Tag: fedora

Fedora 18 and Oracle 11gR2…

After several abortive attempts I finally got hold of Fedora 18 last night. Those mirrors are getting a real battering at the moment. 🙂

The first job was to do a basic installation.

I’d seen a few things written about the new installer, not all of which were positive. IMHO the installation was a really nice experience. It is very different to previous installers, which probably freaks some people out, but I think it works really well.

Once the installation is complete it’s pretty much business as usual. You’ve got newer versions of most of the packages, but to be honest I don’t really focus to much on that. I just keep doing “yum update” every few days and work with what I’ve got. 🙂

One thing that did take me by surprise is how much a hated GNOME Shell. I’ve written several times in that past that I thought it was OK. It was my default environment for quite a few months, but after spending an extended period on XFCE at home and Windows XP at work, I can safely say that I seriously don’t get GNOME Shell. Fortunately, Fedora 18 comes with a whole host of window managers including GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Cinnamon and MATE, so I’m sure you’ll find something there that you can work with.

The next job was to see if Oracle would install on it.

Every time I do this I think to myself it’s going to be the last time. It’s far more sensible to use a VM and install the database on a supported distro. Oracle Linux is free and a supported platform, so messing around with installs on a non-supported distro, like Fedora, really doesn’t make sense. Maybe this will actually be the last time. 🙂

So what next? I’ve got some physical servers running Fedora 17 as the host OS which will have to be upgraded. I think I’m going to play around with Cinnamon and MATE before I do that. If they don’t work for me it’s back to plain and simple XFCE for my window manager. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Adventures with Dropbox and KeePass…

Thanks to Eddie Awad, I’ve been using 2-step verification on my Google account for a while. Now Jake from The Appslab has scared me into using a password manager and revamping all my passwords…

We use KeePass (on Windows) at work to hold all our passwords, so I figured I’d go with that and see how I get on. Unlike work, I want to use a single store for all my devices, so I finally found a use for my Dropbox account.

Dropbox Installations

If you don’t already have it, you need to install Dropbox on your device(s). For mobiles, that means their respective app stores. For computers (Linux, Mac and Windows), you can get it from the Dropbox website.

Whichever KeePass variant you use, make sure you create the KeePass database file under the DropBox directory on your device, so it is visible from other computers or devices using DropBox.

KeePass Installation on Windows.

Download and unzip/install either KeePass Portable 2.x or KeePassXC Portable. I use the portable version and leave this on my Dropbox as well as the shared KeePass database file.

KeePass Installations on OS X

This section of the post originally included instructions for using the Windows version of KeePass Mono. It was then replaced by KeePassX. The best solution now is to use KeePassXC for Mac. It’s better than the alternatives.

KeePassXC Installations on Linux

This section of the post originally included instructions for using the Windows version of KeePass Mono. It’s been removed as you should now use KeePassXC for Linux. It’s better than the alternatives.

KeePass Installations on Android

For Android devices, I originally used the KeePassDroid app, but I now use KeePass2Android.

  • Install the Dropbox app if you don’t already have it. Connect to your Dropbox account and check you can see the “.kdbx” file in the “KeePass” directory.
  • Install the KeePass2Android app.
  • Open Dropbox, locate the “.kdbx” file and tap it.
  • Once the KeePass2Android app opens.

KeePass Installations on iPad/iPhone

For my iPad I used the MiniKeePass app.

  • Install the MiniKeePass app and open it.
  • Hit the “i” in the bottom-middle of the screen.
  • Click the “Dropbox Import/Export” option and follow the instructions.

It’s not a thrilling app, but it does the job.

So that’s it. I only have to remember my DropBox password and my KeePass password and I can now use unique and ridiculously long passwords for all my other logins…

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 17 : My upgrade hell…

It’s been a few days since the final release of Fedora 17. I’ve been running it on VMs since the alpha release, but the day after the final release I decided to upgrade a real Fedora 16 machine. That’s where all the fun started…

I’ve now attempted Fedora 16 -> 17 upgrades on two physical servers and both have been destroyed by the process. In both cases, I had to do a fresh install, which worked cleanly and left a fully functioning installation. Perhaps I’m just very unlucky, but with a record of 0 for 2, my conclusion is that the upgrade process on Fedora 17 sucks so much ass it’s untrue.

As followers of the blog know, I try to keep my host machines pretty clean and do anything of significance in VirtualBox VMs. As a result, the recovery of both systems has been fine, if a little slow. In both cases, I did a clean install, then copied back all the VMs and that was pretty much it.

In conclusion, if you are planning on doing an upgrade to Fedora 17, rather than a clean install, I would think very carefully!

As for  Fedora 17 itself, it feels like Fedora 16 with a different background.

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 17 and Oracle 11gR2…

Fedora 17 was released yesterday. I mentioned in a previous post I had run through the installation of Oracle 11gR2 on Fedora 17 alpha. With the arrival of the final Fedora 17 release I ran through the articles again last night to make sure everything was OK. You can see the finished versions here:

As always, installing Oracle on Fedora 17 is just for fun and totally not supported. For anything proper you should be using Oracle Linux or RHEL.

Cheers

Tim…

ClamAV on Fedora and Enterprise Linux…

Following on from my post on AntiVirus Software and Apple Macs, I decided to add antivirus to my desktop machines also. I chose ClamAV because it is part of the Fedora repository. I wrote a quick note about installing ClamAV on Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, Oracle Linux, CentOS etc.).

Not surprisingly, scans revealed no viruses on any of my Fedora machines.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle on Fedora 17 beta.

I have been playing around with Fedora 17 beta in preparation for my server upgrades when it is released at the end of the month. While I was at it, I did my typical articles for Fedora.

I’ll run through them again when the final release drops, then officially put them live.

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 17 Alpha…

I’ve just tried the alpha of Fedora 17 to see if the GNOME 3 software rendering works and it did. You may recall, since updating my graphics card I’ve been forced to use the fallback mode on Fedora 16. I’m quite keen to move back to proper GNOME 3, which looks like it will be possible when F17 is released.

On a VM it seems a little on the slow side, so I hope this isn’t an indication that it will be annoying on my desktop. I guess time will tell. Fingers crossed though.

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 15: First big problem…

Yesterday I hit a pretty major problem with Fedora 15. I did a reboot and the login screen came up fine, but when I tried to log in I got a message saying,

failed to load session ‘gnome’

No options or alternatives. Just back to the login screen. ??

I started the machine up in “Full multiuser mode” by hitting the “a” key during boot and adding “3” on to the boot parameters. Once at the login prompt I could now log in as root. Since it looked like it might be a GNOME problem I uninstalled and reinstalled GNOME.

yum -y groupremove "GNOME Desktop Environment"
yum -y groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment"

No change!

My next thought was to install KDE, so at least I would have a desktop. I did this using,

yum -y groupinstall kde

I made KDE the default window manager by editing the “/etc/sysconfig/desktop” file to contain.

DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE

The machine now rebooted and I got KDM as the display manager. This allowed me to start KDE, but surprisingly, also allowed me to start GNOME as my window manager.

Now I figured it was probably an issue with GDM, not GNOME itself, so I reinstalled GDM.

yum -y remove gdm
yum -y install gdm
yum -y install gdm-plugin-fingerprint

Bingo. I was now able to switch back to GDM as my display manager by editing the “/etc/sysconfig/desktop” file to contain.

DISPLAYMANAGER=GNOME

I have no idea what happened to cause this problem in the first place. Googling for a solution wasn’t much help because most posts are really old and the new ones just said reinstall.

If anyone else has misfortune to run into this issue, you now know how I got out of it.

Incidentally, my brief time on KDE did not fill me with a desire to switch. I think I prefer GNOME. I am however a little nervous about the stability of Fedora 15 after this incident. Maybe I did something dumb to cause it, but if I did, I have no idea what it was. I’m just running a browser and VirtualBox VMs for the most part.

Cheers

Tim…