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.

The pre-install is not inside a chroot environment, so whatever variables you set or export are only available for use outside of a chroot. And that’s the problem with the post install section, by default anyway.

You’ve probably found an endless supply of URLs where people complain that they can’t get anything to boot with qemu-system-ppc and many supposed guides to follow that work. It’s almost impossible to find functional examples of how to run qemu-system-ppc without a kernel panic, core dump, or ending up in bios limbo. So here’s one way I came up with that works for me.

Google Picasa is available as an rpm and deb for Linux. You can get it from google package repository if you already have that installed, but the latest version doesn’t appear to be available from there just yet. This app is run under a self contained wine installation.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine architecture on a different machine architecture. This is different than VMware, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V where you’re running different operating systems on the same architecture.

The update experience in Fedora, including the recently released Fedora 12, is flawed. There are just too many packages flooding the repositories for the current release model to function efficiently and securely. There seems to be no requirement for updates to only fix bugs and add hardware support while avoiding implementing brand new features. But is the drive here just to become more like Windows?

Proxytunnel is a program that connects stdin and stdout to a server somewhere on the network, through a standard HTTPS proxy. Getting it built seems to be pretty straight forward stuff.

I still prefer a flat ascii file either loading the rules one at a time, or the built in iptables save/restore which basically does the same thing. But if you like/want/need a GUI application, then skip the lokkit firewall configuration tool in favor of system-config-firewall. It makes configuration of your firewall as easy as the simple Windows firewall, but with the option detail you expect from Linux.

Install mercurial source control management system (sorry git lovers), and prerequisites. Set up by making some directories and exporting a variable or four. Clone the source repository. Let the building begin.