I always struggle with quickly enabling MP3 playback on a fresh install of Fedora. There are legal reasons (which I’m not interested in) as to why Fedora doesn’t ship with MP3 support right out of the box. So; that’s what third-party repositories are for. Simply install the RPM Fusion repository and then install the “Ugly” GStreamer Plugin.

# yum localinstall –nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

# yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

If you need other support you can always install all the plugins for GStreamer…

# yum install gstreamer-plugins-*

Another method is simply installing VLC. This media player is bursting at its seams with codex goodness.

# yum install vlc

You’re welcome!

Can a man’s love for the command line blossom like a rose or age like good wine? I do believe the answer to my rhetorical question is a resounding YES! Recently I’ve found myself choosing gnome-terminal to execute things rather than clicking in a series of menus on my desktop. Don’t get me wrong; a GUI is nice thing to have, but the efficency of the CLI is unmatched. Through a series of unfortunate events I’ve setup my Linux environment for Android development (aka how trying to fix a bricked phone). I’m working with a fresh install from Fedora 16 Live. What that means is A LOT of packages/libraries are not installed. Just the bare minimum to get me going.

Here’s a general overview of the process I took:

1. Download and extracted the Android Software Development Kit.
2. Installed the Eclipse IDE (roughly 68 packages).
3. Installed ADT plugins for Eclipse.
4. Ran ./android command from SDK “tools” directory.
5. It started the “Android SDK Manager”. I then installed:
   1. Android SDK Platform-tools
   2. The covented “Android 4.0″ platform
   3. 3.2, 2.3.3, and 2.2 platforms (just to show that I can be verstile)

WGET the Android SDK

I’m really enjoy the simplicity of the WGET command. While viewing the SDK page in Firefox I simply copied the link for the SDK file and pasted it into the terminal:

$ wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r15-linux.tgz

Yummy, Eclipse

I then used YUM to grab the Eclipse IDE and all its relevant components. Again; since this OS installation was pretty light I ended up installing 68 packages, such as: Eclipse, Java, etc.

# yum install eclipse

Once that was done I then installed the ADT plugin.

1. I opened the Eclipse IDE.
2. Clicked on Help > Install Software.
3. Added the following repository: https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/
4. Clicked “Select All” and went to town! It was odd, but I noticed I had to try a couple times. It was claiming to have dependency issues. So; I started clicking one-by-one. Eventually I was able to get all 4 packages installed.

Running Android

This following set is unnecessary since you can access the Android SDK Manager from within Eclipse (thanks to the ADT plugin). Originally;  skipped the ADT plugin step.

Now that Java is installed I can run the “android” command. It’s located in the “tools” directory of your freshly extracted tarball file “android-sdk_r15-linux.tgz”.

$ ./android

SDK Managment

The Android SDK Manager popped up with some packages to install. I chose what I thought were appropriate and wrote this blog post while I waited for the files to be downloaded and installed.

So; that’s pretty much it. At this point you’re ready to jump into the wonderment, which is Android development. Enjoy!

References

1. http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Howto:_Install_the_Android_SDK
2. http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html

Good ol’ Secure Shell or SSH — who would want to live without them!? To give you a text-book definition; SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a secure channel between two networked devices. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let get down to business. You’ve got a fresh install of Fedora 15, with that wonky GNOME 3 desktop, and need to figure out how to enable SSH. This article is simply a barebones way of getting started. There’s a better method to make the SSH session more secure, but I haven’t researched that yet.In order to run some of the commands you’ll need to have the root account’s password.

Enable SSH Daemon

First things first, let’s make sure that the ssh daemon is running. Without that we’re not using this service at all. Open gnome-terminal and type:

$ su -
Password:
# systemctl start sshd.service

Now that it’s started you’ll need to keep it going in case you reboot your machine. Run the following command to have it start on-boot:

# systemctl enable sshd.service

After executing that command I received the message below. Tomasz Torcz was kind of enough let me know that the above command will redirect to chkconfig until systemd unit file is shipped with sshd.

sshd.service is not a native service, redirecting to /sbin/chkconfig.
Executing /sbin/chkconfig sshd on

Verify Firewall Setting

By default port 22 is open in the firewall, but it’s good to double check. Open system-config-firewall. You can either type in that name or navigate to Activities | Applications | Firewall.

Test the Connection

The easiest way to test is run the ssh command in your terminal. Another method is installing an SSH client on your Android device (ConnectBot) or installing PuTTY on your Windows machine. If you’re going to test the connection on the same machine, simply open gnome-terminal and type:

$ ssh user@hostname

For instance my username is “marc” and my computer is 10.0.0.2 (I could never figure out how to configure my hostname properly). So; I type in ssh marc@10.0.0.2. I’d get a warning message saying:

The authenticity of host ’10.0.0.2 (10.0.0.2)’ can’t be established.
RSA key fingerprint is [some long identification number in 2-digit sequence]
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

Once I typed in “yes”, I was then able to type in my password for “marc” and continue on. That’s it. Have fun SSHin’ into your machine from remote places.

Ever wanted to run a command normally executed by the root user account, but didn’t want to log in as root? Hell ya! I know I have. The easiest solution to this problem is to add your user account to a file located at /etc/sudoers and you’re good to go. In this example I’m running Fedora 14 x86_64 (Gnome desktop) in a non corporate environment. The catch is you need to already have root access.

Open gnome-terminal and type the following:

$ su -
Password [type in the root password here]

Your bash line will change from $ to # indicating that you are now using the root account. At this point you’re going to use a text editor to modify the file /etc/sudoers. My preferred graphical editor is gedit.

# gedit /etc/sudoers

Once the document is open you will scroll down until you see:

## Allow root to run any commands anywhere
root            ALL=(ALL)     ALL

Simply append that section with your user account and save the file. You will need to log out so that the sudoers parameters propagates the system. Let’s pretend that your user account is epicman.

## Allow root to run any commands anywhere
root            ALL=(ALL)     ALL
epicman     ALL=(ALL)     NOPASSWD: ALL

That “NOPASSWD” at the end is a pretty convenient setting. It’s self explanatory, but it pretty much allows you to execute “$ sudo <whatever command>” without having to type in a password. Pretty sweet.

References

1. http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/man/1.8.1/sudoers.man.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudo

Some of us have experienced  a problem getting the Fedora 14 Live to work correctly on a USB drive. Well; today I finally found that solution and I’d like to share that knowledge and help heal the wounds. There are a couple routes to take in order to  prepare your USB drive to boot Fedora. The more popular method is LiveUSB Creator. It was brought to my attention that Fedora 14 Live uses syslinux version 4.02. I’m guessing the website is dishing out their package with syslinux version 3.9.2. What to do!?

1. Method 1: Grab the Correct Version of Syslinux. Visit the FAQ page for LiveUSB Creator and you’ll see a link for the appropriate syslinux RPM. Located here at http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/14/Everything/i386/os/Packages/syslinux-4.02-3.fc14.i686.rpm
2. Method 2: Use UNetbootin. You can use another program called UNetbootin. This is the method that I used. Worked like a charm.

The Source of the Solution

I can’t finish this post without giving props to the forum thread that saved my bacon. The entire discussion can be found here at LiveUSB not booting Fedora 14.

Last night I watched Parasite Dolls on Netflix. Wow; what a bad Anime. I gave it two stars, but during the scenes when the hacker was working on his computer I felt a deep loss in my heart. It’s been about 2, maybe 3 months since I last logged into my Fedora partition. I fear that I may miss out on Fedora 13 by time I get it working. It’s a very long story to tell, but one of these days I’m going to take some time out of my busy schedule and fix my computer.

In the meantime if anyone has a motherboard that’s similar to a BioStar TA690G AM2 5.x – contact me. I think I broke mine. :’(

I think I’ve earned some FOSS badges of honor this past week or so. I’ve become very efficient at flashing my USB key and getting it ready to either boot Fedora or Ubuntu Live.  There is a way to totally customize your USB key by not having to use Pendrive or LiveUSB Creator, but I’ll leave that for the advanced post. However, in this post, I’ll talk about the basics of getting your USB key ready to test the latest versions of Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.04. It looks like a pretty intimidating list of what needs to be done, but they each have very short executions:

• What’s Needed
• Getting Your ISO’s
• Getting the USB Software
• Preparing Your USB Key
• Boot via USB key

As a side note, I’m a little embarrassed to say that I did this in Microsoft Windows.  At the time, I couldn’t get into my Fedora 12 x86_64 install. It was a simple GRUB issue, but I didn’t make the effort to correct it. Quite the irony (-5 HP).

What’s Needed

I’m going to primarily reference the Fedora Project, but the concept is basically the same for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. You will need:

• A USB Flash Drive with at least 1 to 2 GB of storage (here’s a list from Newegg).
• A Linux distribution’s “Live” ISO file (ex: fedora-13-x86_64-Live.iso, ubuntu-10.04-Live.iso, scrappydolinux-x86_64-Live.iso, etc)
• Software to convert the Linux distribution’s ISO file into a working bootable format. The two most popular are:
  • Pendrive [software] [article] – the information architecture for this web site is horrible (just an FYI).
  • Fedora LiveUSB Creator [web site]

Getting Your ISO’s

So; you’re ready to get your ISO file. All (or most) Linux distributions have a list of additional servers that are hosting various files. Since they “mirror” what’s on the main web site, other people can get to that data quicker. If the main server is bogged down with users trying to get the latest distribution release then the mirrors can take some of that stress.  All that to say – download the ISO file that you want to put onto your USB key. In this example, I’m going to download Fedora 13 x86_64, which can be found at:

• http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/ – this is the starting point. From here I can go into whatever directory your heart desires.
• http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/13/Fedora/x86_64/iso/Fedora-13-x86_64-DVD.iso – it’s a pretty ugly URL, but whatcha’ gonna do!?

Download the ISO file onto your computer somewhere for safe keeping. You’re going to reference it later.

Edited after Peter’s comment below. Fedora also has alternative versions of its distro, which are tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets. For instance in my original post I used Mobiln as an example of “mirror site”. In fact Moblin is something specific to mobile users (ex: netbook) and it’s really awesome. You can find out more from their Spin site.

Getting the USB Software

For Ubuntu and Fedora the recommended software used to get your USB key ready for booting is Pendrive and Fedora LiveUSB Creator (as mentioned in the “What’s Needed” section). Fedora LiveUSB Creator software will need to be installed, but Pendrive (also known as Universal USB Installer) runs out-of-the-box. In this scenario, install Fedora LiveUSB Creator.

Preparing Your USB Key

I’m expressing a big fat /facepalm as I write this, but in Windows (ugh) you can open Windows Explorer (keyboard shortcut Win+E), right-click on your USB key drive and do a quick format. You can leave the default setting (file system: FAT, Allocation 32 KB, etc) I believe the software does it too, but I haven’t verified that. Once it’s formatted you’re ready to go.

1. Run the Fedora LiveUSB Creator program from the Start Menu.
2. Click the “Browse” button under “Use existing Live CD” section.
3. Locate your Fedora-13-x86_64-Live.iso file.
4. Select your USB key under “Target Device” section.
5. Choose the amount of extra space you’d like to use for miscellaneous storage (totally optional)
6. Click on “Create Live USB”.

For Universal USB Installer, it’s recommended that you use their preset distribution list. I’ve tried it a couple times with “Try Some Other Live Linux ISO” and I end up with errors and a non-working boot sequence.

I’ve rinsed and repeat this process numerous times while testing different devices. It was smooth sailing for the most part (I hope that’s your experience as well).

Boot via USB key

You’re almost there… that sweet-spot of booting Linux (temporarily) onto your existing hardware. The main thing you’ll need to figure out is whether your BIOS supports booting from a USB device. When you boot your machine and you see one of the bootable devices as “USB-ZIP” then you’re good to go! If not, reference your motherboard’s manual and see how to enable this feature.

So; once you make it past the machine boot sequence and choose “USB-ZIP” (or if you set it as the primary or secondary choice) then the rest should be cake. It’ll start like any other normal LiveCD. It’ll give you the options of choosing to run the distro, install it, test it, etc. Have fun whoring-out your system to the array of Linux distributions available in a try-before-you-buy format. Apple and Windows can’t do that! Booyah!

References

• Fedora Project [download] [mirrors] [torrents]
• Live CD
• Mirror web hosting
• Ubuntu Desktop Edition [download] [mirrors]

Today, May 25th, is known by many devout Star War fans as “Day of the Jedi“.  Yet after doing a little bit of research I now know that today is really “Geek Pride Day“. I like “Day of the Jedi” better! I missed posting something on the epically-coincidental “May the fourth be with you” Day (May 4th) so I made sure not to miss this opportunity.

What is “Day of the Jedi”? For those poor Star Trek souls that don’t know, I’ll shed some light on the subject. Or you can look it up on Wikipedia like I did.

The Profound Meaning of Day of the Jedi

The release dates for the original Star Wars series were Episode IV: May 25 1977, Episode V: May 21 1980, and Episode VI: May 25 1983. So; choose the common denominator (May 25)… and there you go! Now go out side or on the Internet and show Star Wars even MORE love than you already do!

Rights and Responsibilities

What really made me want to write a post were the “rights and responsibilities” of Geek Pride Day. You can find it on their Wikipedia page.

A manifesto was created to celebrate the first Geek Pride Day which included the following list of basic rights and responsibilities of geeks.

Rights

1. The right to be even geekier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not like football or any other sport.
4. The right to associate with other nerds.
5. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
6. The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
7. The right to be out of style.
8. The right to be overweight and short-sighted.
9. The right to show off your geekiness.
10. The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities

1. Be a geek, no matter what.
2. Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
3. If there is a discussion about something geeky, you must give your opinion.
4. To save and protect all geeky material.
5. Do everything you can to show off geeky stuff as a “museum of geekiness.”
6. Don’t be a generalized geek. You must specialize in something.
7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.
9. Never throw away anything related to geekdom.
10. Try to take over the world!

Why is this Post Categorized as Linux-Related?

That’s a very good question. 1.) I put this paragraph (or disclaimer) here because this post will be picked up by Planet Fedora. 2.) I could be over-generalizing, but I’m assuming that there are more Star Wars fans within the Linux community than in Windows, Mac, or whatever non-Linux community is out there. 3.) After posting this I realized that TODAY is the release date for Fedora 13 Goddard! Now that must tell you something about the Fedora Project folks. They know how to release a distribution in style! Enjoy this very special day of the Jedi and go install Fedora!

I almost blew my lid when I finally found this web site. I’ve been searching the Internets for anything with the keywords “boxee”, “rpm”, “fc12″, and “fedora 12″. My only result was an RPM for Fedora 10. The version of Boxee was x.7.x and the most recent version of Boxee is x.20.x. That wasn’t going to work – I HAVE to have the latest, I’m running Fedora for peace sake – how much more bleeding edge can I be!?

Well; luck would have it, I came across a forum thread where kurgan posted his latest Boxee/Fedora 12 build. The Great Guin smiles upon us all! So; I’m posting this blog entry to help spread the good word that a Fedora 12/Boxee RPM is out there!

Introducing Boxee Fedora 10/11/12 Port – Boxee Forum Thread

There is an Alpha and Beta version available. Please take the time to view the readme file. I figured you wouldn’t so I posted it below. As of 10 January 2010 this is what it reads.

A couple of notes about this port. The rpm will create necessary symlinks for the Boxee dev’s prebuilt binaries to work. I found them to be their rtorrent, flash player, flash libraries, and some of their xulrunner stuff. Without the symlinks, flash apps such as Hulu and Youtube will give you the “meatspin”. The symlinks created by this rpm are necessary because this package contains pre-bundled binaries built against libraries with a different naming convention than Fedora. Given this fact, a standard rpm -ivh will fail due to dependancy errors. Running the rpm install with the –nodeps is necessary at this time.

It is worth noting I do not run pulseaudio with Boxee or XBMC, so I recommend removing it since pulse cannot do SPDIF passthrough.

My initial testing on F10 has been positive, and I have found no problems thus far. I am able to play dvd .iso’s as well as dvd folders (play VIDEO_TS.IFO works for me), and flash based apps work. Unfortunately, Hulu content is not working with the Beta builds. At the moment, I cannot get any Hulu content to work with any Linux distro and the Firefox browser, so I do not think this is a Boxee specific issue.

Due to an rpmbuild error about an invalid rpath in one of the Boxee pre-built flash binaries/libraries for xulrunner, I have to use the following command when building:

QA_RPATHS=$[ 0x0002 ] rpmbuild -ba rpmbuild/SPECS/boxee.spec 2>&1 |tee box_rpm.log

Installing Boxee

Since it’s an RPM, you’d think it’ll be easy to install. Well of course it is stupid! Just joking. You can either double-click on the .rpm file or run the following command after you “cd” your way into the directory where you saved the .rpm file.

# yum localinstall --nogpgcheck boxee-0.9.20.10263-0.1.b.fc12.x86_64.rpm

Using YUM “localinstall” will install the package and any dependent packages needed. The code above was shared with me from a comment “bronson” made. I’ve been looking for this kind of command for quite some time. So; thanks bronson — you’ve enhanced my Linux experience by so much.

Running Boxee

The Boxee link is conveniently placed within your “Applications | Videos” menu. When you run it for the first time, don’t expect it to actually load completely. If it does crash, run the launch file in terminal to then see what the error is:

/usr/bin/run-boxee-desktop

For me, I was missing two libraries. I installed them and I was good to go!

# yum install faac glew-devel

About two plus weeks ago my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card died on me. It was a sad sad day in Fergyville. The mayor of town gave a heart-filled eulogy and instructed all residences to put their flags at half mast. I found a spare video card and saw it had a VGA port. So; I then ordered a DVI (f) to VGA (m) adapter from Cables for Less and waited another couple days for it to arrive. When it finally arrived, low and behold my spare video card was actually an AGP card and my motherboard only has PCI Express slots. I went spiraling down into a very deep depression (for about 2 minutes). I’ve been without my Linux partition for roughly two weeks and it was driving me insane.

When all hope was lost, I accidentally realized that my motherboard has an on-board video port. How could I have missed that!? I’ve disregarded on-board video for so long that I no longer see them when working on my computer. I was happy to see it, but when I loaded my Linux partition, I didn’t get nice, clear graphics. Instead I got fuzzy and impossible to work with X session.

It Works on… Windows!?

It’s kind of hard for me to admit this, but the on-board video DOES work in my Vista partition. I installed the drivers from the motherboard CD and to my surprise I was able to play Battlefield 2 (low specs though). How can this be… Windows should NEVER trump Linux… that’s just LAW!

Fedora 12, My Hero!

I spent the next couple of days on IRC and countless search results on how to fix this matter. Most of the responses were to try out Fedora 12 and see if it works then. I was very reluctant to do that. I finally got Fedora 11 all tweaked out the way I wanted and Linux distros really aren’t the best thing to do an upgrade on. It’s always best to do a clean install. I wasn’t ready to do that again. Someone suggested I at least try the Fedora 12 LiveCD. I thought, “yeah, that should be too difficult to do.”

I downloaded the 600+MB file within a matter of minutes and loaded it onto a USB drive. To my surprise, X worked. I immediately installed XChat and told my friends on #fedora-social. So; I then backed up my home directory and preceded to install a fresh copy of Fedora 12.

Always Learning

One of the greatest benefits to running Linux full-time is the learning aspect of it. I’m so used to doing a full DVD install of the distro that I take for granted what’s NOT installed if I was to scale back a bit. For example, I did a LiveCD install. It went fairly quick, but then I realized that some of the apps I’m used to having weren’t installed. No worries, just YUM the mess out of the terminal and I’m back in business. What I’ve learned this go around are the names of these vital GUI applications I’ve become dependent on. Damn I love Linux!