If you’re running Fedora or RedHat and you download the plugin required from Google to make voice calls from inside gmail, you’ll need to convert it to an RPM before you can use it. Alien will convert RPMs to Debian .deb packages and vice versa. Download and unpack. You don’t even need to compile or install to use it.

Perform an Inception. Mount your iso, then mount the image found inside. Go inside the second image to see what is available during the pre install section of a kickstart. Use isomaster to rebuild the install.img and plop that inside the the outer iso, rebuilding that one too.

Record the installation time and date, install files into the system, record installation date and time, find file overlays and installation scripts on a remote file system. You can do a lot with the post installation routine in a kickstart file.

The usual fix for this is to re-export or restart nfs services from the server side. You could try unmount -f to force the mount point to unmount or reboot the client. It gets harder when multiple users are online. If someone has a home directory or a remote shell open using a directory under the nfs mount root, good luck fixing it on the fly. The worst situation is where two NFS file systems are mounted in a parent-child relationship.

The main highlights are the support for 64-bit applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard. But it’s hard to say what the best change is. There’s just so many!

f you’re mounting a file system via custom udev rules, hal does not populate /media/.hal-mtab. When a desktop user attempts to unmount the file system, hal complains that it doesn’t know anything about that file system and gives you a friendly message about console users that may have mounted it.

Start the spec file with %define statements at the top. Continue the spec file as you would normally, using the variables you just defined in place of the real name, version, build. Create an rpmbuild script that replaces the template variables with current information. Make an rpm target in your Makefile that calls the rpmbuild script.

Most Linux distributions today boot to a graphical desktop environment by default. Whether that desktop environment is KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or one of the more obscure offerings, that choice is up to you. You can mix and match from different terminals too. The exceptions to this rule would be forensics distributions and a barebones secure installation that would either have a desktop environment but choose not to load it or it might not be installed at all.

Cheatcodes
Cheatcodes are used to pass options to KNOPPIX to help with getting it working on difficult hardware. You type them into the boot screen and press enter/return. The format is “kernel option option option …”. Usually “knoppix” is the right selection for the “kernel”. You can type more than one …

The following is a list of variables you can use for both yum commands and yum configuration files.