Tech Chorus

Many of us have suffered from failing package repository mirrors. Some are slow, some won't have updated content, etc. You might want to remove/blacklist a particular mirror in your yum configuration.

Before trying to remove a mirror, install the fastest mirror plugin.

yum install yum-fastestmirror -y

The fastest mirror plugin is capable of determining mirror speeds and cache it. If that works for you well and good.

Problem: You are trying to use the command svn propedit svn:externals and you are receiving the error:

svn: None of the environment variables SVN_EDITOR, VISUAL or EDITOR are set, and no 'editor-cmd' run-time configuration option was found

Solution: Set vim as your SVN_EDITOR

Command:

export SVN_EDITOR=vim

To permanently set this environment variable put the below line in your ~/.bash_profile file.

export SVN_EDITOR=vim

Did it solve your problem?

I encountered this annoying issue today. OpenOffice.Org won't lunch at all. Clicking the OpenOffice.org icon from the GNOME panel application menu and clicking on a ODS file in nautilus had the same results. I could see the window information 'starting openoffice.org' on the bottom GNOME panel. It would soon disappear.

To troubleshoot the issue, I updated the system. There were new OpenOffice.org-* packages available. Updating the packages didn't fix the issue.

In the recent past, the default keyboard shortcut, CTRL+L set to lock the screen had stopped working. I tried manually setting different keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+ALT+L. None of them would work.

To set the keyboard shortcuts

• Click System on the GNOME Panel
• Click Preferences from the drop down menu
• Click Personal and then click Keyboard Shortcuts
• Select an action and then type the keyboard shortcut
• Click Close

Is scrolling vertically on web pages in your Firefox horribly slow?

I encountered this issue recently on Fedora 10. Initially, I suspected the binary NVIDIA driver. But I was wrong. I found a simple solution.

Disable smooth scrolling in the Firefox preferences.

• On the Firefox window click Edit
• Click Preferences
• Click Advanced tab
• Click Use Smooth Scrolling to uncheck the checkbox
• Click Close

Viola.

One of my friends had trouble configuring Apache2 on Ubuntu. I suggested my friend these steps to fix the problem. Configuring Virtual host in Apache2 is very straight forward. It is easy to find what you need in Ubuntu documentation. The below link clearly explains how to configure Apache2.

https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/server/C/httpd.html

These are the least steps required to configure virtual host in Apache2. If you run into problems please refer the online Ubuntu documentation or Apache2 documentation.

To install Apache use the command
"sudo apt-get install apache2"

• Have you used Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS before and looking for equivalent commands in Ubuntu?
• Are you a Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS user looking for configuration files location in Ubuntu?
• Vice-versa?

If you answered yes to any of the above, read on. I am trying to help you start using Ubuntu without much Googling.

This post provides a brief introduction on available Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS equivalent commands in Ubuntu. This will also be handy for Ubuntu users that have delved into the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS world.

FTP is an acronym that stands for File Transfer Protocol. As the name suggests, FTP is used to transfer data from one computer to another over Internet or through a network. By default, FTP servers listen on port 21 for incoming connections from FTP clients.

An FTP client is a program that allows you to easily move files from your computer to FTP server.

For example, FTP can used to upload Web page files. Those files are normally created on a author's computer and then uploaded to a Web server.

Remote Desktop, a software included with Fedora, enables you to connect to remote computer over the internet. Remote desktop will allow you to see and control your connected PC as though you were sitting directly in front of it. In this post, I will discuss how to set up remote desktop on Fedora 9. Here, I will refer to local system as

This one's a quick how-to about mounting Windows drives from Linux(Fedora 7).

From the Fdisk manual pages:

"Hard disks can be divided into one or more logical disks called partitions. This division is described in the partition table found in sector 0 of the disk. There may be reasons of security, ease of administration and backup, or testing, to use more than the minimum number of partitions".