John's Blog

The Problem: Allow one linux workstation to be simultaneously used for both work and non-work purposes so that work and non-work traffic are segregated. The Requirements: I would like to be able to use the following applications in the corporate environment VNC Web (typically Google Chrome but potentially other browsers as well) Email - IMAP, SMTP, LDAP using Thunderbird IM - pidgin As already mentioned here the corporate network has an SSH server that you authenticate and connect to and from there you can reach the other corporate network resources. I would like non-work related traffic to bypass the corporate network - this is mostly web traffic but might also include things like Spotify, yum updates, and other assorted tasks. Finally it would be nice (but not essential) to wrap all this up in a handy GUI operation or series of operations. The Environment:  Fedora Core 16 (x86_64) and Gnome 3. The Solution:  Use SSH, SOCK...

With Fedora Core 16 UIDs (and GIDs) now start at 1000 instead of 500 as was the case previously . However, if a system has been upgraded from a previous version of Fedora, existing UIDs and GIDs are preserved. I recently found that this creates an ambiguous situation for the easylife utility . Easylife  is a utility that allows Fedora users to configure their systems by helping to install things like fonts, drivers, codecs and the like. When the easylife program is invoked as a regular user the consolehelper program is in turn invoked which requests the root password. When I did this after supplying the root password, the program would terminate with a window that popped up and displayed the following error message NO regular user found! It's a  dangerous  mistake to use your system as root. Most programs don't expect to be run with root privileges. Create a regular user and login again. Then you should run this program again. It turns out that easylife is ma...

My preupgrade system was a dual boot (linux/win7) x86_64 system with a couple of hardware RAID arrays running FC14 with grub as the bootloader.  Graphics hardware is fairly modern and should not by itself pose a problem for Gnome3. There are separate partitions for /home, /boot as well as a couple of others. I mostly relied on the Fedora Project preupgrade Wiki . Used Software Update to update to latest FC14. Backed up /home , /etc , and some of /var to an external drive. sudo yum install preupgrade su; preupgrade (choose FC16 Verne as the upgrade dest) ---At this point everything seemed to go well as many new packages were downloaded etc. but significantly there was no /boot/upgrade directory created and /boot/grub/menu.lst did not have an entry for the upgrade kernel.  Ran preupgrade again --- now things are good. Reboot and boot into the upgrade kernel -- this takes a while as more stuff gets downloaded and the system is modified to support the new distro. P...