/Open Source Software” (Greek)
Marios Isaakidis

20:30 to 21:00: “Intelligent search techniques” (Greek)
Theodotos Andreou

21:10 – 21:40: “Linux Security Tools” (Greek)
Gregoris Chrysanthou

The event is open to everyone and you can bring your laptop if you need any help. We are also going to give away Linux CDs/DVDs

Try Free and Open Source Software! Information without obstacles!

As you can see, I will be one of the speakers. Also, my very good friend Michael will do a presentation.

Once we are all done with the talks, we’ll probably move to a bar to continue the discussion over a pint. So if you are interested in Free and Open Source software, Linux, or just want to meet with fellow geeks, don’t miss this opportunity. They don’t come that often.

Fedora 17 is a Beefy Miracle

The community has voted on the name for the next release of Fedora Linux. The name ‘Beefy Miracle‘ has won the voting race. It got most of the votes despite all the noise and protests from the ‘serious’ people. Personally, I am in favor of this name for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I don’t see Fedora as a ‘serious’ distribution. Not in the enterprise kind of way. It is a bleeding edge Open Source project which is supposed to be fun. And it is. So, nothing wrong with a funny name.

Secondly, for those who do promote Fedora in the enterprise environments, there is really no need to use the name. They can still reference the release by number. And Fedora Linux 17 sounds strict and official.

Thirdly, through the history of all Fedora releases, there were just a few names that I actually understood and could remember. ‘Beefy Miracle’ is easy to remember.

Fourthly, there were too much hype of different vegetarian cultures recently. I have nothing against that. But as a huge fan of meats, I’m glad to see any kind of meat promotion. Be that beefy or porky – I don’t mind at all.

Fifly, c’mon people – it’s just a name. It’s not a project or person name. It’s a release name. No matter what it is, in a year or so it will fade away. Like all the others did. Seriously, who can still remember Heidelberg, or Stentz, or even Laughlin?

tmux – Linux terminal multiplexer

I stumbled upon a very useful tool – tmux. It is a terminal multiplexer for Linux. If you are using Terminator or screen, you’d want to check it out. If you don’t use either of those, you definitely need to check it out.

With tmux, you can have a single shell in which you can create multiple sessions. You can split each session into a number of windows. You can detach from tmux and all your sessions and windows will remain open and running, much like with screen. Later you can attach back to them again or you can start a totally new instance. The interface is keyboard driven. It is simple and intuitive, but as with any other tool, you’ll need a bit of time to get used to it.

If you are a Fedora Linux user, all you have to do to try it out is: ‘yum install tmux‘. If you can read Russian, here is a quick introduction to most useful shortcuts. Check the official website for the rest of the documentation.