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.

You can list the contents of an rpm without installing it first. If you’re not going to build your own from source, you should at least check an rpm before installing it to see what it’s going to install.

These packages are not available in the out-of-the-box configuration when you install Ubuntu 10.04. To get sun java packages such as sun-java6-jre or sun-java6-doc, you need to give yourself access to additional repositories… Now try searching for or installing one of those packages you were missing.

Think of all the software you install on your computer as windows on a battle tank. Every app is another window where armor used to be. The next time you get hit with a virus, the chance that it’s aimed at one of your windows just increased.

The default out-of-the-box installation should delete any additional anonymous users after installation and disallow remote logins completely, but it doesn’t. At least all you have to do is run the mysql_secure_installation script to do so.

Python’s keyring lib supports Windows win32crypto, Mac OS X’s SXKeychain, KDE’s KWallet, Gnome’s keyring, and encrypted or unencrypted password files. When your application wants to store or fetch data from the keyring, it will just work.

Get a developer key and install Unbuntu on a usb disk so you can boot any XO from the USB disk without modifying your XO laptop. All production XO laptops have firmware security enabled when you receive them. Once unlocked, you can run any operating system you want.

I think it’s easier just to setup the google repo and fetch it all at once. blah, blah, blah, Done. Launch it via “google-chrome” or from the gnome toolbar. That’s it for installing on Fedora 12. If you’re looking for Fedora 10 or Fedora 11, try these links…

Switch to the console by pressing CTRL-ALT- (The neighborhood button is the one on the left with the most dots where you see other XO’s and wifi hot spots around you) and install xcompmgr.

I found the easiest way to get all the dependencies out of the way was to attempt to install Fedora’s oprofile, oprofile-devel, and oprofile-gui through YUM. But instead of installing them, just find out their dependencies and install those.