Even though I did attend several presentations on Saturday. My day was mostly taken up with something else…

I built rpm packages for salt!

If you aren’t sure what salt is, check out their site and read the authors blog. Essentially, salt makes it easy to run a set of commands on multiple machines all at the same time, returning results quickly and asynchronously.

If you are interested in trying out salt on your system(s) and run Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, etc. feel free to try out the rpms. I’ve currently got a review request on bugzilla as well if anyone is interested in providing a review.

Cheers,

herlo

But one of the oddities I encountered while upgrading was the names of the packages. Mind you, this is just my twisted mind being interested in some of the funny odd or strange package names I found while the yum upgrade was taking place.

So here’s the list anyway, with a short description of each. Enjoy:

• gwenhywfar – A multi-platform helper library for networking and security applications and libraries.
• meanwhile – Lotus Sametime session functionality.
• neon – An HTTP and WebDAV client library.
• coolkey – Linux Driver support for the CoolKey and CAC products.
• rarian – Designed as a replacement for scrollkeeper; A documentation meta-data library.
• openjade – An implementation of the ISO/IEC 10179:1996 standard DSSSL.
• sox – (Sound eXchange) is a sound file format converter.
• cadaver – A command-line WebDAV client.
• booty – Small python library for use with bootloader configuration.
• orca – A flexible, extensible, and powerful assistive technology.
• zenity – Lets you display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts.
• eog – Eye of GNOME (EOG) is an image viewer.
• gok – Enables users to control their computer without relying on a standard keyboard or mouse, leveraging GNOME’s accessibility framework
• devilspie – A window-matching utility.*

This information was gathered using the command ‘rpm -qi <packagename>’.  This provided enough information to help understand at least the basics of each of these packages and whether to consider using them in the future.

The packages in italics above are packages that I consider interesting, and I plan to attempt to blog about each of them in turn as part of my POW series.

The devilspie package has a * which means that I’ve used this program before.  I quite enjoyed using the Devil’s Pie, and plan to take a look at it again in Fedora 8 as the previous package had some real limitations and lacked needed flexibility.

Please watch for the upcoming articles on these utilities.  Also, if there are packages that you found interesting during your upgrade, please comment and let me know what they are so I can learn and possibly use them as well.

Cheers,

Herlo