Upalite boostere i pripremite se za istraživanje solarnog sustava na upravo lansiranom svemirskom brodu zvanom Fedora 10 Cambridge.
 
Fedora 10 je danas izašla i kao uvijek do sada dolazi s jako puno novosti. Za desktop korisnike je vrlo dobra vijest da sada Fedora ima puno bolju podršku za web kamere. Velika vijest je i potpuno novi grafički bootloader (plymouth) koji u kombinaciji s novim kernel modesetting driverima daje boot proces bez zastoja i blicanja ekrana i s puno ljepšom grafikom. Za desktop korisnike je bitno naglasiti i puno bolju podršku za infracrvene daljinske upravljače putem lirc servisa i pluginova za sve media playere u Fedori. Ako koristite Fedoru kao media center ili kao glazbenu liniju sada uz daljinski upravljač to iskustvo može postati puno ugodnije. Tu je također i potpuno novi bluetooth stack koji će vam olakšati prijenos podataka s Fedore na mobitele i obratno te korištenje bluetooth tipkovnica i mobitela.
 
Od najvećih promjena u odnosu na prethodnu verziju Fedore tu su najnovije verzije Gnome 2.24 i KDE 4.1.2 desktopa. Uz “teškaše” iz desktop kategorije sada se tu pojavljuju i dva nova desktopa – LXDE desktop te Sugar desktop poznat s OLPC laptopa. Posebno treba naglasiti da je Fedora jedina Linux distribucija koja dolazi s OpenOffice.org 3.0 setom uredskih aplikacija s podrškom za .docx datotečni format. Od ostalih desktop aplikacija posebno obratite pažnju na najnoviju verziju GIMPa 2.6 i VLC media playera 0.9.6
 
Da biste bili spojeni na bežične, žičane, VPN i mobilne broadband mreže za to se brine potpuno nova generacija NetworkManager aplikacije koja uz sve prethodno nabrojano sada omogućava i jednostavno dijeljenje vaše bežične mreže (connection sharing) za više korisnika.
 
Za napredne korisnike i programere treba nabrojati novosti poput EXT4 datotečnog sustava, nove aplikacije za popravak raznih podsustava (Firstaidkit) koja se pokreće i s Live CD-a, Python NSS bindings, Eclipse 3.4, Netbeans IDE 6.1 te alata za pravljenje i distribuciju softverskih appliancea.
 
Fedora je slobodna i besplatna Linux distibucija koju možete preuzeti i slobodno ju podijeliti svim svojim prijateljima, rodbini i znancima. Kliknite na ovaj link i sami ju isprobajte.
 
Ako želite na bilo koji način sudjelovati na Fedora projektu slobodno se priključite. Za savjet slobodno se obratite lokalnom Fedora ambasadoru.
 
Još je tu puno novosti pa ako vas zanimaju svi detalji pogledajte službenu najavu i pregled novih funkcija.
 

 
If you have a new Fedora user (or user of any other distro) who has problems using his wireless card first thing you need is for him to tell you which wireless card he has and which wireless driver his card uses. For experienced users this is trivial and can be done in several ways. I found that this can be a bit tricky for new users and there isn’t one simple command that displays ONLY this information.
 
This one liner seams to do the trick for PCI wireless cards:
 
lspci -k|grep -i -E “wireless|wlan|802.11″ -A 2
 
UPDATE:
 
Also try this command:
lshw -class network |grep -i ‘description: wireless’ -A 11
 

BROADCOM:
30:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
	Kernel modules: ssb

INTEL:
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
Network Connection (rev 02)
	Kernel driver in use: iwl3945
	Kernel modules: iwl3945

ATHEROS:
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg
Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: ath_pci
	Kernel modules: ath5k, ath_pci

INTEL:
3:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)
     Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
     Kernel modules: iwlagn

 
I tried this with Intel, Atheros and Broadcom wireless cards. Do you know of a better way to do this? How would you do this for USB wireless cards?
 

 
I use terminal all the time so having it quickly accessible is crucial for me.
 
Would you like to see gnome-terminal icon by default in gnome-panel? Why?
 

 
I really hate Nautilus spatial mode, because it is not usable – it opens lots of windows that you need to close afterwards. I don’t get Fedora using spatial mode by default. First thing for me to do after installing Fedora is:
 
gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser true
 
Do you do the same or leave nautilus set to spatial mode?
 
UPDATE; I ashamed to admit that but I didn’t know about all the shortcuts and I’ve been using Gnome for years! I’ll have to try spatial mode again and report back ;) Thanks for all of your comments.
 
UPDATE 2: I switched to spatial mode ;)
 

If you have digital camera then you also have lots of digital photos on your disk drive. For you who want to better organise your photos here is one quick tip.
 

Cameras name photo files in non human friendly ways, for example last few photos I took have these filenames:

$ ls
pa198126.jpg pa198130.jpg pa198134.jpg pa198138.jpg pa198142.jpg pa198146.jpg pa198150.jpg pa198127.jpg pa198131.jpg pa198135.jpg pa198139.jpg pa198143.jpg pa198147.jpg pa198151.jpg pa198128.jpg pa198132.jpg pa198136.jpg pa198140.jpg pa198144.jpg pa198148.jpg pa198129.jpg pa198133.jpg pa198137.jpg pa198141.jpg pa198145.jpg

 Just from looking at the file names and not oppening these photos you can’t really get much information. If you wish to smartly bulk rename your photo files so that the file names have more meaning continue reading.
 

First we need to install jhead. If you are using Fedora use yum for installing jhead and for Debian (Ubuntu) based systems use apt-get:
 

yum install jhead
or
apt-get install jhead
 

To give these images a new name we will use date written by the camera to their exif tags. Exif tags contain a lot of useful information like date and time the shoots were taken, brand and model of the camera, shutter speed and other info.
 

We will use only the time info for now, but you can play with all the settings as you wish.
 

To rename the images with date and time when they were shoot we can use jhead with these parameters:
 

jhead -n%Y_%m_%d_%H%M%S p*.jpg
 

After that we have a much more human friendly image names:
 

$ ls
2008_10_19_161728a.jpg 2008_10_19_162047.jpg 2008_10_19_172113.jpg 2008_10_19_173315.jpg 2008_10_19_161728.jpg 2008_10_19_162100.jpg 2008_10_19_172124.jpg 2008_10_19_173330.jpg 2008_10_19_161830.jpg 2008_10_19_162204.jpg 2008_10_19_172137.jpg 2008_10_19_173349.jpg 2008_10_19_161840.jpg 2008_10_19_162218.jpg 2008_10_19_172141.jpg 2008_10_19_173806.jpg 2008_10_19_161949.jpg 2008_10_19_171956.jpg 2008_10_19_172231.jpg 2008_10_19_173816.jpg 2008_10_19_162000.jpg 2008_10_19_172009.jpg 2008_10_19_173256.jpg 2008_10_19_162034.jpg

 If you have some more examples how this approach can be enhanced even more please post it in the comments.
 
UPDATE:
 
I read a great article on linux.com about automated image processing. Highly recommended.
 

 
If you have bluetooth GPS dongle that you have laying around, or can borrow one from somebody, and like driving a bike or a car around then this is the guide for you.
 

You need to have bluetooth wireless chip already installed on your laptop. If you have a laptop or a desktop without bluetooth you can buy and use USB bluetooth dongle.
 

You can check if you have a bluetooth and that it is working correctly using this command:
hcitool dev

Then let’s make sure you have bluetooth service running:
service bluetooth status
 

if it is not running just start it with:
service bluetooth start
 

Turn on your bluetooth GPS dongle and find its bluetooth mac address with this command:
hcitool scan
Scanning ...
00:1E:EE:00:11:22 LG KU990
00:02:78:99:FF:00 SJ GPS
00:12:EE:55:00:FF Device01
 

If you find more than one bluetooth device you should know the name of your GPS dongle. My GPS dongle has a “GPS” in its name so it is easy to catch its mac address: 00:02:78:99:FF:00 (SJ GPS)
 

You need to install gpsd and setup bluetooth config files, so let’s first install gpsd:
su -
yum install gpsd gpsd-clients -y
 

Then you need to edit bluetooth config file so that gpsd connects automatically to GPS bluetooth dongle.

gedit / etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf
 

and add these lines:
 

rfcomm0 {
# Automatically bind the device at startup
bind yes;

# Description of the connection
comment "GPS Bluetooth dongle";
}
 

After reboot check if you have /dev/rfcomm0 device with:
ls -al /dev/rfcomm0
 

If after reboot (or you don’t wan’t to reboot) you still don’t have /dev/rfcomm0 then just issue this command:
rfcomm bind rfcomm0
 

Now start gpsd daemon:
gpsd /dev/rfcomm0
 

Now you can start having fun! :)
 

Install gps applications like tangogps, gpsdrive and gpsbabel.
yum install -y tangogps gpsdrive gpsbabel
 

Now just start tangogps and gpsdrive and enjoy…
 

I have read on glipper mailing list that the glipper maintainer has left the project so glipper is no longer maintained :(
 

Anybody with Python skills is welcome to joint the project and continue work on this small but essential and cool little project. I can’t imagine day-to-day work on Gnome desktop without this fabulous tool.

 
I can’t wait until somebody with Python skills comes along and makes this project shine again…

 
UPDATE:
Try parcellite – an alternative to glipper:

as root:
yum install parcellite
 

Thank you Martin for your comment regarding parcellite, and also thank you Christoph for fixing some glipper bugs, but it still has this issue with crashing on startup.

I’ve been trying for some time use Elisa media center on Fedora but it seams that Elisa is too elusive for Fedora. Current version on Elisa home page is 0.5.12 but if you install Elisa on Fedora 9 you will get much older 0.3.2, even bigger issue is that Elisa doesn’t work because of some broken dependencies.
 
You can look at Fedora Bugzilla; more specifically look at bugs #446051 and #429590.
 
So I guessed that there will be some “break my Fedora box” packages in F9 updates-testing repos, but unfortunately there were none :(
So I booted Fedora 10 beta – this is the bleeding edge Fedora so I thought there had to be new Elisa package in F10, but guess what? Fedora 10 also has old Elisa 0.3.2 which doesn’t work.
 
I also tried manually getting packages from freshrpms testing repo, I downloaded and saved all the rpm packages and tried to install them but there were some unmet dependencies :(
 
I tried installing pigment-python-0.3.8-1.fc9.i386.rpm but that packet needs libpigment-0.3.so.8, libpigment-gtk-0.3.so.8 and libpigment-imaging-0.3.so.8 but pigment-devel-0.3.9-1.fc9.i386.rpm packet provides only so.7 but no so.8 libraries…
 
I hope these issues will get sorted out as soon as possible. I’m willing to test Elisa packages and help that way so that working and updated Elisa gets into Fedora 10 repositories.
 
UPDATE:
I found out how you can install elisa on Fedora 9 thanks to thm on #fedora-devel irc channel, and it isn’t too hard.

First you need to setup freshrpms repository; just copy the code below, but you need to remove [ ] around etc because my blog has protection that prevents me to write that path.


su -
cat < /[etc]/yum.repos.d/freshrpms-testing-elisa.repo
[freshrpms-testing-elisa]
name=Freshrpms Testing (elisa)
baseurl=http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/testing/$releasever/elisa/$basearch
gpgkey=http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/RPM-GPG-KEY
enabled=1
EOF
 

and then just install elisa:
 

yum --enablerepo=freshrpms-testing-elisa install elisa

Links:

• Elisa home page
• Bugzilla bug #446051
• Bugzilla bug #429590
• Freshrpms testing repository

Since I stated contributing to OpenStreetMap I got totally addicted to it :)
 

I just love driving around with my bike around the city and why not also make a map while I’m enjoying my ride? I also drive a lot when I’m at work so I also took advantage of that and made a lot of gps tracks while I’m just driving around town doing my regular work related tasks. I just returned from my holiday – you can probably guess that I tracked it the whole time, and it was a really fun thing to do.
 

I usually use my Asus Eee 701 to capture gps tracks in .gpx files and them upload them to OpenStreetMap site, and then work on those tracks to make maps from them. While Eee is a great and small gadget when compared to classic laptops it still doesn’t fit in your pocket.
 

The good news for all OpenStreetMap nuts out there it that there a lot of options for making gps tracks; you can use your laptop, mobile phone, pocket pc or almost any other gadget out there. For the complete list of supported gadgets check out this wiki page.
 

Mobile phones that have gps embedded are hard to come by and are usually quite expensive, the good news it that there is an alternative – external bluetooth gps receivers. In Croatia the price of external gps receivers has come down to 430kn (60€ or 85$) so it is not prohibitively expensive to join OpenStreetMap and start contributing.
 

I have few mobile phones, LG KU990 Viewty, SonyEricsson K750 and Nokia 6230i. The older ones like Nokia 6230 (over 3 years old) and K750 you can pick for dirt cheap. Is almost impossible to find a mobile phone that doesn’t have bluetooth and support for java applications.
 

One great java application for making gps tracks (you can use it also just as a classic gps app) is MobileTrailExplorer. You can easily transfer .jar and .jad files to your phone and just install them from there. Nokia is a bit more specific so you need to use a special software for installing applications to it. If you use windows then you need to use Nokia Mobile Suite and for Linux desktops there is gammu.
 

You need first to configure gammu for your specific phone and you can just start gammu-config or copy/paste this text below to .gammurc file in your home folder.


[gammu]

port = /dev/rfcomm0
model = 6230i
connection = bluerfphonet
synchronizetime = yes
logfile =
logformat = text
use_locking = no
gammuloc =
port=00:00:00:00:00:00


under “port” you need to enter your phones bluetooth mac address.
 

To find out what is your phone’s bluetooth mac address just scan for bluetooth devices with:

hcitool scan
 
and now you just download your java app and install it from command line:
gammu nokiaaddfile Application TrailExplorer
 

In order for gammu to work properly you need both .jar and .jad files. In order for previous command to work you need to have TrailExplorer.jad and TrailExplorer.jar in your current folder from which you are issuing gammu command.
 

Hope this helps some body out there and I hope more people start contributing to OpenStreetMap.
 

Links:

• OpenStreetMap
• OpenStreetMap Wiki
• Gammu
• List of supported gadgets and software for OpenStreetMap
• Mobile Trail Explorer

Fedora 10 Alpha is out and Fedora developers and Red Hat have asked us to join in and provide feedback. First you need to download Fedora 10 Alpha then read instructions on how to provide feedback back to Fedora developers.
 

If you have trouble booting up Fedora 10 Live CD – give your feedback, if you have problem installing CD or DVD versions – give your feedback, some piece of hardware fails on Fedora – give your feedback, if you see some application not working as it should – you got it by now :).
Le’t take this chance and make together Fedora 10 the best Fedora release so far!
 

If you have any problems understandig some part of providing feedback you can contact me or even better join Fedora users mailing lists. If you prefer there is also a IRC channel on feenode.net servers – just follow these instructions.
 

Some of the exciting new features in Fedora 10 are:
• RPM 4.6
• Brand new boot environment
• Wireless connection sharing
• Improved audio system
• Security audit utility
• Better webcam support
• Improved infrared remote control support
• Haskell support
• OCaml support
• Upstream bugfixes, improvements and enhancements.
 

A bit expanded explanation of some great new features:

* Glitch free audio. The revolutionary PulseAudio stack has been enhanced to use timer-based scheduling. This means that it uses less power, is more hardware independent, and adjusts dynamically to keep audio data flowing without interruption — minimizing drop outs.
 

* Sectool. Fedora 10 will feature a brand new security auditing and intrusion detection system. It has both text and graphical front ends, features highly configurable groups for adjusting test runs, and is completely modular and extensible. Administrators and the community at large can write their own tests to extend its functionality even further.
 

* Connection Sharing. Fedora 10 delivers on the promise of NetworkManager’s “Create new wireless network” tool, with easy setup of an ad-hoc wifi network on any machine with a network connection and a spare wireless card. If the machine has primary network connection (wired, 3G, second wireless card), routing is set up so that devices connected to the ad-hoc wifi network can share the connection to the outside network.
 

The best thing is to keep checking out the ever-changing Fedora 10 feature list.
 

Links:

• Fedora 10 Alpha: Give Us Your Feedback
• Download Fedora 10 Alpha
• How to provide feedback
• Fedora users mailing lists
• Fedora IRC howto
• Fedora 10 feature list