Ok – so now post upgrade to Mandriva 2006 I sit down to try something out. Put a dvd in the drive and see what happens. I rarely sit and watch dvd’s on the desktop, but it’s always been a possibility… So, when I pop the disc in, kaffeine pops up with it’s “install” sequence – checks to see what’s on the system and what’s not what version of kde, libdvdcss, dvd, dvb hardware, etc….
So, the disc pops up and no sound…. hmm. maybe it’s just kaffeine…
I’m going to do a few articles on building RPM’s as much for my own reference as anyone elses. I’m not an expert on the subject by any means… I do this from time to time, rebuild an rpm for an older system (or even a newer system that doesn’t have an official rpm for.) I have a tendency to forget things that I don’t do frequently. The first part of being able to rebuild rpm’s is to have what’s called a build environment. For starters, I’m using Mandriva 2006 (older versions I used Mandrake 10.1 or 10.0, etc.) In your home directory you need a folder called rpm.
OK – so as I have mentioned after upgrading to Mandriva 2006 I was looking at the possibility of moving from Evolution to Kontact as the main mail client. I moved contacts and got things massaged quite well. One of the neat features in Kontact is the ability to have multiple address-books/resource names. Anyway, I moved on to calendar items which given that some of what I do is recurring appointments is fairly easy to reconstruct if necessary. Anyway, I got those copied over and thought I’d take advantage of being able to use different calendar files to organize different things. For instance I thought – why don’t I do a seperate file for Holidays…
I REALLY like secure shell (SSH) for remote access to linux machines. You can do more than just a “telnet” like remote shell with it. (Port forwarding.) However, the default configuraton for the openssh-server is sometimes a bit less tight than I would like. For that reason on a new install, I usually like to make a few changes. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I haven’t devoted a post JUST to this, so… here we go.
I’ve toyed around with the idea of migrating everything over to Kontact for my mail. I’ve used Evolution since moving over to linux, but there are some things about Kontact that just seem slicker to me. While I was doing the install, I had the laptop setup to receive messages through IMAP and used Kontact as the client. There were a few features that I wanted to spend a bit more time with. So, the first thing is getting the data into Kontact.
Incidents.org writes to remind as that bot’s aren’t just for Windows. The recent PHP exploits have seen the use of the “kaiten” bot. After infection on the system it connects to an IRC server. It would primarily target linux systems. They do give a very good way to blunt most Linux bot-style malwares…
I think it’s time to wrap things up. The KDE start new session option is back after the changes I mentioned to the /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc file I mentioned in a previous post. There are no outstanding issues from the upgrade. (I need to adjust the font sizes down a bit, but that’s not a big deal.) This series, of course, has been spread out over days. The actual event covered two afternoon’s/evening’s. The first day was the attempted urpmi upgrade (which didn’t go too well.)
There are lots of ways to get a remote desktop under linux, remote X, nxserver, vnc. One of the problems though is the most common configuration doesn’t let you connect to a running desktop session. There is a vnc component that let’s you do this and I’m using it right now. On the home network, sometimes I don’t want to be sitting at the desktop machine and would rather use the laptop while checking in on programs running on the desktop itself. But, being too lazy to go to the desktop it would be nice if there was a way I could run something remotely that would let me view that desktop… ahhh there is a way.
Ok – tv card – no name brand is now working… it was a bttv compatible card but it’s always been “strange” for lack of a better word. NOTHING under linux has seemed to correctly detect it. Sometimes I have seen it given the following settings… bttv card=72 tuner=2, but it’s “close” not working. With those settings I get the channels showing up “in the wrong places” black and white (as if it’s tuning the wrong frequencies – which it likely is.)