Make sure your attached to the internet

have you used live update yet?

Jock, Yes, but there never seems to be anything worth updating.
How do I access and run Yum.

Twitcher, I've tried your instructions also to no avail, nothing happens.
Are there any books out here that would teach me the basics of this Linux thing?

Run live update and install everything it suggests

I think your not connected to the internet properly

are you getting to the stage you have a command line ending #

It has just updated a long list of things and in Terminal there is a $ in front of the cursor.
It still has firefox version 2.

type

sudo su

and it should go to #

then copy and paste the whole of below and hit return.

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

when it comes back to #

copy and paste

yum upgrade

Eureka!
Thanks Mad Jock and Twitcher.
I owe you both a dram or two of the finest malt.
I followed your instructions tonight and it worked.
I have that slightly bewildered feeling one gets when these
computer things do what people say they will.
Thanks again fellas.

Did you do it the manual way or did you mange to get yum to work?

Its been over a year since i had the linpus on my one and its just for personal reference if anyone else asks me. I can't really rememebr what i did to mine before I put the full fedora distro on it.

Jock,
I started with your post 7 then did post 24 and then followed
Twitcher's post 13.
I have no idea what effects have taken place elsewhere under the bonnet or quite how to use yum again.
7AC

yum is an installation manager. It goes off and finds out what's available for you to install and then if you install something it sorts out what other bits and bobs you need to run it and loads them as well.

After you have installed a program it will using the "yum update" command go off and check to see if there have been any updates and if so install them for you.

So say you wanted to have a different movie player you would get to the stage of having a terminal with the # and type "yum install vlc" it would bugger off and sort everything out and install it. And for ever more when you typed "yum upgrade" it would disappear off and get the latest version.

Doing it the manual way will mean that the firefox won't be in the list of applications yum will automatically upgrade.

Anyway glad its working now.

I'm glad you got it sorted :ok:
I found those instructions easy as they were written in a straightforward way, worked first time for me so thought I'd share.

Help sought - Linux and modern(ish) hardware
 

Folks

I'm reasonably familiar with *Nix, running Linux and Macs alongside Windows at home but tearing my hair out with this one.

I'm running 3 machines on Win7 RC and need to do something :-). Would love to upgrade them all but can't afford 3x licenses right now so decided to try Linux on my media centre. The PC is a few years old but has had various upgrades to keep it fettling along for media centre use. It runs very nicely under Win7.

My other Linux box is an old clunker, 1.8Ghz AMD Athlon, 1 GB RAM and an old integrated Intel GPU - used only for surfing, email and "futzing". Works fine.

The media PC has an AMD (ATI) Radeon 9800 Pro and a Creative Labs Xfi GamerXtreme sound card. I installed Mythbunutu as the pre-loaded nature of Myth TV onto Ubuntu seemed to make sense, especially as this is a "spouse friendly" media PC and to the very best of my abilities, the OS should be hidden for ever...

The rebuild has been a total pain. It seems that Linux just doesn't get along with ATI cards and getting SPDIF out from the sound card has completely defeated me. I class myself as expert on Windows, competent on *Nix and hardware and have been developing software for years but the archaic 1990's nature of buggering around with ALSA, kernel compiles and similar nonsense has worn me down.

So, the questions I have are:

1. Recognise the need to abandon the ATI but don't want to spend much. It's only a media PC so doesn't need to be a graphics screamer and any cost, added to the time I've wasted, rapidly adds up to the cost of the Windows license I'm trying to avoid. Seems that nVidia is the way to go. Any recommendations for cheap nVidia cards that will fit the bill or other GPU familiies that don't need the personal assistance of Linus Torvalds to get running?

2. Any clues (and yes, I've spent hours in Google) on how to get the SPDIF out running? I don't get any errors and from a UI and configuration perspective, Linux thinks it's enabled but there is nothing coming out of the jack.

3. Is there any advantage to sticking with Linux on my media PC? My original motivation was simply to avoid cost but so far, I have yet to see any advantage, in fact only disadvantages.

4. Given the above, I've had little chance to play with the Myth TV interface. Tried a couple of different skins but it seems to be a long way behind Windows Media Centre. Is this a fair conclusion or should I persevere?

I can get a Windows upgrade license for around £67 and I've already spent many hours trying to get Linux to work but if I have to spend more than about £40 on hardware, I'll just go ahead and buy Windows.

Thanks for any help/clues/pointers....

Cheers

I would try other flavours of linux using a live OS stick and see if any of the others work out of the box.

For 67 quid its a no brainer..... especially if the mrs uses it...... get the wallet out

Re-installing Windows XP
 

Background.
I use a Mac, my wife has Windows XP on a Dell Lattitude and my son has LinuxMint 8 on his desk top.
Having been v.impressed by Mint I loaded it onto my neighbour's laptop, taking over the whole disk. Can't remember if she had XP or Vista on it, XP I think.
Anyway, she hates the Linux install and wants XP back.
And I can't. I have read much about MS not recognizing the hard disk and I have tried countless times to reinstall including partitioning in Mint. Then the NTFS formatting is unsuccessful.

Help!!!

low level format using fdisk.

Then try again.

Hi mad_jock.

I tried SuSE, Fedora and Mandrake. No go. Thanks for the suggestion..

£62.50 shelled out for Win7 :ok:

Cheers

If anyone is interested in trying out a relatively newcomer to the Linux distros environment I would recommend Igelle 1.0 The distro comes out of Norway, I believe, is really tightly integrated and contains lots of eye candy.
And it boots up in less than 30 seconds. (On my desktop anyway.)
It comes as a Live CD so you can try it before installing it.

Check it out!!!

Not sure if this is strictly a Linux question
I've got a PC with XP using a Netgear DG834PN Router with encrypted access
I've managed to configure the PC settings etc so the PC works OK
I've got a small ASUS EEE 700 loaded with Linux Xandros but I am not able to 'lock in' the c26 letter alphanumeric WPA code so I can log on painlessly without having to punch in all 26 digits each time
Anyone out there with a similar ASUS able to talk me through how to do it, preferably in the 'noddiest' of terms ?
Thanks
NRU74

Ubuntu & Flash Player
 

Linux newbie here.

Over the weekend I installed Ubuntu on what had recently been a (broken) Win XP system. This was my first foray into the world of *ix, and the learning curve was fairly steep. The results, so far, have been such that I'm now considering dumping the Win OS completely; but there is just one small problem - Adobe Flash doesn't work.

Trying to install "install_flash_player_10_linux.deb" downloaded from get.adobe dot com gives the message "Error: Wrong architecture 'i386'". Admitted, the CPU is AMD64 .. but that hasn't been a problem up to now. Is there a suitable alternative I haven't yet found?

If not, I guess I'll just have to wait for a few days and install Win 7. (Unable to survive without iPlayer etc.).

Trying to install "install_flash_player_10_linux.deb" downloaded from get.adobe dot com gives the message "Error: Wrong architecture 'i386'". Admitted, the CPU is AMD64 .. but that hasn't been a problem up to now. Is there a suitable alternative I haven't yet found?

You could install a 32-bit copy of Ubuntu, but that's a massive performance hit. To keep the native 64-bit system you need to do one of two things - install the "32-bit compatability libraries", or find a software repository that includes Flash and will therefore install the whatever libraries it need automagically through the software installer. On my Ubuntu 9.10 system "medibuntu" supplies the non-free/proprietary software andf they have lots of "flash" packages -- can't guarantee they include what you need, but it's a start. Another possible place to check is the Penguin Liberation Front. Google will find tutorials on adding extra repositories to your software installer.

In the Linux world there are some distributions that make it difficult to install proprietary software, as Flash is, and Ubuntu and all other Debian-derived distros are included. The most relaxed distribution that I know for installation of proprietary s/w is Mandriva.


'b

Thanks Aero,

Having trawled this forum I subsequently downloaded SimplyMepis and I am running that from the CD - with mixed success. Flash is working - sorta. Video images move but the sound is terrible, to the point of being unintelligible. Will continue exploring what's available and make a decision on which flavour of OS will have the honour of driving me crazy. :ugh:

I would try installing the fedora distro

I started first of all with fedora and have had so little grief of it i have zero reason to change my flavour of distro

Thanks, MJ.

Apologies for my prolonged absence, but Win7 arrived and just needed to be installed and tested. After all, I've been using it's ancestors all the way back to Win95 (and OS/2 before that).

What a disappointment - not only did it manage to render my newly installed Mepis system unreachable by peremptorily overwriting GRUB in the MBR, but it refuses to recognize my sound card! And I'm less than impressed by the UI. It may stay on the machine as option B - if I get really stuck, but it ain't my OS of choice.

I'll probably give Fedora a try when I stop "playing" with Mepis, which is so far ahead of Ubuntu that I've recycled the live CD as a beer mat.

Anyone want to buy a set of Win7 installation DVDs? One (fairly) careful owner, low mileage (been used once), not even registered with MS. :}

Win 7 Disk
 

Yes, I'll buy your Win 7 disks - name a reasonable price.

a friend has passed me a CD of Ubuntu 9.10 which I am trying to run in live mode, in a Dell laptop PC. The system boots up OK but I cannot persuade it to connect to our O2 wireless router. I have been through several Unix/Ubuntu websites and tried to follow the guidance on wireless setup but I don't really understand what the info presented is supposed to tell me. I am new to Unix, as an admin, but have used it as a user some 20 years ago. Please explain in words of one syllable what I should be doing.

Any ideas anyone?

So far, I understand that the wireless network hardware is 2200 and it is being seen by the software. It makes no attempt to connect or report any available networks. I can't cut and paste stuff to here as this is a different machine (win vista) so please don't ask me to put reams of stuff from the screen on the BB.

Thanks Andrew.

Rans6Andrew (excellent choice of aircraft if your name is reflective of that by the way :ok:)

I'm assuming you've seen the network manager icon at the top right of the window? If you've clicked on it, it will show you the wireless networks it can access. If network manager is doing it's job you shouldn't need to configure the wireless by hand.

If you have clicked on network manager & it tells you it can't find any networks then the wireless drivers aren't working correctly, but that would be unusual as Ubuntu 9.10 has a wide variety of wireless support.

Anyway, first question. Can Network Manager find the wireless connection at all?

Batninth, thank you for your response. I was blinded by the science and failed to notice that the radio in the Dell was OFF when I typed iwconfig. doh!

Luckily the Fn + F2 key combination worked to enable the radio and then I started to see the available network icons......

It works.

Oh, and yes, I do have a Rans S6 503, have had since 2002, been all over in it. Took Er Indoors to France in it last September. Also built a Zodiac 601ul last year, the permit didn't come through in time for the French trip.

What do you fly?

Rans6....

Now I have connectivity, what do I need to add to enable youtube videos to play?

Rans6...

Flash. In Ubuntu you should be able to do something like 'sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer' to install it and automatically keep it up to date.

I found the best way to enable flash content was to get the browser to ask & then let the package manager work it out. Package manager comes up with three options for playing flash, I'd suggest the real Adobe one is the better option although I've used the other open source alternatives & they work ok.

Ubuntu also goes and finds any required codecs, so the first time you go to a media file or media stream it'll take a few moments then will ask if you want it to go & get the media support. Again, I've not had any problems with this & haven't had to resort to command line since Ubuntu 7 to get media support working

BTW rans6andrew
Rans S6 582

Yeah, I knew there was some way to install Flash from the GUI but couldn't remember what it was :).

Perhaps you have found a fix for this by now, but FWIW I have a somewhat similar combination of equipment here, and my 701 finds and logs on to the home wireless system by itself most of the time. However I use one of the shorter option WEP codes (10 characters) for another reason, and that may be a clue. It could be that trying a shorter code option for your wireless security may be more in line with the tiny machine's capability.

I hope you can find a fix - typing in all those characters each time is not a lot of fun on that smallish keyboard.

Regards,

FO Rudder

Scheduling jobs without crontab?
 

A question further to my post about reading SMART temperature values from a remote Linux box (in my case a Western Digital MyBook World Edition II NAS - White lights not Blue light model).

Thanks to some great help I received I now have a nice script that outputs this to a semi colon delimited log file along with timestamp, a disk identifier (there are two in the NAS) and the average load for the past fifteen minutes.

16/03/2010;22:48;A;41;0.13
16/03/2010;22:48;B;41;0.13

Having for reasons of time constraints tried to avoid a science project and wanted a plug and play solution this time round, it's actually been a lot of fun learning some basic Linux.

What I now have is perfect for me to write an Excel macro to chart against, so now I want to automatically run the job every six hours. Unfortunately though WD have stripped the MyBook's BusyBox compilation to the bone and it doesn't have crontab. Of course I can install crontab, but before I do is there another easy way of scheduling my script to run on an un-expiring six hourly cycle, please?

You can just have it running permently so to speak. But then you get into the realms of counter hangups and stalls and possible issues reasources getting locked.

Crontab is by far the best way of doing it. Its what it is designed to do. And its been doing it without much change since Unix was invented.

Thanks, mad_jock. Pretty much what I expected, even though I hoped there was a similar function I'd missed. Crontab it needs to be. Cheers.

Scheduled jobs
 

An update to share how I got on in case any other PPRuNer needs to tread the same path.

First of all I ran the script found here to install both Optware and a bunch of useful features on my WD "White Lights" NAS. Included in these features wasn't just Cron itself but also a nice folder structure to allow any required executable job to be dropped in the appropriate one for the frequency required (/etc/cron.min, /etc/cron.5mins, /etc/cron.15mins, /etc/cron.30mins, /etc/cron.hourly, and so on)

I consequently have my temperature and load logging script sitting in /etc/cron.hourly and producing a new log entry every four hours thanks to a time-checking "IF" statement that I placed in the script.

Another feature included in the download was mini_sendmail so I have written another script that runs every 15 minutes and which checks if either of the two HDDS in the NAS are approaching their maximum design temperature of 55 deg C. If they are, the script connects the NAS to the mail.btinternet.com server to send me an e-mail (which I will receive wherever I am on my Blackberry).

If either of the HDD temperatures continues to climb and exceeds 55 deg C I will be sent a second mail, and if no cooling action is then taken within five minutes that results in the temperature dropping back to 55 deg C or below, the NAS will shut down.

On a scale of zero to hero I'm only just off the starting blocks but considering that a week or so ago I knew nothing about Linux other than that the NAS used a stripped down BusyBox flavour of it, I'm pleased with these practical tweaks.

BTW - I highly recommend WinSCP for connecting to a remote Linux device. It is an open source free SFTP and FTP client for Windows that also supports the legacy SCP protocol and that allows safe and simple copying of files between a local and a remote computer. It saved me MASSES of time compared to navigating around in an SSH command console.

XV105, you still messing around with that hack box ? :ok:

I'm very impressed by all your progress .....ready for your next project ?

It involves a copy of MRTG (also free & open source) and you having pretty little graphs of your HDD temperatures etc. :E

MRTG - Tobi Oetiker's MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher

FORudder
Sorry for belated response, but have cracked it and the laptop connects automatically now.Having wasted much time trawling ASUS sites on the web without success I eventually dug out the manual and followed the instructions.Doh.
Regards NRU

Restricting FTP folder access on Linux NAS
 

Cool, thanks mixture!
I will take the bait! :)

Before then I have a little niggle to solve though; I run Memeo Backup on each PC and laptop on the home network, each backup being written to its own folder on the NAS. Works a treat.

This evening though I installed vsftpd as a small practical project to allow me to share chosen files in a secure way and noticed that the backups were all visible to the User created for secure ftp login. Of course the reason is that the backups are all marked "public" even though they are not explicitly sub folders of the public folder.

My problem is that as soon as I remove the "public" flag, Memeo Backup of course reports "destination not found". Unfortunately it doesn't have a "username and password" option for access to the now secure folder so I can't use one of the Userids that exists on the NAS.

Suggestions for how to achieve a "internally public" and "externally public" structure on the NAS?

For info /etc/vsftpd.conf already has chroot_local_user=YES which I thought was supposed to restrict the User I have created only to the directory I want them to see.

TVM!

BTW - vsftp installed easily, needed only minor "my NAS specific" setup doing, and works a treat.

Solved! :)

I just learned about chroot jail and now have my FTP user securely locked inside!

/etc vsftpd.conf now contains chroot_list_enable=YES and I then created a file called /etc/vsftpd.chroot_list in which I put the Userid in question.