mousematt Posted August 15, 2004 Report Share Posted August 15, 2004 THIS IS MANDRAKEMAG: A FREE MANDRAKELINUX E-ZINE Volume 01 - Issue 03 - Thursday, 12 August 2004 - http://mandrakemag.tux.com.au IN THIS ISSUE - MOUSEMATT'S OPENING MONOLOGUE - HOW TO URPMI INSTALL MOZILLA FIREFOX 0.9.3 - THE BOURNE AGAIN SUPREMACY (BY CHRISTOPHER FA JOHNSON) - WHAT'S HAPPENING AT THE CLUB - PLAYING DVD MOVIES WITH MANDRAKELINUX 10.0 - IN THE NEXT ISSUE ================================================================================ MOUSEMATT'S OPENING MONOLOGUE MandrakeMag Is Not Dead! Despite rumours, reports and fears to the contrary, this zine is live and well! Why is this issue five weeks late? Ask Seagate; my boss - who decided to promote me; Murdoch University's teaching timetable; and whoever invented the flu virus! :P On the 21st of July, the read/write head of my hard drive decided to take up dancing: it wildly danced across the surface of my hard disk and took my entire life with it! I did have backups of some essential data: my thesis, the MandrakeMag subscriber list, my address books... but at the end of the day, I lost about 25GB of data. And that hasn't been fun to put back! A few dollars, a new hard disk and a shiny DVD burner later - and I'm back online. I have spent the past few weeks re-ripping my CD collection, regoogling for a lot of the articles that were the basis for my thesis, and recovering thousands of happy snaps from the spindle of photo CDs in my cupboard. At the end of the day, time slipped - work got busy - and I returned to university to start a new semester. Now, five weeks later, MandrakeMag is back in business! This is a short, diluted issue. The bumper business edition will be coming to your inboxes shortly. For now, this issue introduces a new contributor; Linux command-line guru and chess artisan, Christopher FA Johnson. I'd recommend every newbie read Christopher's excellent article on the advantages of the command line interface. Want to install the latest version of Mozilla Firefox on your Mandrakelinux box? I've written a quick article on how to install and configure this great application under a Mandrakelinux KDE desktop. Remember to backup your data... and please, enjoy MandrakeMag Issue 03! ================================================================================ HOW TO INSTALL THE LATEST MOZILLA FIREFOX USING URPMI: by Matthew Prouse For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past 18 months, Mozilla Firefox is the next generation web browser from the Mozilla Foundation. The official Firefox site is at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. I won't go into details here about how spiffy the Firefox browser is: I will just make a suggestion - TRY IT! The current Linux version of Firefox (0.9.3) ships with an installer that is reasonably easy to use, although it doesn't show you how to install Firefox as a multi-user application. Most applications in Mandrakelinux are multi-user; with separate user profile and a root-only /usr/ application system folder. This is probably the best way to install Linux software - it's much harder for a single user without root priveleges to break a computer program if its set up this way. Okay! How do you do it? Isn't it just "urpmi mozilla-firefox"? At present, the Mandrakelinux 10.0 contrib mirror has an RPM for Firefox 0.8. This is a powerful, fast and user friendly web browser; but it is not the latest and greatest version. A lot of available extensions and themes do not work with the version. However, Chip Cuccio has packaged the latest versions of XMMS, Firefox, Abiword and Mozilla Thunderbird and made them available in his URPMI Package Repository. Chip's website is http://norlug.org/~chipster/ For those lazy people who do not want to surf to other websites - just to get the setup instructions :-) - connect to the internet and do the following. 1. Open a new console window (KDE comes with Konsole) 2. Type su and become the administrator (root) 3. Type in the following text to add Chip's repository to your URPMI setup urpmi.addmedia NORLUG-10.0 \ http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/norlug/...rake-10.0/RPMS/ \ with hdlist.cz 4. Wait for urpmi to retreive the package list. You can now install RPM packages from Chip's repository. 5. To install Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3 from Chip's repository type the following command in the same console window as above. Type: urpmi mozilla-firefox And wait for the package to download and install. Now follow the next two steps to configure Firefox 0.9.3 properly and it will be ready to go. 6. Run Mozilla Firefox once as the root user to set up the plugins and extensions correctly. To do that, press Alt F2, and type: kdesu mozilla-firefox Mozilla Firefox will now load for the first time. Once it has finished, close it down immediately. To run Firefox as your normal user, navigate the Mandrake menu to "Internet > Web browsers > Mozilla Firefox" The browser should load properly now. That only leaves three things to do: set up Java; change the hideous winstripe toolbar theme to something better and select and install a couple of essential extensions. ** Configuring the Java plugin I am assuming you are running the latest Java runtime. At the time of publication it is j2re-1.4.2_05. The Java runtime RPM is easilly installed from MandrakeClub or via the official download from Sun Microsystems. The Sun Microsystems download URL is: http://javashoplm.sun.com/ECom/docs/Welcom...tailId=j2re-1.4 .2_05-oth-JPR&TransactionId=noreg Once you have installed the java-runtime, open a console as the administrator (root) and type the following commands. cd /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox-0.9.3/plugins ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_05/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so I know thats a mouthful... but it works! To check that Firefox has properly enabled the Java plugin change the URL address location to "about:plugins". The Java 2 Plugin should be listed on this screen. If it isn't, then browse through the help files at http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/firefox-linux.html ** Changing the Firefox theme The Firefox 0.9 series comes with a nifty theme manager. There are literally hundreds of themes available for this great browser. To check out a few semi-official ones: surf your browser to http://update.mozilla.org Select a new theme and click "install now". I personally like the Qute, Mostly Crystal and Phoenity themes; but I am certain the perfect theme for every person is available on this site. ** Adding extensions to Firefox 0.9.3 Extensions add extra functions and extra bloat to the naturally slim Firefox web browser. They are also available from http://update.mozilla.org I recommend that you install AdBlock, BBCode and Flash Click-to-View. If you need more help with Firefox or want to get involved in the Mozilla community. I suggest you log on to http://forums.mozillazine.org ================================================================================ THE BOURNE AGAIN SUPREMACY: by Christopher FA Johnson One day last year, I was in the computer room of a hotel, and had connected to my home computer via secure shell (SSH). Someone looked over my shoulder and said in a condescending tone, "What is that, DOS?" "No," I replied, "it's a Unix shell." "It looks like DOS." "It's like DOS about as much as a Formula 1 racing car a is like a rickshaw," I countered. The default shell on Linux distros is bash, the Bourne Again SHell. Its syntax is based on the Bourne shell, the original (not quite the first, but the pre-eminent) Unix shell, which first appeared in 1974. Why would one use the shell instead of a point-and-clock interface? The P&C is so much easier, isn't it? Well, the P&C may be easier but it can have disadvantages. Let's look at a example, finding and installing a package. I want to find and install a chess program. Using the desktop menu: 1. Open the Mandrake Control Centre (I may have to enter a password at this point) 2. select Software management 3. select install (wait several seconds while it loads) 4. enter "chess" in the search box, and press enter 5. select one or more of the packages found 6. click install 7. lose a couple of keystrokes in the window I was working in while waiting for the install because of the annoying pop-up telling me that all packages were successfully installed. 8. click OK on the annoying pop-up 9. wait for a few seconds while it finds available packages again 10. click on the window's close button Using the command line: 1. urpmq chess ## (to get a list of chess programs) 2. sudo urpmi gnuchess gnuchess-book emacs-chess And it's done, much faster and with no more typing than the P&C method (I built the urpmi command by cutting and pasting the output of urpmq). In fact, I used a command that is somewhat faster than urpmq: urpms. You don't have that command because I wrote it myself. It's a very simple command that takes advantage of the /var/lib/urpmi/names.* files in Mandrake 10.0. If you want it, type the following line at the prompt: urpms() { grep -hi "$1" /var/lib/urpmi/names.*; } You can install the command permanently by putting the line in your $HOME/.bashrc file. Besides being an interactive command interpreter, the shell is a complete programming language. At its simplest, a shell script is a sequence of commands (or even a single command) in a file that is marked executable. Personal scripts are usually put in a directory called bin, in a user's HOME directory. Instead of putting urpms in a function, it could be a file by itself. The following commands (type them, or cut and paste them, at the command line) set up the directory, put the command into a file, and make the file executable. mkdir -p $HOME/bin echo 'grep -hi "$1" /var/lib/urpmi/names.*' > $HOME/bin/urpms chmod +x $HOME/bin/urpms echo "PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> $HOME/.bashrc You can put any commonly used, or hard to remember, commands into a file in a directory included in $PATH, make it executable, and use it just like any other command. What directories are in your path? Type: printf "\t%s\n" ${PATH//:/ } Your homework is to create a command (call it "path") that prints the directories in your PATH variable one to a line. ================================================================================ WHAT'S HAPPENING AT THE CLUB A lot of people wonder what happens at MandrakeClub! The easiest way to find out - and support the future development of our favorite Linux distribution is to join MandrakeClub (http://www.mandrakeclub.com). In the last five weeks, Mandrakeclub has launched a new IRC chat server for club members, released RPMS for Mozilla 1.7, OpenOffice 1.1.2 and the latest drivers for ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards. A new-look discussion forum is in late-BETA and club members are busy voting for applications to be included in Mandrakelinux 10.1. Memberships start at 60 EURO per year. Why not join and support the future of Mandrakesoft? ================================================================================ HOW TO PLAY DVD MOVIES WITH MANDRAKELINUX I recently bought a 4KUS 8X DVD ReWriter for my primary desktop machine. It installed simply and Mandrake automatically detected it... excellent. Now, how do I watch Babylon 5 DVDs on my PC? No "free" Linux distribution can legally play DVDs out of the box. DVD movie playback requires an additional software decryption library that is not 100% "legal" in most developed countries. This is because the decryption software allows for videos to be copied as well as played. Fortunately, the software is easy to install using the PLF (http://plf.zarb.org) repositories and URPMI. If you want to play DVDs under Mandrakelinux 10.0 then type the following command as root: urpmi libdvdcss2 Wait a few seconds and presto! DVD video playback. I have found the best app for playing DVD movies on my PC is Totem (http://www.hadess.net/totem.php3). It is installed by default in 10.0. Other applications to consider for DVD playback include Ogle, Xine and MPlayer. I'll write a bit more about DVD movies under Linux in later issues; for now, I am going back to Babylon 5 http://www2.warnerbros.com/babylon5/). ================================================================================ IN THE NEXT ISSUE The next issue will be published in three weeks time. It will be a bumper issue with a detailed look at Small Business Mandrakelinux. Expect some comprehensive guides on setting up small business servers, an interview with the Kumula software team, and a basic guide to essential software and hardware systems. It should be an interesting read. I'd like to ask everyone to drop me a line and share their thoughts, articles or stories. I am looking forward to editing a bumper issue of MandrakeMag. Thankyou for reading this issue of MandrakeMag. Remember to check out the recently updated MandrakeMag website at http://mandrakemag.tux.com.au Comments. Suggestions. Ideas. Feel free to contact me. Bye for now! mousematt ================================================================================ ©2004 Matthew Prouse. All Rights Reserved. E-zine is totally independent of Mandrakesoft SA. Mandrakelinux is a registered trademark of Mandrakesoft SA. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. The MandrakeMag website is kindly hosted by Tux Computing (http://www.tux.com.au). PRIVACY STATEMENT: MandrakeMag respects your privacy! Any and all information collected at this site will be kept strictly confidential and will not be sold, reused, rented, loaned, or otherwise disclosed. Any information you give to MandrakeMag will be held with the utmost care, and will not be used in ways that you have not consented to. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact MandrakeMag. ================================================================================ MandrakeMag : a mandrakelinux e-zine. http://mandrakemag.tux.com.au Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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