his little utility comes with rpm, so it’s already installed and waiting for you. rpm2cpio converts a rpm file specified as as a command argument (or as standard input) and spits it out as a cpio archive to standard output.

Utilizing macros can make life easier when you’re dealing with building on, and for, multiple platforms. Why bother with hard-coding full paths to system utilities when you can simply refer to them by their macro name? These can also be useful for avoiding things like rpm check-files errors, installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found, and debuginfo related stuff.

If you’ve ever run into a dreaded configure problem such as C compiler cannot create executables, and gotten lost in a tangle of glibc/cc/g++ packages, you might find that building source rpms using Mock turns a multi-step process into a breezy single step. Build source rpms using mock which builds inside a chroot. This lets you compile 32-bit on 64-bit without a problem. Check out mock configurations in etc. You may have preconfigured configurations for your Linux distribution.

Shopt toggles the values of variables controlling optional shell behavior. If you want to match a regular expression while ignoring the case, the easiest method is to use shopt. You can use shopt set, unset, and print out settable options such as the ability to expand aliases and debugging options.

You can go to http://www.nltk.org and download NLTK and all the extras - pyyaml, matplotlib, etc. However, these packages are now in the Fedora repositories which makes it a dead simple task to install.

You can change the default behavior of queries using the RPM command by putting a single line in your .rpmmacros. You can also do this manually each time by including the query format in your rpm command.

Ever opened a file vim but didn’t notice it was read-only until you try to save? Don’t exit and run sudo in front of the same command again. Try this instead.

If you have two or more monitors, whenever you first open your terminals, you may find yourself opening more than one and rearranging their placement. Over time you may notice you’re performing the same repetitive task of relocating each window to it’s rightful place. It only takes a minute or two to create panel icons for opening each window using geometry settings defining width, height, and upper left hand coordinates for future placement. If you keep your panel icons in order, whenever you want to open a new one, you’ll know exactly which button to press.

Finally, a 64-bit flash player plugin from Adobe. And it’s simple to install too… Go to your browser’s plugin directory, delete the libflashplayer.so or the link to it, then copy in the libflashplayer.so from the tarball you just downloaded.

Here’s how to make GDM stop showing *every* user account at login screen by default. I don’t know why they released gdm with the broken gdmsetup and showing all accounts in the window by default.