Sexy Sexy Penguins

Wow, I’m excited by the response, and while I still believe that openSUSE is not the distro for me, it definitely has grown on me. I believe on my last review, I might have been a bit hasty in stating that just about everything was useless. And while I do have a few more complaints about this distribution, getting settled in might have been all it takes to shake of the pure hatred I recently expressed.

Much of my response has been in fact aimed at my personal opinions of certain features, and while a few of the failures I noted were indeed things that bugged me, they were personal preference and thus, I will be revising my scoring system a little. In fact, how I will award points will not so much be based upon personal preference unless its completely unbearable to me. And to that end, I’ll make a new PREFERENCES section, which will not receive scores, but will have things I personally like or dislike.

In addition, I so appreciate all of the comments I’ve received, many were very helpful in pointing out errors in my representation of openSUSE. Others were part of the reason I decided to change the scoring a bit. And even others I’d like to take the time to reply:

First, to my friend Heartsbane, thanks for the smartass reply. I should’ve known it was coming!

Sontek pointed out that there were bugs in the iwlwifi driver when 10.3 was released. While I agree with not releasing something before its ready, I find it interesting that 2 months after its release openSUSE doesn’t have iwlwifi drivers available in their updates. Why is this? Did I miss them somewhere? My problems with the ipw3945 are more to the fact that it never seems to work with the WPA PSK setup I have at home/work. The iwlwifi driver has less issues with this specific problem.

apokryphos had several comments, and I will address a few of them.

1. The 1-click-install feature is to help reduce much of the repo setup and installation that used to be a long drawn out process has been reduced to 1 click. While I agree that this is a major improvement, it is such a misnomer to call it a 1-click-install when it clearly isn’t. I only suggest we rename the process as someone coming from another world to Linux who find openSUSE may be disappointed when a 1-click-install indeed requires more like 7 clicks.
2. zypper shows what will be installed was another response I received contrary to what I saw. He asked me for an example, and in return I would suggest that indeed it does tell you what will be installed, but only after you agree to install the extra dependencies. Please provide me a command/option that shows me the dependencies prior to my agreement to install the package(s).
3. The root prompt was another failure on my end, however. Mostly, I have it ingrained in my head to look for the “root” part in the prompt. The entire prompt indeed turns red as suggested, this is something I just have to get used to, or change to my preference I guess. I do still think the prompt is ugly, but its growing on me. Others mentioned this as well, thanks for pointing out this to me.

Another, which I received from Ani and lejocelyn (as well as apokryphos), was in regard to my complaint about the Windows-like look and feel. First off, its not a cop-out and secondly, it does look like Windows. Where is the multiple-workspaces? Isn’t that a big plus, I had to add them and enable the panel object. What about this “control center”, feels a lot like Windows “control panel” to me. There is much more I think, and it also might be somewhat because I’m a GNOME user. But like I said, if I wanted it to look like Windows, I would just run Windows.

Ani also pointed out that some of my complaints about the lack of horizontal bars were because of the wasted space, especially with the new widescreen displays coming out. In retrospect, I agree that its useful to only have one bar on widescreen displays or because it takes up so much space. The “one glance” aspect I get from my status bars sure helps me, however, so I’ll define this as just a preference.

benji.weber@gmail.com pointed out his installation time was much shorter than mine. I’m not sure how he got this, but I installed from DVD offline so maybe its a bit related. He also mentioned that there are many more users testing KDE over GNOME. I suppose this might be the case for openSUSE, but overall, I think that number is pretty evenly split between the two major desktops.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments, I really appreciate the contrasting views and look forward to the next round of comments.

As I didn’t use openSUSE as much yesterday and today, so I have a little less to report:

GOOD

• YaST is growing on me, but I’m still adjusting to living in this world. Its still not my favorite tool (0)
• Suspend works like a charm. Although this also works in Fedora. (+1)

Positive Score: +1

BAD

• The YaST printer tool does not deliver reliable results when setting up printers. YaST discovered my printer, but failed to deliver the correct IP address (-1)
• My bluetooth mouse is still not working, even after following several good tutorials I found online. As per this tutorial from Andrew Jorgensen, I already have the bluez-gnome and bluez-utils from the GNOME Community repository installed. Not sure why, but it looks this one will have to wait for an update, whenever that occurs. (0)
• Enabling the fingerprint reader only asks me for files. I thought that was odd, clicking on the help indicates that providing files from another installation that uses the fingerprint reader will set it up. I didn’t see a way to set this up from scratch with openSUSE in YaST, however. (-1)

Negative Score: -2

Total Score for the last two days: -1 (not bad for day two, you never know, I might actually give a positive score by the end…)

Overall score: -6

PREFERENCES

• I still prefer the system-config-* tools from Fedora over YaST. I don’t like its interface and it still seems to be unfriendly. I do think that its much improved over the original YaST I used back in SUSE 10.0

Tags: distros, printing, Suse, tehsuck, yast

I don’t know if I can last an entire week with openSUSE 10.3. I can’t believe I even thought it possible. I am jonesing for Fedora right now, even though any other distro would probably do…

What’s wrong with SUSE you ask? Just about EVERYTHING! I’m not comfortable at all in this rancid environment. It sucks the life right out of you. I hope some SUSE people come running to save me from this turmoil I feel as I currently hate using this distro. Here’s my first impressions: (beware, the list is rather long)

GOOD

The items below are positives and the openSUSE team deserves credit for all of their hard work in these areas.

• Wireless works (+1)
  • My Intel wireless card from my T60p is recognized and associates with my access points
• The nautilus-open-terminal package is enabled by default (+2)
  • This is the right-click on desktop –> Terminal option, (something severely lacking in fedora and not easily installed in a kickstart)
  • Having this feature, its very simple to get started with the terminal which is definitely needed for the power user in me
• Install allowed me to choose not to use their grub (0) [while this is nice, if I had installed their grub, it would have wiped out my fedora grub components]
• zypper is much improved over the previous rug (10.1) tool (+1)
  • still needs work though
  • easy to add repos compared with fedora
    • packagekit can solve much of the incontinuity in fedora
    • though its nice to have a simple gui to add repos, knowing which repos is still a bit of an exercise in futility.

Positive Score: +4

BAD

Whle there is some good in openSUSE, its apparent to me that there is much to be improved.  As noted below, many more things are in need of improvement, to put it nicely.

• The install takes much longer than necessary (-3)
  • Still uses ugly YAST text user interface
    • YAST didn’t recognize my video driver, but could have just used the VESA driver for the gui install
  • Asks too many questions about details that could easily be simpler
  • Did not work well with other OSes (GRUB)
    • YAST installer wanted to overwrite my fedora GRUB configuration, shouldn’t Linux play well with each other in this sense?
• One-click install is more like 10-click (-1)
  • From opensuse.org, you can do what is called a “one-click install”, and about 8-10 clicks later its installed. If its one-click, its should be one (maybe two) clicks total.
• The initial GNOME config of openSUSE is too Windows-like (-1)
  • If I wanted my Linux desktop to look like Windows, I’d use KDE (or even run Windows)
  • It has only one bar, and at the bottom, not enough room for status apps
  • I had to add workspaces as only one was provided by default, that seems limiting
• bluez-gnome doesn’t have hidd or any sort of recognition for my bluetooth mouse (or anyone’s bluetooth mouse, for that matter) (-2)
  • dbus fails to recognize bluetooth mouse
  • There’s even a bug on it blaming others, yet it works in Fedora - https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=330461
• The bash prompt is ugly - (0)
  • This one is a personal preference, but its hard to tell when I am the root user and when I am not. As such, I will modify my .bashrc and fix the PS1 value
• The wireless driver for my T60p is not the new iwl3945, but the ipw3945 proprietary from intel - (-1)
  • The open driver has been out for quite some time
• Proprietary codecs were not easy to find, nor install (0)
  • Fedora doesn’t make this simple either really.  Yet, when I found them in Fedora they worked first try, gstreamer failed miserably several times in openSUSE
  • an attempt at a codec buddy like tool was made, but doesn’t work…
• zypper does not inform you of the dependencies needed to install even though it reports how much it will download (-1)
  • I want to know what packages I’ll be installing before I install them

Negative Score: -9

Total score for day 1:  -5 OOPS - that’s not good!

To be honest, I think I’m being very generous in some of the points I’m giving.  OpenSUSE makes it very difficult for my lifestyle so far.  I’m not sure what they can do with 10.3 to make it better, but I’d like to hear comments and suggestions on ways to help.

I’m sure hoping that day two will be better.  I’m already starting my list and will be testing such things as; video, development, lvm, raid, kvm/xen virtualization and much, much more.  As I continue to suffer through this bluetoothless mouse world openSUSE has created for me.

Cheers until tomorrow,

Herlo

Tags: , distro, features, Fedora, Suse, tehsuck, yast, zypper

Its been a little couple weeks since I posted anything useful in my Program of the Week (POW) series. And while I still plan to keep that up in the near future, I am going to be doing a new series, Distro Comparisons, with Flare!

My plan is to install the other two major distros of Linux (OpenSUSE and Ubuntu) and compare them with Fedora, my favorite distribution. I’ll be comparing them on installation, features, tools and any other thing that I regularly use in my day-to-day life. Once the distros are all installed (in a triple-boot, no less), I’ll be keeping each one for a week at a time over the next few months.

Over each week, I’ll write down things that are awesome, good, bearable, or just plain bug me, and each will get a score. To be fair, I’ll make sure to rank them with a maximum of +5 and a minimum of -5. Its possible that a negative score can happen, but I expect that this will not be the case for any of the distros.

Anyway, wish me luck on my triple-boot installs and my future blogging with these comparisons. I also hope this will enlighten others about the options available in each of the distros and encourage the developers to continue to improve the usability and functionality of their particular distribution.

Tonight, I’ll be installing and setting up OpenSUSE 10.3 and running it for the next week. During the holidays, I’ll be taking a bit of a break, so blogging might be a bit slower. In early January, I’ll install Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) as well. See you all on the flip side.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Fedora, Install, Suse, Ubuntu

An interesting tool I came across in the last week or so is this week’s Program of the Week: Agave, from the GNOME Community. Recently, we’ve been working on a new logo for the Utah Open Source Foundation, and needed to come up with some simple color schemes that would work well with our logo. In doing so, I came across Agave and started playing with possible combinations of colors we could use.

This tutorial will cover some of the simple, but effective features Agave provides to help provide a good contrast in designing logos, websites and more.

To install Agave, I simply did the following:

# yum -y install agave
.. snip ..
Installed: agave.i386 0:0.4.2-5.fc8
Dependency Installed: gconfmm26.i386 0:2.20.0-1.fc8
Complete!


Once Agave is installed, it is immediately available from the main Applications -> Graphics menu in GNOME. If you use a different desktop, its possible to type agave at the command line. Agave starts up similar to this screenshot:

As is shown above, its simple to see that the three colors here would go nicely together, maybe a bit bright for a website, but not too bad for a logo maybe. In our logo, however, we didn’t want such bright colors, plus we wanted to base it on a color that already existed in our already established brand logo seen below:

This logo is well known in our community, and thus we wanted to make sure to keep the look and feel as our org morphs into its true form. Out game GIMP and with the color picker tool, I obtained the bluish color needed for contrast. Agave only needs the value to give several different options through its several available views. The first view shown is the triads view, in other words, a scheme with three colors that fit well together:

yields the triad

But the real power of Agave is in this section of the application:

The color picker provides for easy to choose colors on the left.

On the right hand side, is the color scheme chooser which allows 6 different choices; Complements, Split-Complements, Triads (3 colors), Tetrads (4 colors), Analagous and Monochromatic. In addition, on the toolbar near the top, is another feature that allows random color schemes to be chosen.

When we’ve finished our site and logo, I’ll update this article with the results.

Try out Agave today and maybe even paint your house using its recommendations!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: agave, color, Fedora, logo, POW, UTOS

This week’s program may seem like a bit of a cop out, but it really isn’t. I’ve regularly found myself in need of some quick passwords to hand out to users that are both semi-secure and easy to remember. With apg, this can become a reality.

First, install apg:

# yum install apg
.. snip ..
Install      1 Package(s)
.. snip ..
Total download size: 101 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
.. snip ..
Installed: apg.i386 0:2.3.0b-5.fc8
Complete!

apg does provide several switches which help to provide an easy way to distribute passwords. Recently, I generated random, yet pronounceable passwords for about 30 users of an application I was using. it was quite nice to let the users login and feel safe with my choices of passwords.

To start with apg is quite easy to generate a set of passwords:

$ apg
NatnawmIx
GhisImAv*
Bahiwaihet
adMuhevep
Ombachat
cier]bipt

These passwords are the default set from apg, providing six pronounceable, 8-10 digit, In my opinion, its better to lose a bit of security to make a password easy to remember, than to have a user have to write the password down, more or less defeating the purpose of the password in the first place.

Because of my opinion, (and no, I’m not a security expert by any means, just using common sense), its probably a good idea to have a look at some of the switches provided by apg:

-a : 0 (default) will make the passwords semi-pronounceable, 1 on the other hand, will be pseudo-random

-n : tell apg how many passwords to display

-m/-x : the minimum/maximum length of the generated passwords

Here’s an example of these options in use:

$ apg -a 1 -n 2 -m 7 -x 10

apg has more to give us though. We can use some standard Linux password checking utilities to help us:

-r : checks the generated passwords against a particular dictionary file.  /usr/share/dict/words, for example.

Adding this to our previous example (and removing the -a option) will verify the password doesn’t have any dictionary words:

$ apg -r /usr/share/dict/words -n 2 -m 7 -x 10

The last component is -M mode, which can request/require that a password has a particular set of attributes. Its a bit more complex than the others above. The mode consists of eight letters, S, N, C and L, in both upper and lower case.

S :  must use special symbol set for every generated password.
s :  should use special symbol set for password generation.

N : must use numeral symbol set for every generated password.
n : should use numeral symbol set for password generation.

C : must use capital symbol set for every generated password.
c : should use capital symbol set for password generation.

L : must use small letters symbol set for every generated password (always present if pronounceable  password generation algorithm is used).
l  : should use small letters symbol set for password generation.

As you might be able to tell, the list above is almost directly from the man page for apg. This is on purpose as it is very well explained (and recommended to read each and every man page for any tool used). Many a good trick has come directly from the man pages.

Let’s see these options in use:

$ apg -n 2 -m 7 -x 10 -M SCnL
Hej=Nio
nefMit/

What is noted right away during several iterations of these modes is the fact that rarely, if ever, is a number included. It seems the lowercase modes are not strong suggestions except in the case of “lower case letters”. However, using the uppercase mode values works every time as expected.

apg is a simple, yet effective tool for generating passwords. My hope is that you decide to use more secure passwords in the future with tools like apg.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: apg, Fedora, POW, Tools

The POW is going to be the improvements made in the Bluetooth functionality in Fedora 8. I’m actually quite impressed with it as its been a bit of a challenge to keep my little mouse connected in the past.

Fedora 8 provides a new extended technology with its bluez-gnome package. In fact, the simplicity of it is that I only have to be able to click and approve a new device.

When I first turn on my bluetooth mouse and start to move it around, it doesn’t work, but up in the top right hand corner of my GNOME desktop is the bluetooth manager. It has a message for me:

The message indicates a click to authorize the device, namely the bluetooth mouse. (One note here, I was originally unable to use my touchpad, so I had to resort to other tactics [not pretty] to enable my mouse. Probably ought to have some other options available instead of clicking.)

Clicking on the notification window above brings me to an authorization window.

At this point, authorization is quite simple. Click yes for a one time authorization of the mouse (Note the Bluetooth Travel Mouse indicated in the description), and to authorize it more permanently, choose Always Grant Access.

That’s it. My Bluetooth mouse is now enabled and working. I’d say this is much friendlier than what I used to have to do, including running hidd –connect <bluetooth id> after pressing the little connect button on the bottom of the mouse. This is sure nice now!

Its possible, that at some point, disconnecting the device might be necessary. To do this, right-click on the nice little Bluetooth logo at the top right of your screen.

Choose Preferences. Up pops the Bluetooth Preferences window. From this window, three tabs are available. In the first (and also selected) tab, there is a section at the bottom of the window which lists the devices that are currently bonded and/or trusted. Choose the device from the list and then the appropriate action. The choices are Disconnect, Trust or Delete.

In addition to just configuring your devices, it appears it might be possible to do things like Bluetooth DUN with a Treo, or enable data synchronization between laptops. One thing I’ve always wanted to try is to get my bluetooth headset working so I could do Skype or Asterisk phone calls through my headset, to my computer and out through the service.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Bluetooth, f8, Fedora, gnome-bluetooth, hidd, mouse, POW

Recently, there was a request in one of my comments on this post. The request was for an easy way to upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8. So I took this on as a bit of a challenge. I feel pretty comfortable with yum and I thought it would be a good and easy task.

A bit of warning here, make sure your current Moonshine ( Fedora 7 ) release is update by running yum update. Also, it is recommended that backups be made of files being modified. If you don’t backup the file, it may be impossible to fix in the future. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Let’s upgrade Moonshine ( Fedora 7 ) to Werewolf ( Fedora 8 ) in three easy steps:

First things first, lets print out some version info:

$ cat /etc/*release
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)

$ uname -r
2.6.23.1-21.fc7

Its easy to tell that this machine is indeed using Moonshine ( Fedora 7 ), so let’s upgrade!

Step 1 - Modify the yum repo files

Located in /etc/yum.repos.d directory are where the yum repository files are stored. We need to modify one line so that yum will know where to look:

$ su -
# vim /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo

Find the first line that starts:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch

and change it:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=$basearch

What changed? Well, the $releasever value is the current value for our version of fedora, in this case 7. By changing it to 8, it’ll load the correct repositories for Werewolf (F8) instead of Moonshine (F7). Save the file, and now we’re ready to move onto the next step.

Step 1 (Alternate)

Since posting this, I’ve learned that another option is available. To update the repositories, its possible to install an rpm to accomplish the same as above and it won’t require Step 3.

Choose your mirror from http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org. I picked University of Oregon’s site because it was close to me.

# rpm -Uvh \
ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-*.rpm

Your ftp/http line here may be different, that is fine. This command installs the updated repositories for Werewolf ( Fedora 8 )

Step 2 - Upgrade

In this step, we just need to run (as root):

# yum update
fedora               100% |===============| 2.1 kB   00:00
primary.sqlite.bz2   100% |===============| 4.9 MB   00:03
Setting up Update Process
Resolving Dependencies
.. snip ..

A few prompts will appear, after the repository data is loaded, a list of several hundred megs (possibly a gigabyte or more) of packages will be ready to install. This is the moment of truth.

Transaction Summary
============================
Install     88 Package(s)
Update     836 Package(s)
Remove       1 Package(s)

Total download size: 1.0 G
Is this ok [y/N]:

Start the download of over 800 packages (in my case) and install and update your system. If you feel a bit of trepidation, I concur. Its still exciting though, isn’t it?

Is this ok [y/N]: y

Now aren’t you excited! In about 30-45 minutes, you’ll have a newly upgraded Werewolf ( Fedora 8 ).

Downloading Packages:
orca-2.20.0.1-1. 100% |=========================| 1.5 MB    00:01
.. snip ..

Step 3 - Cleanup and Reboot

Welcome to your new Werewolf. Treat it wisely. First things first though, we need to clean up our editing from step 1:

# vim /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo

Find the first line that starts:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=$basearch

and change it:

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch

Save the file, or if you prefer, copy the backup you made over the modified repo file.

In addition, there are some items that aren’t in Fedora 8 the same way they were in Fedora 7. For these, read this guide. I didn’t have these problems myself, ymmv.

To get the newly updated kernel and all the new goodness of Werewolf, a reboot is necessary. Enjoy your new Lycanthrope on the flip side.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Fedora, update, upgrade, werewolf, Yum

This week’s Program of the Week is a bit ahead of its release. The package is Codec Buddy, and is currently slated for release in Fedora 8 tomorrow.

Codec Buddy, with a little help from the Fedora and Fluendo development teams has grown into something that could be great. I see Codec Buddy really helping those who want to use and play non-free media sources from within Fedora. If you are currently running rawhide, you probably already know about this, but very soon, many other people will start to understand how Codec Buddy works as well.

One of the goals of the Fedora Project is to be free of any proprietary software. Though I don’t see that many people using Fedora without at least a few proprietary components, media codecs, drivers, etc. Maybe one day…we can always hope.

To that end, I am a big media buff. I regularly watch TV shows and movies that use proprietary codecs. As an example, most people don’t realize that using the reverse engineered DVD encoding provided by DVD Jon could be considered illegal. Fedora doesn’t want to be encumbered by these risks, and truthfully, I don’t blame them one bit. Considering that my backlog of mp3s and DVD rips will require an additional bit of software not normally included with Fedora, I think this is a great software solution. Give the user what they want without compromising the integrity of the project.

Codec Buddy is provided to help the average Joe understand the world of media formats. Its job was originally to provide a short description of why Fedora doesn’t include this in its distribution. Then point to where one might find more information about these formats. Codec Buddy has been altered a little, but attempts to accomplish the same thing using the Fluendo website.

Fluendo is the company that employs many of the individuals that work on the gstreamer project. Its quite a noble project, providing media codecs (installable formats) for many of the audio and video we like to use every day. Its great to have open source companies like Fluendo helping open source grow.

Codec Buddy works by launching a small application when someone tries to access a media codec not currently on the system. For instance, I’ve attempted to play a show I’ve downloaded.

Launch Totem

Open the file

Start the video

As the video attempts to play, a prompt appears, indicating the media isn’t supported. Codec buddy then provides a few options to enable playback for this particular media format.

The available items are MP3 Audio Decoder, MPEG Playback Bundle and MPEG4 Part 2 Video Decoder. By default only the MP3 Audio Decoder, which is also the only codec that will be installed without payment, is checked. The other two codecs are available for a small fee, which helps Fluendo to provide these codecs.

Clicking the “Get Selected” button will immediately start the download of the MP3 Audio Decoder (if it was selected).

A license agreement then appears, make sure to read this and if you agree, click Accept.

Once the agreement is complete, its time to purchase the remaining codecs. Choose Start Web Browser and in a few moments, the Fluendo website should appear. This should allow you to purchase the remaining codecs needed for the video I want to watch.

The Fluendo website has a good list of available codecs beyond the choices available in Codec Buddy.

The purchase will seem similar to many others on the web, add things to the cart, and pay.

Fluendo is a good start. I’m sure there will be many people interested in purchasing these codecs here. However, I believe however, that the biggest problem is that most people can get these codecs for free on Windows, Mac and even other Linux distributions. So far, the thing I feel is missing here is the explanation for why charge for these codecs and who benefits.

Fluendo is a great resource and provides some kick-ass codecs. If there is no explanation as to why we need to pay for something that one can get for free. Potential customers who don’t understand the reasoning behind it might go elsewhere, or worse even, choose another distro or operating system.

I love fedora for the freedom it gives me to choose my path. I love fedora for its focus on making sure things are free and open, both monetarily and in liberty. I love fedora for trying things like Codec Buddy, I want it to succeed. I hope that with a few suggestions, both fedora and Fluendo can make Codec Buddy the informational tool that it was originally intended.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: audio, codec buddy, f8, mp3, mpeg4, video

The second in the Program of the Week (POW) is here.

Yum, the Yellowdog Updater Modifer, has a very interesting feature. One which you might find useful if you want to install an entire set of packages for say a new “Windows File Server”.

Yum provides this feature right out of the box these days, and its quite a nice feature. SUSE 10.1 has rug which is a very similar feature, called bundles. I would guess that Ubuntu either already has this feature, or will in the near future.

So how does installation by groups work? Pretty simple really, first we must learn a few new options in yum:

First is “grouplist”. Grouplist will tell you which groups of packages you have installed and which ones haven’t been installed.

$ yum grouplist

Setting up Group Process

Installed Groups:
  Office/Productivity
  Engineering and Scientific
  .. snip ..

Available Groups:
  .. snip ..

  Windows File Server
  .. snip ..

  Development Tools
Done

In my case, you can see that I’ve not yet installed “Windows File Server”. Interestingly enough, I’m not sure what’s in that group of packages, so its time to check:

$ yum groupinfo "Windows File Server"
Setting up Group Process

Group: Windows File Server
 Description: This package group allows you to share files
 between Linux and MS Windows(tm) systems.

 Mandatory Packages:
   samba
   samba-client
 Default Packages:
   system-config-samba

Wow, quite a few packages, there’s also some good information here. We now know that there are 10 optional packages and 1 conditional package that can be installed. To get the details on any of these packages, yum can tell us:

$ yum info samba
  .. snip ..

Available Packages
Name   : samba
Arch   : i386
Version: 3.0.26a
Release: 0.fc7
Size   : 3.1 M
Repo   : updates
Summary: The Samba Suite of programs
Description:Samba is the suite of programs by which a lot of
PC-related machines share files, printers, and other
information (such as lists of available files and printers).
The Windows NT, OS/2, and Linux operating systems support
this natively, and add-on packages can enable the same thing
for DOS, Windows, VMS, UNIX of all kinds, MVS,
and more..

Yum informs us that the “samba” package is useful for setting up file sharing between Windows and Linux. Other packages from the list above will also be installed so we’ll get to play with some of those as well. If desired, ‘yum info’ can be run for each of the packages found in the grouplist. However, for us, lets move on and install the group of packages:

$ su -# yum groupinstall "Windows File Server"
.. snip ..

============================================================
Package               Arch    Version        Repo      Size
============================================================
Installing:
system-config-samba   noarch  1.2.52-1.fc7   updates  287 k
Installing for dependencies:
samba                 i386    3.0.26a-0.fc7  updates  3.1 M
Transaction Summary
============================================================
Install      2 Package(s)
Update       0 Package(s)
Remove       0 Package(s)

Total download size: 3.4 M
Is this ok [y/N]:

At this point, we need to choose whether we’re going to install the 2 packages that will enable samba for us. Hitting enter will answer no, so we need to type a ‘y’ and hit enter. The packages are then downloaded, and installed:

Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
(1/2): system-config-samb 100% |=============| 287 kB  00:00
(2/2): samba-3.0.26a-0.fc 100% |=============| 3.1 MB  00:02
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: samba                 ################## [1/2]
Installing: system-config-samba   ################## [2/2]
Installed: system-config-samba.noarch 0:1.2.52-1.fc7
Dependency Installed: samba.i386 0:3.0.26a-0.fc7
Complete!

As you can see, its pretty nice to be able to install a group of packages together, letting yum do the work to figure out the details. In another article in the near future, I’ll cover how we create these relationships and build a back end yum server from the ground up.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Fedora, groupinfo, groupinstall, grouplist, POW, Yum