We had a great meeting with 10 in attendance including 2 who had not previously attended and were not on the mailing list. Awesome for a warm July Evening! Clint opened the meeting with a demonstration Fedora 13 which he had installed on his laptop in a dual boot configuration. His first comment was on how Fedora 13 handled the "dual monitors" of the built in "wide screen" and the overhead projector as it was observed that it left the display settings on the laptop alone but set the proper 4:3 resolution on the projector so that both displays were "normal" in appearance. The Fedora 13 demonstration was based on the Fedora 13 Gnome LiveCD and the following installation guides:
Perfect Desktop - http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-fedora-13-i686-gnome-p3
MJM Wired - http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f13.html
Several rpm installs he noted were:
Enabling RPMFusion repositories: rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable... http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-... RPMFusion is an aggregation of three non-free or proprietary respositories containing many program packages not available with Fedora due to legal or licensing issues.
Install the commercial DVD playback library: rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/libdvdcss2-1.2.10-5.fc13.i686.rpm
He also talked about some problems with the fedora update repositories being broken by unavailable dependencies with the work around of using yum --skip-broken -y update to do updates. Any broken and skipped updates will be listed at the conclusion of the update:
Skipped (dependency problems):
empathy.i686 0:2.30.1.1-1.fc13
evolution.i686 0:2.30.2-1.fc13
evolution-data-server.i686 0:2.30.2-2.fc13
Clint mention how he like the "group package" install feature found in Fedora called "groupinstall". You can get a listing of the grouplist names, both installed and available using the comand yum grouplist. One important group to install is Office/Productivity which install almost all of the OpenOffice Suite with the command yum -y groupinstall "Office/Productivity". Note the quotes around the group name which is necessary if there is non alpha characters or spaces in the group name. On the "essentials list", you should also install yum -y groupinstall "Development Libraries" and yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools" which is similar to "build-essentials" on Ubuntu.
On installing multimedia support, the following process should be followed:
yum -y install wget
cd /tmp
wget http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/all-20071007.tar.bz2
tar xfvj all-20071007.tar.bz2
cp all-20071007/* /usr/lib/codecs/
ln -s /usr/lib/codecs/ /usr/lib/win32
After downloading as described on the mjmwired website, running the command rpm -ivh msttcore-fonts-2.0-3.noarch.rpm
yum install xine xine-lib-extras xine-lib-extras-freeworld
yum install vlc
To fix MP3 playback in Rhythmbox and other other programs yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-ffmpeg
Clint had the latest version of Oracle's VirtualBox PUEL installed on Fedora 13 which he then showed running a copy of WindowsXP that he had exported from his Ubuntu laptop and imported to the newer version running on Fedora 13. He commented that when you import a VirtualBox ovf/vmdk based virtual machine, make sure you have at least twice the diskspace needed for the image as VirtualBox needs room to work during the import. Running WindowsXP in a virtual on top of Linux is the preferred over running Linux in a virtual on top of WindowsXP because Linux allows a wider range of drive format types to be automatically mounted and accessible from inside your virtual machine. You can now download VirtualBox for all platforms (PUEL) at http://dlc.sun.com/virtualbox/vboxdownload.html#linux The Fedora Install Command is rpm -ivh VirtualBox-3.2-3.2.6_63112_fedora13-1.i686.rpm
It was also mentioned by one of the attendees that the Debian Repository for apt on Lucid and others debian based distributions for installing the PUEL version is http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian karmic non-free You should install the PUEL version in order to get the enhanced features such as USB support for using your USB devices inside your virtual machine, something that is not supported by the OSE (Open Source Edition) version.
Clint spent some time on demonstrating how wine can be used to run Windows applications. He first showed that Wine Doors, a very useful tool that can be installed on both Ubuntu and Fedora among other distributions is currently broken because it is a client/server application and the server is in the maintainer's word "Very very broken and I don't have time to fix it". If you try to use Wine Doors, all the applications are stored on the server and you will not get any applications for installation. He next demonstrated how he "prepares" wine for installing Windows applications by providing some foundation libraries using the winetricks shell script (must be run at the command line but then displays a GUI from which selections can be made) . The first one he showed was installing DotNet 2.0 which failed because "cabextract" was not installed. Having "cabextract" installed is an essential for many windows applications that use cab files for installation. Clint switched to root to install cabextract on Fedora 13 with the command yum install cabextract. Switching to root also brings up a very important point in that you must run ./winetricks as your user, not root! Clint did not switch back to his user account by using "exit" from the root session and consequently, part of his demo failed in showing the libraries being added using the wine configuration tool. Attachments include screen shots of what should have been seen in the demo. Clint's list of winetricks essentials are dotnet20, jet40, mdac25 (mdac_type),wininet, vb6run, and vcrun6. These libraries provide the foundation requirements for a quite a few windows applications and will reduce the number of entries displayed in the terminal window during installation. He then showed how to install Internet Explorer 6 using winetricks and then created a menu application launcher for the application using the application template found at on our website at http://boiselug.org/node/94. Finally, intended for demonstration was the actual installation of a Windows application using wine. To install Microsoft Office 2000 (the recommended version as the one that works but don't install Outlook), the steps are:
1. Insert the installation CD and let Linux mount it on the desktop.
2. Find the mount location:
[tinslecl@fed13 ~]$ mount
...
/dev/sr0 on /media/O9PRMCD01 type iso9660
...
Your CD mount device should be something like sr0 and it mounts on /media/ with the CD label of O9PRMCD01.
3. Start the installation:
[tinslecl@fed13 ~]$ wine /media/O9PRMCD01/setup.exe
Clint also commented on not installing msi2 to install the InstMsiA (msiexec) for installing .msi files, a frequent mistake as msiexec is included in wine (built-in). If you make this mistake the best way to disable the msi2 is to open Wine Configuration, make sure that Default Settings is selected on the Applications tab and then on the Libraries tab, select and remove *msi (native, builtin) and *msiexec (native, builtin) from the list shown. The WineCfg2.png attachment shows this view.
During the night's Meeting, we discussed the wireless router I was using at my new job where my work location is some distance from the main building with no network connectivity and the existing wireless was usable for access by my Fedora 13 desktop using a DLink Wireless USB adapter. It was asked if I would provide the information about this router since it has some neat capabilities including a wide range of security settings (WEP, WPA-2, Shared, etc), WPS, extended range (up to 1200 feet), high throughput at 300 mBit (burst), QoS feature, and can function as an AP in extending your home network (no routing). The device is a Belkin N Wireless Router, sells for around $70 but I got it on sale at Fred Myers for $60. I also mentioned that in my use of this router and the Fedora 13 Desktop at the office providing network connection sharing functionality that is part of Network Manager, I have 4 or more computers sharing the wired connection on the Fedora 13 Desktop accessing the wired network in the other building via the Wireless USB Adapter and the Belkin N Wireless Router which is connect to the wired network in the other building. This has been a very stable setup and I have been able to do full bandwidth DSL downloads to the 4 or more computers sharing the connection from the Fedora 13 Desktop via an HP ProCurve Switch with no noticeable impact on the Desktop performance.