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F-O-S-S Explained

1. Free Software : Free software is software for which everyone has the right not only to inspect and study the source code but also to use it for any desired purpose without monetary or other restrictions. These other purposes include making as many copies as desired, installing on as many computers as desired, modifying (including extending) in any desired way, and redistributing in its original or modified form. As defined by Free Software foundation, its a software whose licensing conditions promise following 4 freedoms * Freedom 0: freedom to run the program for any purpose. Eg. Softwares restricted for educational use hinders this freedom (like those distributed under MicroSoft Academic Alliance) * Freedom 1: freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Eg. Softwares whose licensing terms forbids reverse engineering curtails this freedom * Freedom 2: freedom to redistribute copies. Eg. softwares (eg. WinXP) whose lic...

Btrfs - System Rollback comes to Fedora

Btrfs helps in creating lightweight filesystem snapshots that can be mounted (and booted into) selectively. The created snapshots are copy-on-write snapshots, hence there is no file duplication overhead involved for files that do not change between snapshots. A "rollback" to an older snapshot is non destructive for other snapshots. If user switches to an earlier snapshot, the later snapshots will still be available afterwards. Btffs will allow users to : 1. Automatically create new disk snapshots before each yum transaction. 2. Change which snapshot will be next booted into, if neded. 3. Manually create a new snapshot, if needed. For carrying out any of the above mentioned tasks under Btrfs user need to have Root user privileges. PS : Btrfs is a File system type, so if you desire for a partition to be Btrfs strong you need to format the partition with FS type set to Btrfs. Source : fedoraproject.org

Downloading RPM's using YUM

YUM now provides you with the ability to : 1. Download the RPM's without installing them. 2. Just get the list of URLs from where the RPM's would be downloaded. 3. Resolve the dependencies for the package that you plan to download, and get then too along with the package. 4. Get the source if you are intrested in that being more geeky. And not just this much , yum will get you all this specific to your release and arch,so no more no-arch packages. So here is how to go with this : First of all you need to install the package 'yum-utils' as the utility that provides all this functionality using the configuration of YUM. Make sure that this all will work using the repos (software repositories both online and offline (if-any)) configured under /etc/yum.repos.d/ that are used by YUM for package searching, dependency resolution and many other packages related tasks. It all depends on the configuration in the repo files, using which yum will be looking up the packages...

Plymouth : The new Graphical Boot of Fedora

Plymouth is the new graphical boot animation in place of the text messages that normally get shown corresponding to the services getting started. Fedora [Live CD] by default is supplied by only single Plymouth theme knows as 'plymouth-theme-charge', in which the boot process is animated with the Fedora Bubble getting filled up and finnaly it blasts off with white light. There are multiple other plymouth themes provided by Fedora which can be installed using YUM. [root@xbox ~]# yum list all|grep plymouth-theme plymouth-theme-charge.x86_64 0.8.0-0.2009.29.09.19.3.fc12 @updates plymouth-theme-fade-in.x86_64 0.8.0-0.2009.29.09.19.3.fc12 @updates plymouth-theme-script.x86_64 0.8.0-0.2009.29.09.19.3.fc12 @updates plymouth-theme-solar.x86_64 0.8.0-0.2009.29.09.19.3.fc12 @updates plymouth-theme-spinfinity.x86_64 0.8.0-0.2009.29.09.19.3.fc12 @updates [root@xbox ~]# All of the missing ones can be installed using...

Fedora : Hiding Desktop Icons

With a aim to have a clean desktop of all of the default icons like My Computer, Sawrub's Home, Trash the Gconf Editor was looked at and here is how to do the same. - Open Gconf-Editor under Application -> System Tools -> Configuiration Editor, if the same is missing install it first. - Navigate to /apps/nautilus/desktop in the left hand side tree - Once there check the right hand side frame for options corresponding to each of the default icons present at the desktop. - In order to disable the Computer icon uncheck the flag against 'computer_icon_visible' - The computer icon will no longer be availble at the desktop. - Similar steps can be followed for other icons.

Hacked Google Calender addon for Thunderbird

I was trying to get the add-on 'Provider for Google Calendar' to work reading steps from , but was not able to do so since the option for Google Calender setup as shown in was not coming up. So finally after around 2 hrs of fight looking for help at FAQ, IRC, I finally got the hit and hacked the config file of the extension a bit and was able to do it all. 1. Checked the presence of the 'install.rdf' in the /home/sawrub/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/extensions/ directory that contained the data corresponding to the calender sync like a snip from it read liek "The Original Code is Google Calendar Provider code" grep -i google \{xx12xx12x1x-5fdc-40c2-873c-223b8a6925cc\}/install.rdf 2. Once the file was there, read through for the dependencies and there the problem was.I was ok with all other things mentioned in the config file except this. <em:requires>       <Description>         <!-- Lightning...

Command of the Day

The Post include the diffrent commands that i come to know on daily baises. - package-cleanup - yumdownloader - pdfto group [pdftohtml pdftoppm pdftops pdftotext] - DenyHosts