without-brains.net » Fedora

Fedora team changes package installation policy

Mark — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:08:20 +0000

After a few days upheaval the Fedora team came around and changed the default policy in Fedora 12 back to requiring root privileges for installing packages again: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/11/20/1241231/Fedora-12-Package-Installation-Policy-Tightened. In my opinion that is a good thing

I don’t intend to install Fedora again though, as I’m very pleased with Ubuntu

Manual Eclipse install in Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10

Mark — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:40:28 +0000

When developing software I sometimes like to use Eclipse (I recently did some work involving Drools, and there is an excellent Eclipse workbench available for working with Drools). Instead of using a package manager (such as yum or apt) to install Eclipse, I prefer to use the release that is available from eclipse.org and install that in my home directory. That way I can install whatever plugins I want without risking issues when running updates in the package manager.

If you try to do this in Fedora you’ll quickly run into SElinux. This can easily be solved by specifying which java binary to use with Eclipse. You can do this by passing in -vm /path/to/java on the command line, or by adding this into the eclipse.ini file.

Another issue that you will have in both Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 is that certain UI buttons seem unresponsive. When clicking one of those buttons the UI is unresponsive for a few seconds, and when it wakes up it appears as if you had never clicked that button. This is due to the fact that both Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 ship with a new version of GTK, which contains a new feature which certain applications such as Eclipse can’t handle properly. The fix to this is quite easy, you can deactivate this new feature by setting the environmental variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS to 1 (or true). You can do this by creating a script that does this before starting Eclipse, that way you don’t have to turn off this feature entirely but just for Eclipse.

The Fedora and Ubuntu versions of Eclipse that you can install via the distros’ package managers don’t have this problem, most likely because these versions of Eclipse turn off this GTK feature somehow (perhaps in the same way that I have described above).

You can read more about the GTK story here: http://blog.export.be/2009/10/fixing-eclipse-for-ubuntu-karmic-koala-9-10/. Kudos to the author, without that article it would have taken me a very long time to figure this one out

Linux on my desktop and EEE

Mark — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:18:16 +0000

Over the past few years I have mainly ran Ubuntu as my Linux of choice on desktops and laptops. I have run 9.04 on my EEE PC 900 for some time, and I have always been very pleased with it. My desktop has ran Windows XP for ages though, and I have been wanting to install a Linux distro on it for some time.

When Fedora 12 was released I decided to give that a go. I have to say that like Ubuntu it is easy to install and works really well. Unfortunately though I noticed that I could install packages without root priviliges as written here: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/11/18/2039229/Fedora-12-Lets-Users-Install-Signed-Packages-Sans-Root-Privileges. To me that is just an unacceptable security risk. I realise that this is just a policy setting (that you can re-configure), but I’m just not too fond of these types of defaults…

So I decided to back to Ubuntu. Unfortunately installing the 9.10 release did not go without problems, mainly because I had used some old CD-R(W) discs. Once I had a good CD-RW disc installation was a breeze though. A friend told me that next time I should use a USB drive instead

Because I’m so happy with Ubuntu 9.10, I also installed it on my EEE PC 900… using a USB drive