fedora

I was looking for a Skype recorder that works in Linux and I came across this application:
http://atdot.ch/scr

I went to downloads and tried out their RPM version, and it (almost) worked right away. There were a few awkward steps for my distro (Fedora 14) and I can't say how it performs in other distros, but it seems by and large this works well, once you've fixed any dependency problems.

For my reference, and for the good of others, here are the steps required to make this work in Fedora 14:

Fedora 12 "end of life" just came around, so I decided to update to Fedora 13 while things were quiet over Christmas. Fedora ships with a preupgrade app which manages the update process, so in theory this should do it:

For my own sanity I'm blogging this, since every time I have to do it I end up jumping through the same hoops and cursing myself for not blogging it!

I have a USB external drive on one of my machines. I want it shared across the network. It's an old Windows drive formatted as NTFS. Here are the steps:

1. On the "server" install required services and applications. As root:

FUSE should be there already, but just in case. The GUI for ntfs-3g is optional.

2. Make sure the NFS services is enabled and loads on boot:

So, last night I lost not inconsiderable amounts of time and sleep to a Vodafone Italy 3G USB key. Trying to get these things set up is supposed to be fairly straightforward, however the end-to-end process is not really documented anywhere, as far as I can tell. Maybe for individual devices, but not in any generic way.

Since this is the second time I've done this now, and in both cases it was a pain in the ass, I am documenting some generic steps so I don't forget what I need to do all over again!

Ok, here I am at DrupalCon Paris blogging about Linux. WTF? Sorry, sorry, but I'm blogging this before I forget how I did it.

Note: This is written with Fedora 10 and Gnome. Apparently KDE has a desktop zoom feature which sounds like it achieves the same thing more easily. Although this is Fedora 10, I guess it should work for any Gnome desktop.

If you have a small-screened laptop or netbook (in my case, an EEE PC 901) and you want to "zoom out" your desktop and applications but can't go to a larger screen resolution, what do you do? With Gnome it's a two step process:

Good news for all you people who want to process their own video on their Drupal website. While FFMpeg is a "forbidden" application as far as the Fedora project guys and gals are concerned (not sure why - usually because of some legal issue), the ATrpms repositories contain FFMpeg, the Linux command line video encoding tool you need to install to use the FlashVideo module:
http://atrpms.net/

Specifically, here is the Fedora 10 repository:
http://atrpms.net/dist/f10/

Apache2 on the Fedora core (in my case Fedora 10) can be a fiddly beast. In fact, if you're a total Linux n00b I would say don't bother with the core Apache2 and MySQL - just install XAMPP, which gives you everything right out of the box. It is *not* secure but as long as we're talking about a fire-walled home computer here it is fine.