The last 4 and half years had left me with no spare time to pursue my interests in all things Linux. Recent career choices have given me the breathing room to change that. I intend to bring up my site back to what I’ve always wanted it to be: useful to me and hopefully useful to others. Lots has changed in the linux and open source world, but even so I’ll slowly start contributing again.

The Fedora 18 installer does not allow single package installations, instead it prefers to install by package groups. You can also install groups after completing installation. This is especially useful since you can only select one Desktop Environment at installation. Alternatively, to have faster installations, select as few groups as possible and then only install the ones you need later. This is just a quick note on how yum can install by groups instead of by individual packages.

Legacy Man by Mauriat Miranda (with apologies to Billy Joel) It’s nine o’clock on a Wednesday The regular files are looking neat There’s an old dev sitting next to me Trackin' bugs in his Excel spreadsheet He says, “Son, can you debug this memory I’m not really sure how it works But it’s bad and discrete and I knew it complete When I wrote a younger man’s code.” La la la, di da da La la, di di da da dum

I’ve been doing some development for some embedded Linux devices which only support ftp and telnet. In order to automate transfer of binaries from my Fedora development host to the target embedded device I’m using this handy ftp script: pushftp.sh #!/bin/bash # arg1 = dest hostname # arg2 = local file # arg3 = dest dir HOST=$1 SRCFILE=$2 USER=root PASSWD=password #DESTDIR=/usr/local/data DESTDIR=$3 ftp -inv $HOST<<ENDFTP user $USER $PASSWD cd $DESTDIR bin put $SRCFILE chmod 755 $SRCFILE bye ENDFTP Then I added something like this to my Makefile after cross-compiling:

(Note: For the purpose of this post CentOS is equivalent to RHEL) It has been about 2 and 1/2 years since I built a dedicated server and chose CentOS instead of Fedora. Since I installed CentOS 5.1 I have used the upgrade process 4 times with no problems bringing me to version 5.5 with practically no re-installation, re-configuration or troubleshooting upgrade issues. This is the goal of enterprise linux. A long term stable solution with no major changes to preserve compatibility with every piece of software that was provided since it was released (in this case April 2007).