I have just packaged up the essential win32 codecs from mplayer into an RPM. Unfortunately, I cannot distribute it. While the codecs are freely available from their publishers, the redistribution of these codecs is against the EULA(s) of the companies that hold the copyrights to them.
So I can include the codecs on the Fedora install discs I am building for my own use, but I can’t give them out (at least I think I am within my rights to
do this).
However, what I can do, is make my RPM SPEC file available to download, and explain how to build your own RPM for the codecs.
Continue reading ‘Packaging win32 codecs’
Adding packages to a custom fedora install is fairly easy, and well documented, with kickstart. But, kickstart is fairly inflexible. What if you wanted to add packages onto the install media and have them in the standard package selection dialog on install.
Continue reading ‘Adding new RPM packages to a fedora DVD with comps.xml’
Why must I set my proxy settings in 4 or 5 different locations to get things working in Fedora!. I know this only affects a very small percentage of users as most people are not behind a proxy server, but for those of us who are, it is annoying.
Well behaved Gnomes apps read the proxy settings from gconf, set in the control center. Shell apps use the environment variable: ‘http_proxy’. Firefox uses it’s own preferences. And if you want to use a socks server for gaim, you need to set it their as well.
And now with the inclusion of pirut and pup in FC5 it needs to be set in ‘/etc/yum.conf`. Yum when called from the shell reads your environment variable settings, if you only run pup an pirut from the shell everything will work, but if you call them from the applications menu, yum is not passed the proxy settings, so they need to be explicitly set in yum.conf.
Surely pup and pirut should read the settings from gconf, but alas, they do not.
Most things have been working great on the notebook. However, in certain apps, I kept coming up against an “enter” key which would not send a newline character. An external PS2 keyboard would work, but the laptop keyboard would not. It was particularly annoying in “info” and “man”.
After some digging, it turns out the keyboard is actually sending a keypad enter scancode instead of a regular enter scancode. Most apps don’t care, and it made no difference, but some did, and it bugged the crap out of me.
Easy fix. Add the line:
keycode 108 = Return
To ~/.xmodmap. Restart X or just run: xmodmap ~/.xmodmap. The problem should go away.
I just installed FC5 on an old evo laptop. All in all, I am very impressed. Almost everything worked as it should without any configuration and the power management stuff has improved heaps since the last time I installed linux on a laptop.
There were a couple of annoyances, the biggest one fixed. I could not change the brightness on my display, simply adding:
Option "AGPMode" "4"
to xorg.conf under Section “Device”, corrected the problem and the funtion
keys on the keyboard now increase/decrease brightness as expected.
Creating a yum repo for installing FC5, prepatched, via the network, is also fairly simple. And makes a lot of sense for anyone supporting a fedora based environment.
Continue reading ‘Updated FC5 Network Install’
Something I probably should have mentioned. If you are attempting to build an updated repo, you need the anaconda-runtime package. To install it:
# yum install anaconda-runtime
One of the things which has always ticked me off is making a clean fedora install, and then having hundreds of megs of patches to download the first time “yum update” is run. However, building a patched install dvd is actually pretty simple.
Continue reading ‘Building an updated Fedora Core 5 DVD’