Fedora Core is a collection of software that provides a complete working environment for a desktop or a server computer. It is often called an operating system , but, like other Linux distributions, it provides a lot more functionality than operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X because it includes desktop productivity applications and server software. Fedora Extras is a collection of software that is compatible with and extends the functionality of Fedora Core.

Fedora is developed and supported by a large community of developers, testers, package maintainers, documentation writers, marketers, and advocates. Many leading community members are also employees of Red Hat, Inc., which provides servers, build systems (the computers that compile and test the thousands of packages included with Fedora) and some funding for the project. In return, Red Hat gains the opportunity to receive feedback on new software and features before incorporating them into its commercial product line, called Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

If you want (or need) to run Windows games or a specific Windows application, Fedora may not be the right OS for youalthough Wine will let you run some Windows applications when you're in a pinch. Two commercial products based on Wine are available: Cedega, for Windows games, and CrossOver Office, for Microsoft Office and other business applications.

A new Fedora release is made approximately every four to nine months, and only the current and next-to-current releases are actively maintained by the project (beyond this time frame, security and bug fixes are supplied by the Fedora Legacy project).

If you need a platform with long-term stability, consider using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instead (or CentOS, which is a nonaffiliated project based on RHEL that does not have commercial support). Each RHEL release is supported with updates and security enhancements for a full seven years.

Because Fedora serves as a testbed for new technologies, it can be used to gain a preview of the new technologies that will be incorporated into future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases.

As a community distribution, support for Fedora is provided by the Fedora community rather than a commercial entity. That means that most questions receive a quick and friendly answer, but since no one is being paid to help you, you may not receive any answers to unique or unusual questions.

If you like Fedora but need commercial support, consider using RHEL, which is Red Hat's fully supported commercial Linux product.

Fedora will install on PCs with Intel and AMD 32- and 64-bit processors, as well as compatible processors from Transmeta, Via, and others. You will need a minimum of 256 MB of memory, 7 GB of disk space, and a processor speed of 400 MHz to obtain reasonable performance with the graphical user interface. A broadband Internet connection is desirable for obtaining software updates but is not necessary.

You can also install Fedora Core on a system with a PowerPC processor, such as an Apple Mac produced after 1999 and before 2006, or an IBM RS/6000 system.

Fedora Core can be configured for dual booting , as long as you have sufficient disk space for both operating systems. You will be given the opportunity to select the default operating system during the Fedora installation, and you can override this default during the boot process, selecting the operating system you wish to use from a menu.

If Windows is currently using your entire hard disk, you will need to resize the Windows partition (see Lab 10.1, "Resizing a Windows Partition ") or add an extra disk drive. If Windows is not yet installed on your computer, you should install it before Fedora; otherwise, it may overwrite your Fedora bootloader (or, in some cases, the entire Fedora installation).

There are dozens and dozens of Linux distributions, each aimed at a different audience. For details about specific distributions, visit http://distrowatch.com .

Visit http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/repodata/ , and you'll see a browsable display of all of the packages in Fedora Core. Click on a package name to see a detailed description of the package.

The Fedora Core installer is a bare-bones configuration of Linux designed specifically for the installation process. Once the installer is running, it configures and installs the Fedora Core software on your system.

There are, therefore, two parts to the software: the software used to boot up the system for the installation session, and the software that is installed on your system. These may be on the same media, or they may be separated into boot media and installation media .

Before selecting the media and obtaining the software, you must determine which architecture (machine type) you are using. Fedora Core is available for three different architectures:

The Fedora Core installation boot software is usually started from a CD or DVD disc. It's also possible to boot from a USB flash disk drive if the system's BIOS supports it, or to boot from a network boot server using the PXE protocol. Table 1-1 outlines the boot media requirements.

Table 1-1. Boot media requirements for installing Fedora Core 6

To create a Fedora Core CD or DVD set, you must obtain the ISO image files .

To download the entire Fedora Core distribution for installation direct from disc, use one of these two procedures:

 Go to the web page http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/mirrors.html and select an HTTP or FTP site for direct download. Select the directory for the desired Fedora Core version number (6), then the directory for your machine architecture (i386, PPC, or x86_64), and then select the iso directory. You will probably not need the files containing "SRPM" in the name. If you want the CD images, get the files containing "disc1," "disc2," and so forth in the name; to obtain the DVD image, get the file containing "DVD" in the name.

 Use BitTorrent ( http://www.bittorrent.com ) to obtain the files from one of the Fedora torrents listed on http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ .��

To download only the boot disk ISO (for use with a network or hard disk installation):

 Go to the web page http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/mirrors.html and select an HTTP or FTP site for direct download. Select the directory for the desired Fedora Core version number (6), then the directory for your machine architecture (i386, PPC, or x86_64), select the os directory, and then select the images directory. Download the file named boot.iso . (You can also find this file in the images directory of the Fedora Core DVD or CD disc 1).

Once you have the image files, burn them onto optical media using the CD-creator program available on the platform used for downloading. For example, on Windows you could use Nero or Roxio Easy Media Creator; on a Linux system (such as Fedora Core 4), right-click on the file and select "Write to disc," or use a tool such as K3B , xcdroast , or growisofs .

Depending on the speed of your Internet connection, it may be faster and cheaper to purchase a set of Fedora discs than to download the software. A list of online Fedora Core vendors is available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/OnlineVendors , and a list of local retailers carrying Fedora Core is at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/LocalVendors .

To install Fedora Core from a FAT, ext2, or ext3 partition, simply copy the ISO image files for the DVD or CD set onto that disk partition. For example, on a Windows system with a FAT32 disk partition D: , download the DVD image file as though you were going to burn it onto a DVD but place the image file on drive D: (be sure to record the name of the directory/folder containing the images!).

Each of these tasks is most easily performed on a running Linux system; see Chapter 10 for instructions. (Similar software is available for other platforms.)

The Fedora installer has grown to the point that it no longer fits on a floppy disk. The USB flash disk method has replaced the floppy-disk boot procedure.

To install Fedora Core, you'll need the installation media and your computer. If you are going to use a local area network or broadband Internet connection, it's recommended that you have it connected during the installation process.

A Fedora installation will usually take 15 to 90 minutes, depending on the speed of your computer and the amount of optional software you choose to install.

If your system already has Windows installed, and you intend to continue to use Windows, you will need to free up some space on the hard disk for Fedora Core. See Lab 10.1, "Resizing a Windows Partition ," for instructions on shrinking a Windows disk partition (or deleting one that is unused).

There is an alternative to repartitioning your disk: you can install an additional disk drive in your system and use that drive for Fedora, or use an external USB or FireWire drive.

Insert your installation media (DVD, CD, or USB stick, or plug your system into a network with a PXE network boot server) and turn your system on. If it does not boot from the installation media, change your system BIOS settings to boot from it.

The first thing you will see is the boot screen shown in Figure 1-1 .

Figure 1-1. Fedora Core installation boot screen

The boot: prompt at the bottom of the screen lets you configure special options. You can press Enter for a standard, graphical installation, or you can type linux followed by any of the keywords in Table 1-3 to specify particular options for the installation session. Table 1-4 lists hard disk device names.

Additional installation boot options are discussed in Chapter 10.

Table 1-3. Fedora Core basic installation options

Option	Description	Notes
lowres	Uses 640x480 screen resolution.	Use if you are installing with a very old monitor.
resolution= 1024x 768	Specifies a standard video resolution.	Use if the installer does not correctly detect your monitor capabilities and the video signal is out of range.
text	Uses text mode for installation (no graphics mode or mouse access).	Use this if graphics are garbled or slow when using the regular installer.
askmethod	Ask the user for the installation method (source of the software to be installed).	The installer will automatically ask if the boot media is a USB flash drive or a network boot. For a CD or DVD installation, the installer will assume that you're installing from the CD or DVD unless the askmethod or method= options are specified.
method= method	Specifies the installation method:cdromInstall from optical disc (CD or DVD)http:// server / pathInstall from HTTP serverftp:// server / pathInstall from FTP servernfs: server / pathInstall from a NFS serverhd:// partition / pathInstall from an ISO file on a hard disk partition	For the hd installation method, take the hard disk device name from Table 1-4 and add the partition number at the end. For example, if the ISO file is in the folder fc6 on the 2nd partition of the primary master hard disk, use: method=hd://dev/hda2/fc6/.
expert	Enables the use of a driver disk with additional device driver modules.	Use this to install onto hardware that requires driver modules not included in Fedora Core 6.

Table 1-4. Hard disk device names

Device name	Disk type	Controller	Unit
/dev/hda	Parallel ATA (IDE)	Primary	Master
/dev/hdb	Parallel ATA (IDE)	Primary	Slave
/dev/hdc	Parallel ATA (IDE)	Secondary	Master
/dev/hdd	Parallel ATA (IDE)	Secondary	Slave
/dev/hde	Parallel ATA (IDE)	Auxiliary #1	Master
/dev/hdf	Parallel ATA (IDE)	Auxiliary #1	Slave
/dev/hdg	Parallel ATA (IDE)	Auxiliary #2	Master
/dev/hdh	Parallel ATA (IDE)	Auxiliary #2	Slave
/dev/sd<X>	SATA, SCSI, IEEE1394, or USB	<X> is a for the first disk found, b for the second disk found, c for the third disk, and so forth. With USB and IEEE1394 (FireWire) devices, the assignments may change between reboots.

�For example, if you are using a CD for booting, and you want to use text mode and to be asked for the installation method, enter this boot string:

boot: linux text askmethod

In most cases, you should simply press Enter at the boot prompt. The Linux kernel and ramdisk ( initrd.img ) will load, as shown in Figure 1-2 , and then start executing, as shown in Figure 1-3 .

Figure 1-2. Loading the kernel and initrd (ramdisk)

Figure 1-3. The Linux kernel starting up

At this pointif you are installing from DVD or CD seta media-check tool enables you to test the DVD or CD set, as shown in Figure 1-4 . Press Enter to test the discs (optional), or press Tab and then Enter to skip the media check. The tests will take 26 minutes per CD or 812 minutes per DVD on a modern computer.

Figure 1-4. DVD/CD media check

The screen shown in Figure 1-5 will appear only if you did not not boot from an optical disc, or if you entered the method or askmethod keywords at the boot prompt ( Figure 1-1 ).

Figure 1-5. Language selection screen

Select the language to use during installation using the up/down cursor keys, and then press Enter to proceed. The keyboard selection screen shown in Figure 1-6 will appear.

Figure 1-6. Keyboard selection screen

Select the entry that matches your keyboard and press Enter.

If you included the askmethod keyword at the boot prompt or booted from a USB flash disk or a PXE boot server, the installation method dialog shown in Figure 1-7 will appear next.

Figure 1-7. Installation method dialog

If you select an installation method that is network-based (NFS, FTP, or HTTP), you will be presented with a network configuration screen where you can enable automatic IP configuration through DHCP and select IPV4 (used on most networks) and/or IPV6. If you do not enable DHCP support, an additional page will appear to collect the IP settings (IP address, netmask, DNS server, and gateway). In most established networks (including small business or home networks with a broadband Internet connection through a router/gateway device), the IP settings can be obtained from a DHCP server. If in doubt, try the DHCP server option; if it fails, you will be given the opportunity to enter the network information manually.

If you select the hard disk installation method, you will be prompted to select the disk device and path to the Fedora Core ISO images. Use Table 1-4 to determine the disk device, and append the partition number to the device name (for example, use /dev/hda2 for partition 2 on the IDE primary master disk); for the path, enter the pathname of the directory containing the ISO images, using the forward-slash ( / ) character to separate directories instead of the Windows-style backslash ( \ ).

At this point, control of the system passes from the boot media to the installation media. For example, if you've used a USB flash drive to boot and HTTP for the installation method, it is at this point that the system switches over to software from the HTTP server.

If you're using a graphical installation, the graphical environment will be started now, and the splash screen shown in Figure 1-8 will appear. Click Next to proceed.

�If you are using a text-mode installation, you will see a text-based version of each of the following screens; the layout may be slightly different to accommodate the available screen space and the absence of a mouse pointer. Use the Tab key to navigate among the controls on the text screen.

Figure 1-8. Fedora Core graphical-installation splash screen

If you have not already selected your language and keyboard type, the screens shown in Figures 1-9 and 1-10 are presented to collect this information.

Figure 1-9. Graphical language selection

Figure 1-10. Graphical keyboard selection

The installation program will check to see if you have an existing Fedora installation; if you do, it will offer you the option of upgrading the current system instead of performing a new installation (Figure 1-11).

Figure 1-11. Upgrade option

Choose Install Fedora Core if you want to replace your existing installation, or "Upgrade an existing installation" if you want to upgrade your existing Fedora system to Fedora Core 6. Click Next.

If you choose Install, skip to the next section titled "Performing a New Fedora Installation." Otherwise, the screen shown in Figure 1-12 will appear, asking what you want to do with the bootloader configuration.

Figure 1-12. Bootloader configuration during upgrade

Choose an option based on your current bootloader:

Update boot loader configuration

Use this if your previous installation installed the GRUB bootloader (the default for recent versions of Fedora Core).

Skip boot loader updating

Use this if you are using a third-party bootloader program. You will need to refer to your bootloader documentation to determine how to update the bootloader manually.

Create new boot loader configuration

Select this option if you are using the older LILO bootloader. The installation system will replace LILO with GRUB.

Click Next. After a few seconds, the screen shown in Figure 1-13 will appear.

Figure 1-13. Fedora installation confirmation screen

This is the point of no return. Click Next to proceed with the upgrade, but remember that the upgrade process must run to completion and cannot be safely interrupted. The Fedora installer will analyze the software installed in your existing Fedora system, determine what needs to be updated, and install the new packages.

If any of your hard disks are empty and have not been previously used, the warning message displayed in Figure 1-14 will appear. If the drive contains data that you wish to preserve, abort the installation and boot into your existing operating system, figure out why the disk does not show a partition table, and restart the installation. Otherwise, click Yes to continue the installation.

Figure 1-14. Warning about a blank partition table

The installer will now ask what you want to do about partitioning, as shown in Figure 1-15 . In most cases, there are four options available:

Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout

This will wipe out everything on the drive and use the entire drive for Fedora Core. Select this option on a new computer or a computer you want to convert for use entirely with Fedora Core. This is also the right option to use when you are installing Linux on a second (or third) disk drive, leaving the software and data on the other drives untouchedbut be careful that only the Fedora Core drive is selected in the list of available disks.

Remove Linux partitions on selected drives and create default layout

Use this option if you are replacing an existing Linux installation and want to leave other operating systems (such as Windows) untouched.

Figure 1-15. Disk and partition strategy selection

Use free space on selected drives and create default layout

If you have unused space on your disk drive, or you have shrunk a Windows partition to free up some space, select this option.

Create custom layout

If you are familiar with partitioning and have special requirementsfor example, you wish to preserve only one filesystem (such as /home ) from a previous Linux installationselect this option.

If you have more than one disk drive installed, you will be able to select the drive(s) to be used for Fedora using the checkboxes in the rectangle labeled "Select the drive(s) to use for this installation." Refer to Table 1-4 for Linux disk names.

At the bottom of this screen, be sure to select the checkbox labeled "Review and modify partitioning layout" so that you will have an opportunity to see the proposed disk layout before it is used. Click Next to continue.

If you have selected an option that involves removing an existing partition, you will see the partition-removal warning shown in Figure 1-16 . Review the information shown, and then click Yes to confirm that you are prepared to remove the partitions listed.

Figure 1-16. Partition removal warning

By default, Fedora Core uses a system called Logical Volume Management (LVM). A partition managed using LVM is called a physical volume (PV). Storage space from one or more PVs is used to create a pool of storage called a volume group (VG). Out of this pool of storage, one or more virtual partitions are created; each virtual partition is a logical volume (LV). Figure 1-17 illustrates the relationship between these components.

Figure 1-17. Relationship between LVM components

LVM has several advantages over traditional partitioning:

 Logical volumes can be resized, enabling you to shift space between filesystems without reinstalling the system.

 Logical volumes can span multiple physical volumes, enabling the use of filesystems that are larger than one physical disk.

 Additional storage can be added to existing filesystemsfor example, you can add a new disk drive and add that storage space to the home filesystem.

 Data can be migrated from one drive to another.

Chapter 6 delves into more detail regarding LVM.

Although logical volumes can be enlarged or reduced at any time, the ext3 filesystem that Fedora uses can be enlarged only while it is in use. It must not be in use when it is reduced in size. This can make it fairly complicated to shrink an ext3 partition. Because it's difficult to determine how much disk space each filesystem will require in the future, it is a good idea to make Fedora filesystems no larger than necessary at first, and then add space to them as required. This avoids the need to reduce the size of one LV in order to increase the size of another.

Unfortunately, the LVM system is too complex to use during the early stages of the booting process, so a system configured to use LVM must also have a small traditional partition for boot files.

If you have selected a partitioning option that includes the default layout and have selected the checkbox to review and modify the layout, the screen in Figure 1-18 will appear at this point in the installation.

Figure 1-18. Fedora Disk Druid partitioning screen

The table on the bottom half of the screen contains two sections: one for LVM volume groups and one for hard disks. The default layout creates a 100 MB boot partition, and takes all remaining available disk space on all drives and places it in a single volume group named VolGroup00 . The space in this volume group is then divided into two logical volumes: LogVol00 for the root filesystem and LogVol01 for swap space (virtual memory).

There are three improvements that we are going to make to the default Fedora Core partition/LVM layout:

 A separate LV will be used for the /home filesystem, so that users' home directories are separated from the operating system. This will enable you to wipe out the operating system and reinstall it (or install another distribution of Linux or a later version of Fedora Core) without affecting the users' files.

 The LVs will be reduced in size so that they are no larger than necessary. Surplus disk space can be left unassigned within the volume group and added to logical volumes as needed; this eliminates the need to perform complex operations to shrink one volume group in order to grow another.

 The volume group and logical volume names will be replaced with more descriptive text.

To make these changes, double-click on the line in the table that reads VolGroup00 and then click the Edit button. The Edit LVM Volume Group window will appear, as shown in Figure 1-19 .

Figure 1-19. Edit LVM Volume Group window

Start by changing the Volume Group Name at the top of this window from VolGroup00 to main . Next, click on the entry that has a mount point of / and click Edit; the Edit Logical Volume window shown in Figure 1-20 will appear.

Figure 1-20. Edit Logical Volume window for the root LV

Change the Logical Volume Name to root , and change the size to a value that is closer to the size of the installation. I recommend 8,000 MB (i.e., 8 GB; most server and desktop systems will take 26 GB of space to install, so 8 GB gives a modest amount of headroom). Click OK when you are done.

Figure 1-21 shows the settings that repeat the process for the other predefined LV: click on this LV and then click Edit. Change the Logical Volume Name to swap , leaving the size at the default value. Click OK when you are done.

Figure 1-21. Edit Logical Volume window for the swap LV

Finally, click the Add button and create a new Logical Volume to hold the home directories, as shown in Figure 1-22. Set the Mount Point to /home , the File System Type to ext3 , the Logical Volume Name to home , and then set a reasonable size for storing the users' home directories (if you're not sure what value to use, start with 1000 ). Click OK when you are done.

Figure 1-22. Creating a new Logical Volume for the home LV

Review the final disk partition and LVM layout, and then click Next. The bootloader configuration screen will appear, as shown in Figure 1-23 .

Figure 1-23. Bootloader configuration screen

The default bootloader configuration replaces any existing bootloader installed on the main hard disk. If you have more than one operating system installed, the bootloader will ask you which OS to boot when the system is started. If you have a Windows boot partition present, it will be listed as a boot option, but it will be labeled Other. To change this label to something more descriptive, click on that entry, and then click Edit. Enter the text of your choice, such as Windows XP Professional , and then click OK.

Use the checkboxes in the Default column to select which operating system will be loaded by default if the user doesn't override the selection at boot time.

It is a good idea to install a bootloader password. Without this, any person with physical access to your machine will be able to easily override all security by booting the system into single-user mode. Click "Use a boot loader password" and then enter your selected password twice when prompted.�

Click Next to proceed.

If you have not already configured the network, and you have a network adapter installed in your system, the network configuration screen appears next, as shown in Figure 1-24 .

Figure 1-24. Network configuration screen

If you have a DHCP server on your networkwhich is the case in most large networks and in most small office and home networks that have a broadband Internet gateway/router devicethen you will only need to change the "Set the hostname" option to "manually" and then enter the hostname of your choice (unless your DHCP server sets the hostname for you). If you have a registered domain, choose a hostname within that domain, such as bluesky.fedorabook.com (which specifies the host bluesky within the domain fedorabook.com ); otherwise, choose a hostname and append .localdomain to the end of the name.

If you do not have a DHCP server on your network, select your primary Ethernet card from the Network Devices list and then click Edit. You will see the Edit interface window shown in Figure 1-25 . Click on the "Configure using DHCP " option to deselect that checkbox, then enter the IP address and netmask. Click OK to save this information, and enter the hostname, gateway, and DNS server information in the blanks provided (it is necessary only to enter a Primary DNS server).

Figure 1-25. Edit interface window

Click Next to proceed to the next step in the installation, which is time zone selection, as shown in Figure 1-26 .

Figure 1-26. Time zone selection

Click on your region of the map to zoom in, and then click on the major city closest to your locationor use the pull-down menu to select your time zone.

You can choose to configure the system's hardware clock to store information in local time or in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This is controlled by the checkbox labeled "System clock uses UTC." If you are using multiple operating systems on your computer (dual-boot), to use local time, deselect the checkbox so that the other operating system will interpret the time correctly.

If you are using only Fedora, or Fedora and another distribution of Linux, choose UTC by selecting the checkbox. This will avoid multiple adjustments of the clock when entering or exiting daylight savings time.

Click Next to proceed.

The screen in Figure 1-27 requests that you enter a root password for the system (twice). This is the master system administration password, so be sure to safeguard it against both theft and loss.

Figure 1-27. Creating a root password

The next screen, shown in Figure 1-28 , is used to select the software that will be installed. Use the checkboxes to select the categories of applications that you wish to have installed. To further refine the software selection, select the "Customize now" option; this is recommended if you are installing on a system with minimal disk space or a slow Internet connection.

Figure 1-28. Software selection screen

Click Next to continue. If you selected "Customize now," you will see the screen shown in Figure 1-29 . Otherwise, skip ahead two paragraphs.

Figure 1-29. Software customization screen

Select a category on the left side to see the package groups within that family on the right side. Use the checkboxes provided to select the groups you want. For even finer control, you can select a package group, click the "Optional packages" button, then select the individual packages you wish to include from the window shown in Figure 1-30 .

Figure 1-30. Optional package selection screen

�Click Next to continue. After a short time for dependency processing, the screen shown in Figure 1-31 will appear.

Figure 1-31. Installation confirmation

This is the point of no return; once you click Next, the partition table, filesystems, and bootloader will all be modified. Once the installation process begins, it cannot be safely interrupted and must be allowed to run to completion. During the installation, a progress bar similar to the one in Figure 1-32 will be shown.

Bored? You can read the release notes during the installation; just click on the button in the lower-left corner of the screen.�

Figure 1-32. Installation progress indicator

When the installation is complete, the confirmation message shown in Figure 1-33 is displayed. Remove the installation boot media, and then click Reboot to start up the new system.

On some systems, you may need to click Reboot and wait for the system to start the boot process before you can remove optical media.�

Figure 1-33. Completed installation

The first time you boot your freshly installed Fedora system, you will be asked a few questions to finish up the initial configuration. The display shown in Figure 1-34 will greet you; as you work through the questions, the arrow on the lefthand side of the screen will move downward to indicate your progress.

Figure 1-34. First boot welcome screen

Click Forward to proceed to the license-agreement screen. Read the license carefully, and then click Yes or No to indicate whether you accept the license terms.

Click Forward to enter the firewall configuration screen. I strongly recommend that you leave the firewall enabled, and that you initially select only ssh as a trusted service. You can loosen your firewall to permit other inbound services later, as you set those services up.

Click Next to proceed to SELinux configuration. SELinux hardens the Linux kernel against attack. Although it can be a bit difficult to configure at times, the protection that it provides is well worth the extra effort. SELinux is covered in more detail in Lab 8.2, "Using SELinux ." For now, leave the Modify SELinux Policy option at its default setting; you can always adjust SELinux later.

Click Forward to proceed to the date and time configuration screen. Select the current date by clicking on the calendar, and enter the current time into the fields provided.

If you have an always-on Internet connection, click on the Network Time Protocol tab. Select the checkbox labeled Enable Network Time Protocol. This will configure your system to communicate with timeservers on the Internet to keep the clock closely synchronized to official time. This is valuable because it ensures that time and date stamps on your system are always accurate.

You can edit the list of timeservers that can be contacted using the Add, Edit, and Remove buttons beside the server list. The NTP Server Pool Project maintains a pool of publicly accessible timeservers; the default server list ( 0.fedora.pool.ntp.org , 1.fedora.pool.ntp.org , and 2.fedora.pool.ntp.org ) configures your system to randomly select up to three timeservers from the pool at boot. To use a timeserver in your country, use your ISO country code as the hostname within the pool.ntp.org domain; I'm in Canada, so a server in my country could be found using the name ca.pool.ntp.org .

Click Next to proceed on to creating the first user. The root password that you entered during installation is used only for system administration and should not be used for day-to-day work. This screen lets you create the first user account; you can create as many additional accounts as you want later (see Lab 4.7, "Managing Users and Groups").

Fill in the four fields on this screen:

You can rerun the firstboot script by adding reconfig to the boot parameters when the system is started (boot parameters are entered in the same way as runlevels are during the boot process; see Lab 4.5, "Using Runlevels"). The sequence of steps used during a reconfiguration is slightly different and longer from that used when the script executes for the first time; for example, you can change the system's default language during reconfiguration.

Fedora is a community-based project, and the Fedora community is very helpful. The best places to turn for help are the Fedora Forum and the Fedora mailing lists. You can also access help using IRC (see Lab 9.2, "Using IRC ," for more information).

Fedora Linux can boot into graphical mode or text mode, depending on the default runlevel (see Lab 4.5, "Using Runlevels"); when installed using the graphical installation program, Fedora's default is to present the graphical login display shown in Figure 2-1 .

Figure 2-1. Fedora default login screen

In the middle of the screen are four clickable controls:

GNOME and KDE are built upon different technology and have been designed with different philosophiesas a GNOME or KDE advocate will quickly tell you. However, the most common operations are the same in both environments, and the GNOME and KDE communities collaborate on a number of key issues through freedesktop.org ( http://freedesktop.org ). The friendly rivalry between the groups spurs them on to develop innovations and refinements for both desktop environments.

Fedora installs and uses GNOME by default, and it is the best choice for most Fedora users. However, KDE is provided on the installation CDs/DVD, and it's worthwhile experimenting with both desktops to find the one that suits your style.

Once you have logged in, you will see the GNOME desktop, shown in Figure 2-2 , or the KDE desktop, shown in Figure 2-3 . The same default visual theme has been installed in both environments to provide a fairly consistent appearance and style.

Figure 2-2. Fedora GNOME desktop.

Figure 2-3. Fedora KDE desktop

Although the two desktop environments have some significant differences, their main features are very similar. Here is a summary; where KDE and GNOME differ in their naming conventions, I've used a unified terminology (which will mortify GNOME or KDE purists but allow the rest of us to talk about the desktop in a sane way):

When you start a program by clicking on an icon or application menu item, one or more windows will appear. Almost all windows have a title bar and window controls, as shown on the window in Figure 2-4 .

Figure 2-4. Dasher window, showing title bar and window controls

These are the basic controls:

KDE, GNOME, and other GUIs based on the X Window System have standard cut-and-paste features. Most applications use Ctrl-X for cut, Ctrl-C for copy, and Ctrl-V for paste, which is compatible with the keyboard shortcuts on other platforms.

But the X Window System also has a faster way of pasting: select the text (or graphic) you want to duplicate by highlighting it, then click the middle mouse button at the point you wish to paste. For example, to fast-paste a web address from Firefox into an email being composed in Evolution, you can highlight the text in Firefox (place the mouse cursor at the start of the text, press the left mouse button, drag the cursor over the text, and release the button), then move to the Evolution window and press the middle mouse button to paste that text.

Taking this one step further, all of the Fedora web browsers allow you to highlight a web address in any application's window, then middle-click on a blank spot in the browser window to go directly to that page (with Firefox, you can also search using this technique, by highlighting a search term instead of an addressas long as there's no period in your search term).

To log out of the desktop, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete. A confirmation dialog will appear, and then you will be logged out. You can also select the Log Out option from the application menu (System menu in GNOME).

Many other desktop/GUI environments are availablefor example, Xfce, a nice but lightweight desktop environment included in the Fedora Extras repository. To install Xfce:

# yum groupinstall XFCE

You'll see an entry for Xfce in the Display Manager's Session menu (shown in Figure 2-1).

Almost all of the Fedora GNOME desktop, as well as desktop options that are not part of GNOME or KDE, can be configured using the System→Preferences menu; other portions of the desktop can be configured by right-clicking on a GNOME component.

This lab looks at the GNOME settings most commonly used to customize the desktop.

The GNOME desktop and the Metacity window manager (the default GNOME window manager) use themes to configure appearance. Each theme is a combination of configuration information, images, and software that provides a particular visual effect and behavior.

Three types of component themes are used on the desktop:

Application (or control) themes

Configure the appearance of the controls: elements used by applications to build the graphical user interface, such as buttons, sliders, scrollbars, and text-entry fields.

Window border themes

Used by the Metacity window manager to control the appearance of the window borders, title bar, and title bar buttons.

Icons

Control the appearance of icons on the panel, desktop, application toolbars, and Nautilus file manager.

One component theme from each category can be combined into an overall desktop theme .

To change themes, select System→Preferences→Theme from the panel menu. The window shown on the left of Figure 2-6 will appear.

Figure 2-6. Theme preferences tool

You can select a desktop theme from this list by clicking on it. The theme will start to load immediately, and the appearance of your desktop will change in a few seconds.

To create a custom combination of component themes, click the Theme Details button. The window shown on the right of Figure 2-6 will be displayed. There is a tab for each of the three component theme types. You can select a different theme for any of the components, and when you do, a Custom Theme entry will appear in the main Theme Preferences window. Your selection will take effect immediately so that you can preview the effect. Once you are satisfied with a combination of component themes, click on the Save Theme button to name the combination and save it as a desktop theme.

To install additional component themes, open a browser and go to http://art.gnome.org/ , and open the Theme Preferences window in an adjacent part of the screen. When you find a theme on art.gnome.org that you wish to install, simply drag the download icon (a small floppy disk) from the browser window to the Theme Preferences window, and it will automatically be installed. You can then combine that component theme with others to produce a new desktop theme as described earlier.

Fedora's desktop is configured with two panels by default: one at the top of the screen containing the menus, icons, and applets, and one at the bottom of the screen containing the task list.

You can add another panel by right-clicking on an existing one and selecting New Panel. The new panel will appear on an edge of the screen that doesn't have a panel, or at the top of the screen if all of the edges are occupied. You can move it to another location by dragging it with the mouse.

To delete a panel, right-click on it and select "Delete this Panel." If there is anything on the panel, a confirmation dialog will appear before the panel is deleted.

To add items to a panel, right-click on the panel and select "Add to Panel." Although most of the options presented are applets or monitors, you can also add a drawer , which is like a panel that can be unfolded from another panel. A drawer is managed in the same way as a panel, by right-clicking on it.

To move an item around a panel, or move it to another panel, middle-click on the item and drag it (or right-click and use the Move menu option). To push along other icons, hold the shift key while dragging.

To delete an item from the panel, right-click on it and select "Remove from Panel."

To set a panel's properties, right-click it and select Properties. A small window will appear, containing two tabs, General and Background.

The General tab contains these settings:

The menu option System→Preferences→Desktop Background is used to adjust the desktop background color and imagebut most Fedora users get there using the shortcut of right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Change Desktop Background. Both methods cause the Desktop Background Preferences window to appear, shown in Figure 2-7.

Figure 2-7. Desktop Background Preferences window

You can change to any of the listed background images by clicking on it. To add your own image, drag and drop an image file from the Nautilus file manager, or click the Add Wallpaper button and enter the filename; to remove an image, highlight it and click the Remove button. If you don't want a background image, select the No Wallpaper option.

The Style control determines how the selected image will be displayed:

Select the menu option System→Preferences→Window to modify the behavior of the window manager, Metacity. Three options are presented in a window:

The Nautilus file manager is configured using the Edit→Preferences option in any Nautilus window, or through the panel menu option System→Preferences→File Management. A configuration window will appear with five tabs, containing lots of options.

Both mice and keyboards are effective input devicesbut switching between them can significantly slow you down. A good set of keyboard shortcuts enables you to perform common operations without switching to the mouse.

Fedora's GNOME configuration contains a good set of keyboard shortcuts. To change shortcuts or add new ones, select the menu option System→Preferences→Keyboard Shortcuts, which displays the window shown in Figure 2-8.

Figure 2-8. GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts window

This window shows a number of actions on the desktop and the shortcut key for each. To change a shortcut, click on an entry. The shortcut for that entry will change to read New Accelerator. Press the key or key combination that you wish to use for that keyboard shortcut; if the shortcut is not already in use, it will be assigned to the selected action, and if it is in use, the conflict will be displayed in an error dialog.

To remove a keyboard shortcut, click on an entry, and then press Backspace.

After testing component themes, you can move them from your personal theme directories to the system-wide directories:

# mv /home/yourusername/.icons/* /usr/share/icons/

# mv /home/yourusername/.themes/* /usr/share/themes/

# chown -R root:root /usr/share/{icons,themes}

Most KDE configuration is performed through the KDE Control Center, which is found on the K menu. The Control Center is shown in Figure 2-9.

Figure 2-9. KDE Control Center

�Along the lefthand side of this window, there is a collapsible menu of configuration categories; each category contains several subcategories, which can be revealed or hidden by clicking on the +/- icon in front of the category name. Each subcategory is handled by a separate configuration module . When you click on a configuration category, the configuration module for that category is shown on the righthand side of the window.

You can also configure some desktop components by right-clicking on them. For example, right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Configure Desktop will bring up a subset of the Control Center options, which is useful for changing the appearance of the desktop.

Unlike GNOME, KDE settings are not usually automatically applied; you must click on the Apply button before your changes take effect.

To configure KDE themes, select Appearance & Themes→Theme Manager in the Control Center (Figure 2-9). You can select a theme from among the options listed by clicking on it and then clicking Apply.

To install a new theme, click the "Get new themes..." link in the upper-right corner to open the Konqueror web browser with the kde-look home page (http://kde-look.org). Select a theme that is packaged into a .kth file and download it to your system. Click the Install New Theme button within the KDE Control Center and open the downloaded file to install it into the list of available themes.

KDE panels are configured in much the same way as GNOME panels.

You can add a new panel by right-clicking on an existing one and selecting Add New Panel→Panel. You can move the new panel to any edge of the screen by dragging it with the mouse.

To delete a panel, right-click on any panel and select Remove Panel, and then select the panel you wish to remove. It is not possible to remove the original panel. If the panel contains anything, a confirmation dialog will appear before the panel is deleted.

To add items to a panel, right-click on the panel and select "Add Applet to panel" or "Add Application to panel"the difference being that applets run within the panel, displaying information or performing useful actions, while applications are simply buttons that launch programs.

To delete an application from the panel, right-click on it and select "Remove application." To delete an applet, place your mouse cursor over it, which will cause a small bar to appear beside it; right-click on this bar, and select "Remove applet."

To move a panel object, middle-click on the object (or on the bar beside the object if it is an applet) and drag it to the desired location. To push other objects around, hold down the Shift key while dragging; to move between bars, left-click and drag.

To set a panel's properties, right-click on a panel and select Configure Panel, which displays the window in Figure 2-10 . You can also start the KDE Control Center and select Desktop→Panels, in which case the window arrangement is modified slightly to fit into the design of the Control Center.

Figure 2-10. KDE panel configuration window

In either case, you will have buttons or tabs for Arrangement, Hiding, Menus, and Appearance.

The Arrangement section contains these settings:

The background image or color is adjusted using the Appearance & Themes→Background option in the Control Center. You can get to the same configuration module by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Configure Desktop, then selecting the Background button. Figure 2-11 shows the window that appears.

Figure 2-11. KDE desktop background configuration

You can individually configure the desktop background for each virtual desktop. This can make it easier to identify which virtual desktop is currently displayed, but it can use a lot of memory and increases the amount of time it takes to switch desktops. The "Settings for Desktop" control selects the desktop to be configured; use All Desktops to use the same image on all of the virtual desktops.

In this configuration module, there are two sections:

To configure window-manager behavior, right-click on a title bar and select Configure Window Behavior. Figure 2-12 shows the window that appears. You can access the same options through the Control Center using the Appearance & Themes→Window Decorations, Desktop→Window Behavior, and the Desktop→Window-Specific Settings options.

Figure 2-12. KDE window-manager behavior configuration

The KDE window manager, kwin, offers extensive configuration options:

Since Konqueror was designed as both a web browser and a file manager, it offers many options for customization. You can access these configuration options by selecting Settings→Configure Konqueror from within Konqueror, or within the KDE Control Panel by selecting KDE Components→File Manager. The arrangement of the configuration options is slightly different, depending on the route you take get there; Figure 2-13 shows both layouts.

Figure 2-13. Konqueror configuration window; Control Panel version (left) and Konqueror Settings version (right)

Keyboard shortcuts are configured using the Control Center option Regional & Accessibility→Keyboard Shortcuts, shown in Figure 2-14. To add or change a shortcut, double-click on an action in the list of actions under the Shortcut Schemes tab or a command under the Command Shortcuts tab. Enter the new shortcut (such as Ctrl-Shift-H) and click OK, or click on the whisk-like icon beside the Shortcut field to clear it.

Figure 2-14. KDE keyboard shortcut configuration

The directory /etc/skel acts as a template, or skeleton , for new account creation. Any KDE configuration files placed in /etc/skel/.kde/share/config will get copied to new user accounts automatically.

The GNOME menu option System→Preferences→Screen Resolution sets the default resolution and refresh rate for a particular user (in KDE, select Control Center from the panel menu, then click on Display under Peripherals; be sure to select the checkbox labeled "Apply settings on KDE startup").�

The system-wide resolution setting will be used for the user login display; individual user settings will take effect after the user logs in. The color depth can't be set this way because the architecture of the X Window System requires the color depth to be a system-wide setting.

The X server itself is capable of generating a reasonable xorg.conf file, which you can then fine-tune by manually editing it:

# X -configure :1

The default X server configuration will work with all USB pointer devices and keyboards plugged into the system. The devices will work in parallel; for example, if you have two mice, moving either one will move the onscreen pointer, and if you have two keyboards, typing on either will send characters to the display.

Most keyboards will be detected as soon as they are plugged in, but other keyboards will be detected only when the system starts. For example, I have a secondary French Canadian USB keyboard and a USB calculator/numeric keypad; the French Canadian keyboard is detected as soon as it is plugged in, but the numeric keypad must be plugged in during boot in order to be detected properly. Special features of advanced pointers (such as touchpads) will not be configured automatically unless those devices are plugged in when system-config-display is run.

In most cases, these displays can be probed automatically using VESA standard protocols. If not, edit /etc/X11/ xorg.conf , find the Monitor section, and enter the HorizSync (horizontal scan frequency) and VertRefresh (vertical scan/refresh frequency) values specified in your monitor documentation:

Section "Monitor"

�Identifier "Monitor0"

�VendorName "Monitor Vendor"�

�ModelName "Unknown Monitor"

�HorizSync 32.00 - 72.0 # Horiz. sync in kHz

�VertRefresh 58.0 - 62.0 # Vert. refresh in Hz

EndSection

Select the menu option System→Administration→Printing (in KDE, it is Administration→Printing). You will be prompted to enter the root password, and then the printer configuration window will appear, as shown in Figure 2-16. If any print queues have been previously defined, they will be listed on the left side of the window, grouped according to connection type; if you click on one of these printers, the configuration details for that printer will appear on the right.

Figure 2-16. Printer configuration window

USB and parallel printers, as well as network printers that use the Internet Print Protocol (IPP), will be detected and configured automatically; you can adjust the printer configuration by editing the values in the main printer-configuration window (Figure 2-16) and then clicking Apply.

Other printers must be configured manually. Click on the New Printer icon to access the window shown in Figure 2-17.

Figure 2-17. New Printer window

Enter the name of the printer, which should be short and contain no spaces. I recommend using the generic printer type followed by a number (e.g., laser3 or inkjet0 ); even if you only have one printer now, you may add more in the future. If desired, you can add verbose description and location information. Click Forward to proceed to the connection configuration step, shown in Figure 2-18 .

Figure 2-18. Printer connection configuration

The Devices list shows all detected local printers, plus serial ports and common network printing protocols. Select the appropriate option; for network printers, you will need to enter the IP address or hostname as well as the printer or queue name. Press Forward to proceed to the driver configuration step, shown in the left side of Figure 2-19. Select the printer manufacturer, then click Forward; on the next display (shown on the right side of Figure 2-19), select the printer model. Use the Comments buttons to display information about the printer, driver, or PPD file.

The Drivers list may present more than one driver option. In almost all cases, it is best to use the default driver.

Click Forward, then click Apply on the confirmation dialog that appears.

Figure 2-19. Printer driver selection

To change an existing queue configuration, select the printer in the main window (Figure 2-16) and edit the option values on the tabs:

The default print queue is used for all print requests that do not specify a queue. To set the default, select a printer and then click Make Default Printer. Click Apply to activate your change.

The command lpr (line printer requester) is used to place a print request into a queue. When used from the command line, lpr can accept input from standard input or from a specified file. For example, to print the file output.ps :

$ lpr output.ps

Or to print the calendar for the year, generated by the cal -y command:

$ cal -y | lpr

To specify a specific print queue (such as laser3 ), add the -P argument along with the name of the queue:

$ lpr -P laser3 output.ps

$ cal -y | lpr -P laser3

You can view the status of a print queue, including the documents in the queue, by clicking on the printer icon that appears in the notification area of the GNOME panel bar. The window shown in Figure 2-20 will appear; this window shows all print requests made by you on all print queues. To delete a document from the queue, right-click on it and select the Cancel document option.

Figure 2-20. Document print-status window

The lpq command provides another way of viewing a queue's contents:

$ lpq

inkjet0 is ready

no entries

While the graphical Document print-status window shows requests by one user on all queues, lpq shows requests by all users on a single queue. The output in the previous example shows that there are no documents in the default queue inkjet0 . You can specify a specific printer queue using the -P argument:

$ lpq -P laser3

laser3 is ready and printing

Rank Owner Job File(s) Total Size

active chris 91 report.ps 124928 bytes

2 jason 92 spreadsheet.ps 523423 bytes

In this case, there are two jobs in the queue; job 91 is printing, and job 92 is scheduled to be printed next.

You can delete a document using the lprm command, which accepts a job number (the default is the active job) and the -P option to specify the print queue. This command will delete job 92 on the print queue laser3 :

$ lprm -P laser3 92

This is called a printer class; to create one, use the New Class button in the graphical configuration tool. Add the desired printers to the printer class and click Apply; you can then print to the printer class instead of a specific printer, and the first available printer will be used to print your document.

Not only is it possible to set up more than one queue for a printer, it's a good idea, because each queue can have a different driver configuration.

For example, I have a color inkjet printer, which is used in text mode with plain paper and in a photo mode with photo paper. I have created three separate queues: color0-draft for fast, low-quality printing that saves ink; color0 for regular printing; and color0-photo for photo printing. The appropriate driver options have been set for each. Although it is possible to create just one queue and set the resolution and paper type within some applications, not all applications are capable of setting those options, and it's simply faster and more convenient to have preconfigured queues. Similarly, I have single- and double-sided queues for my laser printer.

Many applications that don't provide PDF output do provide the ability to print to a file instead of printing to an output queue; this feature can be used to save a PostScript copy of the print request, which you can then convert to a PDF by using Ghostscript via the ps2pdf script.

For example, you could "print" from Firefox to the file bankstatement.ps and then convert bankstatement.ps to bankstatement.pdf with this command:

$ ps2pdf bankstatement.ps

HP produces several lines of multifunction printer/copier/scanner devices that use a multiplexed communication protocol; the printer and scanner are accessed through a single connection. The software necessary to access these devices is built into Fedora Core; just ensure that the hplip service is running.

When a user logs in, Fedora assigns ownership of the sound devices to that user and sets the permissions so that only that user can open them. If you want to allow several users (including those remotely logged in) to use sound at the same time, you can change the permissions of the sound devices so that they're universally accessible:

$ chmod 0777 /dev/snd/* /dev/mixer* /dev/audio* /dev/dsp*

The amixer utility provides command-line access to the sound controls. Run without arguments, it will tell you all of the current settings (which can run into hundreds of lines of output):

$ amixer

Simple mixer control 'Master',0

�Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined

�Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right

�Limits: Playback 0 - 31

�Mono:

�Front Left: Playback 17 [55%] [on]

�Front Right: Playback 17 [55%] [on]

Simple mixer control 'Master Mono',0

�Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined

�Playback channels: Mono

�Limits: Playback 0 - 31

�Mono: Playback 14 [45%] [on]

Simple mixer control 'Headphone',0

�Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined

�Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right

�Limits: Playback 0 - 31�

�Mono:

�Front Left: Playback 20 [65%] [on]

�Front Right: Playback 20 [65%] [on]

...(Lines snipped)...

There are many different audio file formats, and Fedora includes many different media players so that you can listen to them (including Totem, Mplayer, and Xine). Fedora Core also includes the sox utility to convert between formats; the sox package also includes a handy script named play that can be run from the command line. It converts just about any file into an appropriate format for output and sends the sound to your speakers:

$ play/usr/share/sounds/KDE_Startup_2.ogg

Fonts can be easily added or removed by manually copying the font files or by using the file managers: Nautilus (GNOME) or Konqueror (KDE).

GNOME's Nautilus file manager has a special URI for viewing and managing fonts. To access it:

1. Start Nautilus; use the My Computer or Home desktop icons, the panel bar icons, or any folder in the Places menu.

2. Select Open Location from the Nautilus File menu, or press Ctrl-L. An Open Location dialog will appear.

3. Enter fonts:/ in the location text box.

Figure 2-24 shows the Nautilus font display.

Figure 2-24. Font display in GNOME's Nautilus file manager

The lower- and uppercase letter A of each font are displayed, if the font has those characters. Double-clicking on a font (or right-clicking and selecting " Open with GNOME Font Viewer") will display some basic information about the fontincluding the license, file size, and font stylealong with an extended font sample, as shown in Figure 2-25 .

Figure 2-25. GNOME font viewer

To install fonts into your personal font directory (~/.fonts), simply drag and drop them into the Nautilus font window. The fonts may not show up in the Nautilus display until you log out and log in again, but they will be installed and immediately accessible to applications when they start (if an application is already running, just restart that application to gain access to the new fonts).

To install fonts that are in a compressed archive, such as those from http://www.1001freefonts.com , click on the .zip archive link (i.e., for the Windows font) in your web browser, then select "Open with Archive Manager" as the action. You can then drag and drop the file from the Archive Manager window to the Nautilus font window.

A personal font can be deleted in the same way that a file is deleted using Nautilus: drag it from the Nautilus window to the trash can, or right-click on it and select "Move to Trash."

KDE's Konqueror file and web browser enables you to view, install, and delete fonts from both the system-wide font directories and your personal font directory. To access this mode:

1. Start Konqueror, using the Home or Web Browser panel icons, or the K menu.

2. Enter fonts:/ into the location field.

The window will show icons labeled Personal and System; double-click on the group you wish to see, and the display shown in Figure 2-26 will appear (the System group is shown here).

Figure 2-26. Konqueror system font display

Double-clicking on a font will present the KFontView window shown in Figure 2-27 , showing an extended font sample. Clicking on the T icon will enable you to change the sample sentence; the default sentence is same pangram used in the GNOME font viewer.

Figure 2-27. KFontView window

To add fonts, simply drag and drop them into the font window. If you drop them into the system font window, you will be prompted to enter the root password.

To delete a font, treat it like a file: drag and drop it onto the trash can, or right-click and select Delete. As with installation, you will be prompted for the root password if the font is from the system font window.

You can also install and remove fonts through the KDE Control Panel.

When an application starts, the font configuration system automatically scans ~/.fonts (your personal font directory) as well as /usr/share/fonts (which is the system-wide font directory). Any changes to the fonts contained in those directories are detected automatically, so adding fonts is simply a matter of placing files into those directories, and removing fonts is simply a matter of deleting them.

For example, if you have a compressed tar file named /tmp/newfonts.tgz containing a folder named newfonts full of TrueType fonts and wish to install them for your own private use, you can use these commands:

$ cd ~/.fonts

$ tar xvzf /tmp/newfonts.tgz"*.ttf" "*.TTF"

Web pages and documents created on Microsoft systems often use fonts that are distributed with Windows. For a time, Microsoft made these fonts available free of charge on its web site; although they are no longer available directly from Microsoft, they are available from fontconfig.org under Microsoft's fairly simple licensing terms, documented in http://fontconfig.org/webfonts/Licen.TXT .

Installing these fonts makes it possible to view Word and Excel documents and web pages created under Windows as they were originally designed. Mozilla, Firefox, OpenOffice, and other applications can all use these fonts.

In order to install these fonts, you'll need to obtain a copy of the cabextract program to extract the fonts from archives created in Microsoft's proprietary CAB format:

# yum install cabextract

Applications load their font lists at startup time, so simply relaunching an application is usually all that is required before you can start using new fonts.

The command fc-cache will create an index cache to speed application startup. To use it:

$ fc-cache

# fc-cache

Font rendering can be tuned to adjust the font appearance to suit user preferences and the display hardware in use. Both GNOME and KDE provide configuration tools to configure font rendering.

The GNOME configuration window shown in Figure 2-28 is accessed from the menu item System→Preferences→Font. The KDE rendering configuration panel shown in Figure 2-29 is accessed through the KDE Control Panel under Appearance & Themes→Fonts.�

Figure 2-28. GNOME font-rendering preferences tool

Figure 2-29. KDE font rendering preferences tool

In both cases, you can enable or disable antialiasing, adjust the level of antialiasing hinting, and set subpixel order.

On an older system with a slow CPU and/or low memory resources, turning off antialiasing can make enough of a performance difference to turn an unbearably slow system into one that performs reasonably.

When antialiasing is enabled, the hinting level can be set according to user preferenceexperiment and see what looks best.

If you have an LCD screen, select "Smoothing: Subpixel (LCD)" in GNOME or "Use Subpixel Smoothing" in KDE. You'll also need to select the order of the red, green, and blue elements on your screen; since this information is almost never documented in the hardware specifications, use a large magnifying glass or experiment until you find the setting that looks the best.

The fc-list program (a utility provided with Fontconfig) will list all of the fonts available through the Xft/Fontconfig system:

$ fc-list

Luxi Serif:style=Regular

MiscFixed:style=Regular

Utopia:style=Bold Italic

Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Italic

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:style=Bold

Webdings:style=Regular

Console:style=Regular

URW Palladio L:style=Roman

Century Schoolbook L:style=Bold Italic

Luxi Serif:style=Bold

...(snip)...

Fontconfig font names are very easy to use: just specify the font face you wish to use. You can optionally include a size (separated by a hyphen) or font attribute name/value pairs (after a colon).

For matching purposes, you can specify multiple values for the font name or size, separated by commas. The first matching value will be selected.

Table 2-4 lists some font names expressed using this notation.

Table 2-4. Fontconfig font names

For a complete list of font properties that can be used in font names, see the documentation on the Fontconfig web site at http://fontconfig.org . Note that many of the properties mentioned in the documentation are not used; on most systems, style is the only property specified for most of the fonts.

xterm has support for Fontconfig/Xft and can be used to test a Fontconfig font name. The command-line option to use is -fa (face); if the font name contains spaces, be sure to quote it on the command line. Here are some examples:

$ xterm -fa courier

$ xterm -fa courier-12

$ xterm -fa courier-18:style=italic

$ xterm -fa "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-16:style=bold"

$ xterm -fa foo,bar,baz,utopia,courier,qux-12,18,10:style=italic

Using USB storage in Fedora Core is easy: simply insert the USB storage device into any available USB port.

If you're using GNOME, the device will be mounted, an icon will appear on the desktop, and a window will open showing the contents of the device.

When you insert a USB storage device while running KDE, the dialog in Figure 2-31 appears with two options: "Open in New Window" and "Do Nothing." Choose one of the options and click OK. If you want to skip this dialog next time you insert a storage device, select the checkbox labeled "Always do this for this type of media."

Figure 2-31. KDE USB Storage action dialog

The action performed when a new USB storage device is detected is configurable in both GNOME and KDE.

Before unplugging a USB drive, you should unmount it to prevent data loss. In GNOME and KDE, right-click on the drive's desktop icon and select the menu option Unmount Volume or Remove Safely. Wait until the activity lights stop blinking and then unplug the drive.

To configure the action taken when GNOME detects a new USB storage device, select the menu option System→Preferences→"Removable Drives and Media." The window shown in Figure 2-32 will appear.

Figure 2-32. Removable Drives and Media Preferences tool

The first tab, Storage, contains four checkboxes for USB storage devices:

To configure the behavior of KDE when storage devices are inserted, open the KDE Control Center and select the configuration category Peripherals→Storage Media. The window shown in Figure 2-33 will appear.

Figure 2-33. KDE Removable Media configuration

Select Unmounted Removable Medium in the "Medium types" menu. Two actions will be displayed: "Open in New Window," which mounts the drive and opens a Konqueror browse window, and Do Nothing, which causes a drive icon to be displayed on the desktop, which, when clicked, will mount and browse the drive.

To set one of these actions as the default, click on it, then click "Toggle as Auto Action," and then Apply. The selected action will take place automatically when new media is detected.

You can use the standard fdisk utility to partition a flash drive (after unmounting it, if necessary). Here is an example in which fdisk is used to divide a 64 MB flash drive into two partitions:

# fdisk/dev/sdb

You can use ext2 or any other filesystem on a USB storage device, but that will reduce compatibility with other systems. To format the partition /dev/sdb2 with an ext3 filesystem:

# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb2

Automatically mounted storage media are mounted to the directory /media/<label> if the filesystem has a volume label, or to /media/disk<-N > if there is no volume label, where <-N> is a sequentially assigned number (the first disk mounted is simply called /media/disk ).

When you're in runlevel 3 (character mode), your USB storage devices won't be automatically mounted. You can still use USB storage; you just have to mount it by hand:

# mkdir /mnt/usbdisk1

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdisk1

Fedora uses the Advanced Configuation and Power Interface (ACPI) specification to monitor and manage the current power configuration. This approach requires support from the motherboard and CPU as well as the operating system; fortunately, most systems built in the last decade have some level of ACPI support, though many BIOS implementations are nonstandard.

Fedora's main power-management tool is gnome-power-manager. You can access the gnome-power-manager configuration window using the menu option System→Preferences→More Preferences→Power Management.�

The same program controls the power-management icon in the panel bar, which may or may not appear depending on the system configuration (it will usually appear by default on a system that has a battery, including most notebooks, but will not appear by default on a system with no battery). The symbol used for the icon will change according to the power supply: it will show a battery when discharging the battery, a battery plus a power cord when charging the battery, or just a power cord on a system with no battery. You can access the gnome-power-manager configuration window by right-clicking on the icon and selecting Preferences.

Regardless of how you access the configuration window, you will see the display shown in Figure 3-1 .

Figure 3-1. Power Manager Preferences window

�This window contains three tabs: one that configures power management when the system is running on AC or charging the battery, one that configures power management when the system is running on (and discharging) the battery, and one for general power-management settings.

The controls on first two tabs are almost identical:

Sleep

Configures the conditions under which the display and the whole system is put to sleep. For the display, "sleep" is defined as a low-power mode; for the system, the definition of "sleep" is taken from the setting on the General tab. You can set either to a value between 11 and 60 minutes (in one-minute intervals), or you can disable sleep by moving the slider all the way to the right (Never).

When laptop lid is closed

Specifies the action to be taken when a lid closure event is signaled by ACPI. The options include: do nothing, which causes the system to continue to use full power, to be available the moment you open the screen; blank the screen, which is similar to doing nothing but will use slightly less power and delay system startup for a few seconds; or suspend or hibernate the system.

Configuring the screen to blank without suspending or hibernating the system whenever the lid is closed is ideal for listening to digital music.�

Prefer power savings over performance

If you are performing a task that is not very demanding, such as editing a document, instruct gnome-power-manager to maximize the battery life (or, on AC, reduce power consumption) by selecting the checkbox. On the other hand, if you need optimal performance without regard to the power consumptionsuch as when you are giving an important presentationleave the checkbox for this option unselected.

When battery power critical

This button appears only on the "Running on Battery" tab, and it configures the action to be taken if the battery runs down to the point that it will power the system for only a few minutes. The options are to do nothing, to suspend or hibernate, or to shut down the system. For most users, doing nothing is a poor choice because the system will abruptly shut off within a few minutes; suspend continues to use power, although at a much lower rate than usual, so the battery will ultimately go dead in due course (causing the loss of any data in memory). Shutdown in an option, but the shutdown procedure itself may take a few minutes and uses a fair bit of power. Therefore, the best choice (if your system supports it) is to hibernate the system when the battery power becomes critical. Hibernation takes less than a minute to complete and even less time to resume, yet it uses no power during the time that the system is in hibernation.

Depending on the hardware installed on your system, you may see different combinations of controls on the "Running on AC" and "Running on Battery" tabs.�

The third tab in this window controls general power-management options, as shown in Figure 3-2 .

Figure 3-2. General tab on Power Management Preferences window

�The options in this window control how the system is put to sleep when the inactivity period set in the other tabs is reached (do nothing, suspend, or hibernate). It also configures the times that the the power-management icon is displayed in the Notification Area; the default is to display it only when the battery is present, so if you want to easily access the power-management controls on an AC-only system, set this to "Always display icon."

It's important to understand the difference between the suspend and hibernate options: in both cases, the system is effectively off, but in suspend mode the memory is still operating (and consuming power), while in hibernate mode the memory is transferred to swapspace. This means that suspend state will eventually run your battery down, and then the information in RAM will be lostbut until that time, the system will be able to quickly resume its operation. On the other hand, your system can be in hibernate state forever without any power and still resume successfully, but it will take a little longer to do so.

In order to hibernate or suspend successfully, the drivers for all of the devices attached to the system must be able to save and restore the device state. There's no simple way to predict if this will be the case, so it's best to try suspend and resume operations when you have nothing critical happening on the system. For hibernation, it's also necessary to have a swap partition instead of (or in addition to) swapspace on a logical volume.

To manually provoke a suspend or hibernate operation, right-click on the power-management icon in the status bar and use the menu options that appear. To resume from a suspend, use the wake-up key defined for your system (you may have to consult the system documentation or experiment to find this). To resume from hibernation, turn your system power on with the power button, then let it start a normal boot cycle. The kernel will recognize the hibernation state and attempt to resume; if this fails, a normal boot will take place (but you may lose changes to any files that were opened when you hibernated your computer, so it's a good idea to save changes before you hibernate).

A password is required to unlock the screen after a resume if passwords are configured in the screensaver (which is the default).

Resuming from hibernation will fail if the kernel has been upgraded since the last boot.

If your system has a battery, gnome-power-manager provides a number of interesting graphs showing your power state. To view them, right-click on the power management icon on the panel, then select Information. The window shown in Figure 3-3 will be presented.

Figure 3-3. Power Information window

The tabs across the top provide access to the available information and graphs:

Device Information

Displays the current battery state. Clicking on More presents the battery technology, serial number, and a capacity rating showing the percentage of the original design capacity that the battery is now capable of holding (the higher the number, the better the battery condition).

Charge History

This graph shows the battery charge (as a percentage of its current maximum) over time. The graphs are automatically scaled horizontally.

Power History

Displays the battery charge and discharge rates over time, as shown in Figure 3-4 . If the battery is fully charged and the system is on external power, the discharge rate will be shown as zero, but if the battery is charging, the system will show the rate at which it is charging. When running on battery power, this graph shows the rate of discharge. Power events are marked on this graph, including transitions to and from AC power, suspend and hibernate events, lid closures, and display idle periods. You can use the information in this graph to see the impact of your usage patterns on the system's power consumption.

Figure 3-4. Power History graph

Estimated Time History

Shows the history of the calculated time to charge the battery, when you're on AC power, or to discharge the battery, when you're running only on the battery. Power events are also shown on this log.

Event Log

Displays a more verbose listing of the same power events shown on the graphs.

On an AC-only system, the graphs will all be flat lines, but power events will still be displayed.

If CMOS semiconductors were perfect, they would consume power only when they changed state. They're not perfect, so they leak energy and consume power when idle, but that's a tiny fraction of the power they consume when changing state.

The system clock is a pulse generator that controls the speed at which the CPU changes state, and therefore controls the amount of energy used by the CPU and related system components. Therefore, there is a trade-off between performance and power consumption.

Fedora can balance power usage against performance automatically according to system workload. This feature is provided by the cpuspeed service and is enabled by default.

The default parameters used by this service work well in most cases, but can be adjusted by editing the file /etc/cpuspeed.conf , which looks like this:

VMAJOR=1

VMINOR=1

# uncomment this and set to the name of your CPUFreq module

#DRIVER="powernow-k7"

# Let background (nice) processes speed up the cpu

OPTS="$OPTS -n"

# Add your favorite options here

#OPTS="$OPTS -s 0 -i 10 -r"

# uncomment and modify this to check the state of the AC adapter

#OPTS="$OPTS -a /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/*/state"

# uncomment and modify this to check the system temperature

#OPTS="$OPTS -t /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/temperature 75"

Usually the DRIVER, VMAJOR, and VMINOR lines should not be changed.�

Uncomment the OPTS lines that contain additional options you wish to use. The pre-configured lines have these meanings:

-n

Allow processes that have been marked as low priority using the nice command to run at full speed. The default is to slow down the processor when only low-priority processes are running.

-s 0 -i 10 -r

Manages only CPU 0 ( -s 0 ), making speed change decisions once a second instead of the default of once every two seconds ( -i 10 ), and restore the original speed when cpuspeed exits ( -r ).

-a /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/*/state

Monitors the AC adapter and switches to minimum speed when AC power is removed. Adding -C will force the system to operate at maximum speed when AC power is connected.

-t /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/temperature 75

Watches the system temperature and slows down the CPU when the temperature exceeds 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit).

To see a list of all available options, run this command:

$ /usr/sbin/cpuspeed --help 2>&1|less

After editing /etc/cpuspeed , restart the cpuspeed service:

# service cpuspeed restart

Stopping cpuspeed: [ OK ]

Starting cpuspeed: [ OK ]

You can monitor the CPU speed by installing a monitor on your panel. Right-click on your GNOME panel, then select "Add to Panel." Choose the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor and click Add. The icon shown in Figure 3-5 will appear; the bar graph will rise and fall as the CPU clock speed is adjusted, and hovering your mouse cursor over the display will show the current frequency setting (the box that appears below the icon in Figure 3-5).

Figure 3-5. CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor

If you are using your system through a text-mode console, you can still access the important power-management tools.

To suspend the system, execute the pm-suspend script:

$ pm-suspend

To further reduce power consumption:

 Dim your screen as much as the ambient lighting conditions will allow. The backlight for the screen draws a huge amount of power; one of my systems draws 31 percent more power in total when the screen is at maximum brightness than when it is set to minimum brightness.

 Turn off all unneeded services, reducing CPU and disk activity.

 Use a lightweight desktop environment such as Xfce instead of GNOME or KDE.

 Unplug any unneeded external devices, including USB devices, headphones, mice, and keyboards. Each USB device can consume up to 2.5 watts of power, increasing your power consumption by as much as 20 percent.

 Turn off your wireless network radio when it is not in use. Most laptops have a wireless kill switch (sometimes labeled airplane or flight mode ) that turns off the radio portion of the wireless card. This can cut your power consumption by up to 5 percent.

The hdparm program can be used to stop a drive immediately or to configure it to stop if it is idle for a certain length of time; this is called a spin-down (and restarting the drive is called a spin-up ). This does save some power; however, the drive is rarely idle for very long and the length of time (and amount of energy) required to spin-up the drive is significant (and hard on some hardware), so opinion is divided on whether it makes sense to use this feature.

In the case of a two-drive system where the second drive is rarely used, an idle spin-down timeout is a good idea. Configure it with the hdparm command:

# hdparm -S 6 /dev/[hs]d[a-z]

Some important operations are best performed when a system is not in normal use, such as backup, software updating, and data indexing. It's not necessary to keep a system running 24x7 in order to schedule nighttime tasks.

Most modern system BIOSes contain an alarm wake feature, which causes the system to turn on at a preset time. This feature can be used with the hibernate state or a full system shutdown to automate nocturnal activities.

Some BIOS versions permit the wake time to be set through ACPI. To see if this is possible on your system, enable the alarm wake feature using your BIOS configuration utility, then boot Fedora and examine the /proc/acpi/alarm file:

$ cat /proc/acpi/alarm

2007-03-17 00:00:00

There are three ways to configure networking on Fedora. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages:

The GNOME NetworkManager facility provides an alternative to the use of profiles. NetworkManager is a service that automatically detects network configuration changes and determines available options. A small GUI application permits you to quickly select the network option you wish to use. It's ideal for laptop users because it permits rapid switching between multiple wired and wireless networks.

The NetworkManager service is enabled in the same way as every other service (see Lab 4.6, "Managing and Configuring Services "). You can configure it to start at the next boot by choosing the menu option System→Administration→Services, and then selecting the checkboxes labeled NetworkManger (the related NetworkManagerDispatcher service is not usually required); to start the services immediately, select each of them in turn and then click the Start button.

From the command line, you can start the service immediately using the service command, and you can configure it to start at boot time using chkconfig :

# service NetworkManager start

Setting network parameters...

Starting NetworkManager daemon: [ OK ]

# chkconfig NetworkManager on

Notice the nonstandard use of capital letters in the name NetworkManager.�

As soon as the NetworkManager starts, an icon should appear in your panel's notification area, which is shown in Figure 3-21 . This icon will indicate the type of IP connection currently in use. To switch to a different connection, click on the icon; a list of available connections will appear (including all broadcast local network names if you have a wireless card, plus a little signal-strength bar graph for each wireless network). Click on the network you wish to connect to, and NetworkManager will attempt to make the connection. You will be prompted to enter WEP or WPA encryption keys if necessary.

Figure 3-21. NetworkManager icon (left), showing that a wired Ethernet connection is active

NetworkManager will establish connections with wired networks automatically, but it will not automatically connect to wireless networks to which you have not previously connected because they may belong to your neighbor, or to companies that you are passing if you are in a vehicle. It will also detect the loss of network connectivity when a wireless signal is no longer usable or a network cable is unplugged.

You can also view the NetworkManager status from the command line by using nm-tool :

# nm-tool

NetworkManager Tool

State: connected

- Device: eth0 ----------------------------------------------------------------

�NM Path: /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/eth0

�Type: Wired

�Driver: b44

�Active: yes

�HW Address: 00:0D:56:33:D7:18

�Capabilities:

� Supported: yes

� Carrier Detect: yes

� Speed: 100 Mb/s

�Wired Settings

� Hardware Link: yes

�IP Settings:

��IP Address: 172.16.97.100

��Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0

��Broadcast: 172.16.97.255

��Gateway: 172.16.97.254

��Primary DNS: 24.153.23.66

��Secondary DNS: 24.153.22.67

Fedora's distribution policies do not permit the inclusion of binary software without source code, and that includes firmware. Unfortunately, some very popular wireless network cards require firmware for which the vendor will not release source code.

Any IP address that is publicly accessible must be assigned by a central authority in order to prevent address collisions. For private networks, addresses can be freely assigned from pools reserved for this purpose, as listed in Table 3-2 ; these addresses are guaranteed not to conflict with any public IP addresses. Many home and small business gateway products default to assigning addresses in the 192.168.1.x range. If your computer is assigned one of these addresses, it will not normally be accessible from machines that are on different networks (unless you are using the port forwarding feature of your router or wireless access point).

Table 3-2. Private network address pools

A router passes packets from one interface to another, and Fedora is capable of doing this. /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward controls packet forwarding; writing a 1 to this path enables forwarding:

# echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

The ifrename utility can be used to rename a network interface. The -i option specifies the old interface name, and -n sets the new name. To rename wlan0 to eth1 , for example:

# ifrename -i wlan0-n eth1

eth1

# ifconfig wlan0

wlan0: error fetching interface information: Device not found

# ifconfigeth1

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:2D:00:2B:DB

������ BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

������ RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

������ TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

������ collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

������ RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

This can be done if the Synaptics device is defined in addition to a traditional mouse, as recommended in the X11 configuration shown in this lab.

Even with palm detection, some typists and touchpads register false information during typing (especially true with certain laptop case designs, which transmit case stress to the touchpad). To help in these situations, the Synaptics software includes the syndaemon program, which will automatically disable the touchpad when the keyboard is in use. To start this daemon, simply type its name as a command:

$ syndaemon

Output from one card to multiple monitors is supported only by some drivers. The most commonly used ones are the NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, and the open source Radeon driver. All of these drivers have some limitations; for example, the NVIDIA driver, when used on a laptop, will always configure an external monitor as primary (screen 0), and the ATI drivers permit only general monitor positioning (you can specify that one monitor is to the right of another, but you can't indicate a difference in their vertical alignment).

Note that for the changes described in this section to take effect, you will need to restart the X server in one of these ways: changing to runlevel 3 and then back to 5, restarting the system, or terminating the running X server with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (save your work first!).

First, configure and test your system using the NVIDIA proprietary driver (see Lab 5.3, "Using Repositories "), and then add the highlighted lines to the Device section of your /etc/X11/ xorg.conf file:

Section "Device"

�Identifier "Card0"

�Driver "nvidia"

�VendorName "nVidia Corporation"

�BoardName "NV34 [GeForce FX 5200]"

�BusID "PCI:1:0:0"

�Option "TwinView"

�Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "31.0 - 80.0"

�Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50.0 - 75.0"

�Option "TwinViewXineramaInfo" "on"

�Option "MetaModes" "800x600,1024x768"

�Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"

EndSection

The SecondMonitorHorizSync and SecondMonitorVertRefresh options configure the horizontal and vertical frequency ranges for the second monitor (the settings for the primary monitor are in the Monitor section of the file). The values given here are reasonable for most small monitors. The TwinViewXineramaInfo line configures the driver to inform applications about the fact that the desktop is on two screens, so that windows can be placed intelligently (avoiding dialog boxes that span both screens, for example).

The MetaModes option configures the relative sizes of the two screens; the first screen is always the external display. The TwinViewOrientation specifies the position of the second display relative to the first for the purpose of mouse movement and window positioning (possible values are Above , Below , LeftOf , or RightOf ).

For finer control over the monitor relationships, the positions of each monitor may be specified in the MetaModes line as an absolute position within the entire desktop. These values are given in the form + X + Y after each resolution; for example, "800x600+0+0,1024x768+800+0" specifies that the primary monitor is to the left of the secondary monitor and that the two monitors are aligned at the top, and "800x600+1024+168,1024x768+0+0" specifies that the primary monitor is on the right and that the monitors are aligned at the bottom (168 pixels is the difference between the two monitor heights, 768 and 600 pixels).

When using the external monitor connection for projection, it can be convenient to project a subset of what is shown on the laptop's panel. Using the NVIDIA driver, this can be configured by overlapping the two display regions using the MetaModes option. On a laptop with a 1400x1050 display, for example, you can project an 800x600 pixel subset to your audience:

Section "Device"

�Identifier "Card0"

�Driver "nvidia"

�VendorName "nVidia Corporation"

�BoardName "NV34 [GeForce FX 5200]"

�BusID "PCI:1:0:0"

�Option "TwinView"

�Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "31.0 - 80.0"

�Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50.0 - 75.0"

�Option "TwinViewXineramaInfo" "on"

�Option "MetaModes" "800x600+200+200,1400x1050+0+0"

EndSection

When you restart the X server, the GNOME panel bars will be located in the middle of the screen, because the smaller 800x600 subset display is considered "Primary." Drag the panels to the top and bottom of the laptop display. You can then start an application and position the portion of the window that you wish to display into the 800x600 pixel area that starts 200 pixels down and 200 pixels to the right of the upper-left corner of the screen.

This works well with OpenOffice.org Impress in "Normal" mode, which displays three panes, including the current image in the center and a preview of slides on the left (the panes can be rearranged if it is more convenient to see the preview on the right). Reposition the dividing line between the panes and scroll the center pane until the current slide completely fills the external display.

This configuration enables you to preview the slides using the OpenOffice.org preview plane as shown in Figure 3-22 without changing the projected slide. Once you select and then click on a slide, it becomes the current slide and is displayed both in the center plane of the LCD image and on the external projector, shown in Figure 3-23 .

Figure 3-22. LCD display, including slide preview pane (right)

Figure 3-23. Projected 800 600 subset of LCD image, showing only the current slide

First, configure and test your system using the ATI open source driver radeon , and then add the lines highlighted in bold to the Device section of your /etc/X11/ xorg.conf :

Section "Device"

�Identifier "Card0"

�Driver "radeon"

�VendorName "ATI"

�BoardName "ATI 7500"

�BusID "PCI:1:0:0"

The ATI closed source driver is configured in much the same way as the other drivers. First, configure and test your system using the ATI closed source driver fglrx , and then add the lines highlighted in bold to the Device section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf :

Section "Device"

�Identifier "Card0"

�Driver "fglrx"

�VendorName "ATI"

�BoardName "ATI 7500"

�BusID "PCI:1:0:0"

Very few of the other X.org video drivers support multiple video outputs. If you have another driver and want to see the options supported, look for a manpage for your driver. For example, to see the driver options for the Intel 810 adapter:

$ man i810

If you are logged in to the system through the graphical user interface, access the command line through the terminal program. Select the menu option Applications→Accessories→Terminal (System→Terminal in KDE), or right-click on the desktop background and select Konsole under KDE.

If you have logged in to the system through a character-mode login screen or an SSH login, you will automatically be presented with a command line.

The standard shell prompt looks like this:

[chris@concord2 ~]$

To enter a command, simply type it, and then press Enter to execute it. The output from the command will appear after the command (scrolling the screen if necessary), and when the command is done a new prompt will be printed.

To edit a command line, use the left and right arrow keys to position within the line, and the Backspace and Delete keys to delete characters to the left or right of the cursor, respectively. To insert text, simply type it. You can press Enter with the cursor located anywhere on the line to execute the command. Other editing keys are available; Table 4-1 shows the most useful ones.

Table 4-1. Useful editing keys

You can scroll through the history of previously entered commands using the up and down arrow keys. This enables you to easily re-enter a command, either exactly as you previously entered it or after editing.

You can also search for a previous command by pressing Ctrl-R (for reverse search ) and then typing a few characters that appear in the command. For example, if you had at some previous point typed cat /etc/hosts and you pressed Ctrl-R and typed hos , the cat /etc/hosts command would appear (providing that no intervening commands contained the letter sequence hos ).

The superuser account, root , is also called the privileged account, because it is not subject to the security restrictions that are applied to regular user accounts. root access is required for many system administration commands. Although it's tempting to use the root account all the time on a single-user computer, it is unwise because Fedora assumes that you know what you're doing and won't ask for confirmation if you enter a dangerous command; it will just go ahead and execute it. If you're using the root account, an incorrect command can cause a lot more damage than the same command executed in a normal account.

Although you can directly log in as a root user, it's usually much safer to take on root privilege only when necessary, using the su (switch user) command:

$ su

Password:

root-password

#

Many Linux commands will output a message only if something goes wrong. For example, if you try to remove a file using the rm command, no message will be displayed if the file is successfully deleted, but an error message will be generated if the file does not exist:

$ rm barbeque

rm: cannot remove \Qbarbeque ': No such file or directory

You can leave a shell by pressing Ctrl-D or typing exit . If you are using a terminal window and don't have any programs running, you can simply close the window using the X button on the title bar.

The type , which , and whereis commands all provide information about the location of programs.

type will tell you where a command is located in a verbose way, along with an indication of whether the command location is hashed (stored in the shell for quick reference because the command has already been used recently). If there is more than one command with the same name, the location shown is the first one found using your $PATH :

$ type cat

cat is hashed (/bin/cat)

Programs with a graphical user interface are started in exactly the same way as programs with a character-based user interface. GUI-based programs use the DISPLAY environment variable to determine if a graphical display is available and to connect to that display. Some programs, such as system-config-printer , will automatically start up with a graphical or a character-based user interface according to the type of display that is available.

Typing Alt-F2 will open a Run Application dialog (in KDE, it's called Run Command), which enables you to enter a single command and run it. This is most useful for starting graphical programs that aren't on the menu.

You can also add an applet to your panel bar that does the same thing.

There isn't any! Linux does not make any distinction between categories of programs.

Fedora offers four different command shells: csh (a.k.a. tcsh ), bash (a.k.a. sh ), ksh , and zsh . You can temporarily start a different shell just by typing the shell name:

$ csh

There are five main types of documentation available:

 Manpages

 info pages

 The GNOME Guides and KDE Manuals

 HOWTOs and guides from the Linux Documentation Project

 Text files distributed with applications

Fedora continues the Unix tradition of providing an online version of what were originally loose-leaf printed manuals. These manuals cover the commands, programming interfaces, and data formats used by the system.

The command used to access these online manuals is called man , so these documents have come to be known as manpages . The majority of Fedora documentation is in this format.

The pages are arranged into sections according to the original binders, using the section numbers described in Table 4-2 . The section numbers are used to distinguish different manpages with the same name, such as the manpage for the uname system call (found in section 2) and the uname command (found in section 1). In some cases, a letter or two may be appended to a section number to indicate a subsection (such as 3pm , the manual section containing Perl module library functions).

Table 4-2. Section numbers for manpages

To view the manpage for a particular command, such as ls :

$ manls

The output will appear as shown in Figure 4-1 . You can use the up and down arrow keys and the Page Up/Page Down keys to scroll through the text, or q to quit. You can also type / , enter some text, and press Enter to search for that text within the document; type n (lowercase n , for next ) to search again. ? and N (uppercase N ) can be used in the same way to search backwards.

Figure 4-1. Online display of a manpage

To request a manpage from a specific section of the manual, give the section as the first argument and the name of the manpage as the second argument:

$ man2 uname

If you don't specify the section, the first section containing a page with the requested name is usedand since there is a uname page in section 1, you won't see the page from section 2 unless you specifically ask for it.

The -k argument of man is used to produce a list of all of the pages that contain a specific keyword in their short descriptions. For example, if you wanted to see all of the manpages that contained the word calendar in their summary:

$ man -k calendar

Date::Calc (3pm) - Gregorian calendar date calculations

Date::Calendar (3pm) - Calendar objects for different holiday schemes

Date::Calendar::Profiles (3pm) - Some sample profiles for Date::Calendar and

Date::Calendar::Year

Date::Calendar::Year (3pm) - Implements embedded year objects for Date::Calendar

cal (1) - displays a calendar

The GNU project supplies most of its documentation in info documents rather than manpages. info documents are a unique form of hypertext and are read with a reader program named, not surprisingly, info :

$ infols

GNOME and KDE each provide a general user's guide or manual, with specific chapters (or in some cases, separate manuals) for their various desktop tools.

To access these guides, just press F1 in a GNOME or KDE application. Alternately, select the System→Help (GNOME) or Help (KDE) menu options from the panel bar. The GNOME menu is connected to the GNOME documentation, and the KDE menu is connected to the KDE documentation. You can access the documentation for the other desktop environment from a command prompt; for GNOME documentation, use either of these commands:

$ gnome-help

$ yelp

The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP) maintains a very helpful set of documents called HOWTO s, each of which describes the procedure to accomplish a specific task. They also publish some book-length guides . Most of these documents have been translated into multiple languages. However, these documents are generic and do not reflect the default configuration and packaging of Fedora.

The TLDP documentation can be found on the Web at http://www.tldp.org/ . TLDP also publishes FAQs and maintains links to online versions of the manpages and free Linux magazines.

Most open source software packages include a small number of text files written by the programmers, which include licensing information, change histories, errata and bug lists, and release notes. In Fedora these miscellaneous documents are placed in /usr/share/doc and are organized in directories by package name and version. For example, the notes for dia (a diagram-drawing application) are available in /usr/share/doc/dia-0.95 .

I find that the easiest way to view these documents is to use a web browser, which enables you to navigate among directories and view documents by simply clicking on them. To do this, just open the Firefox web browser and enter /usr/share/doc as the location.

To view these files from the shell prompt, change to the directory you wish to view, and then use ls to list names of the files and less to view the contents of any text files that interest you. For example, here are the steps you might take to view the dia text files:

$ cd /usr/share/doc

$ ls -d dia*

dia-0.95 dialog-1.0.20050306

$ cd dia-0.95

$ ls -l

total 724

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1578 Aug 16 2004 AUTHORS

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 574015 Aug 17 2004 ChangeLog

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17992 Mar 12 2004 COPYING

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11364 Aug 16 2004 custom-shapes

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1620 Aug 16 2004 diagram.dtd

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3927 Aug 16 2004 INSTALL

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4955 Aug 16 2004 KNOWN_BUGS

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21535 Aug 17 2004 NEWS

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3444 Aug 16 2004 README

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 27 01:13 samples

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2324 Aug 16 2004 shape.dtd

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 501 Aug 16 2004 sheet.dtd

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1379 Aug 19 2004 THANKS

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2545 Aug 16 2004 TODO

$ less KNOWN_BUGS

The man command's -t option will format a page into PostScript; you can then send the PostScript output to your printer with the command lpr using a pipe. This command prints the manpage for ls :

$ man -t ls | lpr

It's easy to convert manpages into PDF or HTML formats.

For PDF, use the -t option with man and then pipe the PostScript output into the ps2pdf program. This command places the manpage for ls into the file ls_man_page.pdf :

$ man -t ls | ps2pdf - ls_man_page.pdf

Linux, like most modern operating systems, uses a tree-like hierarchy to store and organize files. To manage files effectively, extend the hierarchy to organize your data.

Fedora's master directory (or folder , as it would be referred to by other operating systems) is called the root directory ; it may contain files and directories. Each of those directories may in turn contain other files and directories.

For each user, one directory is designated as the home directory , and that is where that user stores her personal files. Additionally, each process (a running copy of a program) has a current working directory on the system, which is the directory that it accesses by default unless another directory is explicitly specified.

The root directory is always the same system-wide; the home directory is consistent for a particular user, but varies from user to user; and the current working directory is unique to each process and can be changed anytime.

A pathname specifies how to find a file in the file hierarchy. There are three different pathname schemes that can be used, based on the three different starting points (root, home, and current working directory); each scheme specifies the path from the selected starting point to the desired file, separating directory names with the forward slash character ( / ). These three schemes are summarized in Table 4-4 .

Table 4-4. Absolute, Relative, and Relative-to-Home pathnames

Fedora uses a standard set of directories derived from historical conventions, the Linux Standard Base (LSB) project, and the kernel. Table 4-5 outlines the key directories and their purpose.

Table 4-5. Key directories in Fedora Core

Local files refers to filesbinaries, scripts, and datafilesthat you have developed and that are not part of Fedora. Separating these files from the rest of the operating system makes it easier to move them to a new system in the future.

The wildcard characters ? and * can be used for pattern matching , which is useful for dealing with several files at a time without individually specifying each filename. ? will match any one character in a filename, and * will match any number of any characters (including none).

Square brackets [] can be used to contain a list of characters [123] , a range of characters [aj] , or a combined list and range [123aj] ; this pattern will match any one character from the list or range. Using an exclamation mark or carat symbol as the first character inside the square brackets will invert the meaning, causing a match with any one character which is not in the list or range.

Table 4-6 lists some examples of ambiguous filenames.

Table 4-6. Ambiguous filenames

Linux filenames can be up to 254 characters long and contain letters, spaces, digits, and most punctuation marks. However, names that contain certain punctuation marks or spaces cannot be used as command arguments unless you place quote marks around the name (and even then there may be problems). Linux filenames are also case-sensitive, so it's productive to adopt a consistent naming convention and stick to it.

Here are my recommendations for Linux filenames:

 Build the names from lowercase letters, digits, dots, hyphens, and underscores. Avoid all other punctuation. Start the filename with a letter or digit (unless you want to specify a hidden file), and do not include spaces.

 Use the single form of words instead of the plural ( font instead of fonts ); it's less typing, and you won't have to keep track of whether you chose the singular or plural form.

 Filename extensions (such as .gif , .txt , or .odt ) are not recognized by the Linux kernel; instead, the file contents and security permissions determine how a file is treated. However, some applications do use extensions as an indication of file type, so it's a good idea to employ traditional extensions such as .mp3 for MP3 audio files and .png for portable network graphics files.

The ls (list-directory-contents) command will display a list of the files in the current working directory:

$ ls

4Suite crontab hosts libuser.conf nxserver

a2ps.cfg cron.weekly hosts.allow lisarc oaf

...(Lines snipped)...

To print the name of the current working directory, use the pwd (print-working-directory) command:

$ pwd

/home/chris

To create a directory from the command line, use the mkdir command:

$ mkdirnewdirectory

To copy a file, use the cp command with the source and destination filenames as positional arguments:

$ cp/etc/passwd /tmp/passwd-copy

In Linux, renaming and moving files are considered the same operation and are performed with the mv command. In either cases, you're changing the pathname under which the file is stored without changing the contents of the file.

To change a file named yellow to be named purple in the current directory:

$ mvyellow purple

The rm command will remove (delete) a file:

$ rm badfile

Linux systems store files by number (the inode number ). You can view the inode number of a file by using the -i option to ls :

$ ls -i /etc/hosts

3410634 /etc/hosts

The file command will read the first part of a file, analyze it, and display information about the type of data in the file. Supply one or more filenames as the argument:

$ file *

fable: ASCII text

newicon.png: empty

passwd: ASCII text

README: ASCII English text

xpdf.png: PNG image data, 48 x 48, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced

You can display the contents of a text file using the cat command:

$ catREADME

Dia is a program for drawing structured diagrams.

...(more)...

To display only the top or bottom 10 lines of a text file, use the head or tail command instead of cat .

If the text file is too big to fit on the screen, the less command is used to scroll through it.

$ lessREADME

GNOME's file manager is named Nautilus and it permits simple drag-and-drop file management.

When you are logged in to GNOME, Nautilus is already running as part of the desktop environment. To open a Nautilus window, double-click on the Home icon on your desktop or select a folder from the Places menu. A window will appear, such as the one shown in Figure 4-2 , showing each file as an icon. Emblems overlaid on the icons are used to indicate the file status, such as read-only .

Figure 4-2. Nautilus file management window

By default, Nautilus uses a spatial mode, which means that each directory will open in a separate window, and those windows will retain their position when closed, re-opening at the same location when you access them later.

You can open child directories by double-clicking on them, or you can open a parent directory using the pull-down menu in the bottom-lefthand corner of the window. To deal with more than one directory (for example, for a copy or move operation), open windows for each of the directories and arrange them on the screen so that they are not overlapping.

To manage files, start by selecting one or more files:

 To select a single file, click on it.

 To select several files that are located close together, click on a point to the left or right of the files (which will start drawing a rectangle) and then drag the mouse pointer so that the rectangle touches all of the files you wish to select.

 To select several files that are not adjacent, click on the first one, and then hold Ctrl and click on additional ones.

 To select a consecutive range of files, click on the first file, and then hold Shift and click on the last file.

Once you have selected a file (or files):

 Move the file by dragging it between windows.

 Copy a file by dragging it between windows while holding the Ctrl key.

 Link a file (symbolically) by dragging it between windows while holding the Ctrl and Shift keys.

 Delete a file by dragging it and dropping it on the Trash icon on the desktop, by pressing the Delete key, or by right-clicking and selecting "Move to Trash."

 To rename a file, right-click, select Rename, and then edit the name below the file icon.

You can also use traditional cut, copy, and paste operations on the files:

 To cut a file, press Ctrl-X, or right-click and select Cut. Note that the file will not disappear from the original location until it is pasted into a new location; this effectively performs a move operation.

 To copy a file, press Ctrl-C, or right-click and select Copy.

 To paste a file that has been cut or copied, click on the window of the directory you with to paste into, and then press Ctrl-V or right-click on the window background and select Paste.

You can also perform cut, copy, and paste operations from the Edit menu at the top of the Nautilus window.

KDE's Konqueror is both a file manager and a web browser. Figure 4-3 shows the file manager view. Although at first glance this looks similar to Nautilus, Konqueror offers a larger set of features, most of which are accessed through the toolbar and menus.

Figure 4-3. Konqueror in file management mode

To start Konqueror, select Home from the K menu. Unlike Nautilus, Konqueror does not use spatial windows; as you move around the file hierarchy, the same window is reused. To create a second window for drag-and-drop, press Ctrl-N (or select the menu option Location→New Window). Alternately, you can split a window horizontally or vertically using the Window menu, and then drag and drop between the two panes. To view more information about the files, select the menu option View→View Mode→Detailed List View, which shows information similar to that displayed by ls -l. There are other options on the View Mode menu that are useful in different situations, such as the Photobook view for directories of photographs.

You can change to child directories by double-clicking on them, or you can change to parent directories by using the up-arrow icon on the toolbar. You can also select a directory from the Navigation Panel, shown on the left in Figure 4-3 (the Navigation Panel can be toggled on and off using the F9 key).

To manage files, start by selecting one or more files:

 To select a single file, click on it.

 To select several files that are located close together, click on a point to the left or right of the files (which will start drawing a rectangle) and then drag the mouse pointer so that the rectangle touches all of the files you wish to select.

 To select several files that are not adjacent, click on the first one, and then hold Ctrl and click on additional ones.

 To select a range of files (rectangular region), click on the first file, and then hold Shift and click on the last file.

Once you have selected a file (or files):

 Move, copy, or link the file by dragging it between windows (or window panes). When you drop the file on the destination, a pop-up menu will appear with Move Here, Copy Here, and Link Here options.

 Delete a file by dragging and dropping it on the Trash icon on the desktop, by pressing the Delete key, or by right-clicking and selecting "Move to Trash."

 To rename a file, right-click, select Rename, and then edit the name below the file icon.

As with Nautilus, you can also use traditional cut, copy, and paste operations on the files:

 To cut a file, press Ctrl-X, or right-click and select Cut. Note that the file will not disappear from the original location until it is pasted into a new location; this effectively performs a move operation.

 To copy a file, press Ctrl-C or right-click and select Copy.

 To paste a file that has been cut or copied, click on the window of the directory you wish to paste into, and then press Ctrl-V, or right-click on the window background and select Paste.

You can also perform cut, copy, and paste operations using the Edit menu at the top of the Konqueror window.

Linux shells use a process called globbing to find matches for ambiguous filenames before commands are executed. Consider this command:

$ ls /etc/*release*

Microsoft Windows uses drive designators at the start of pathnames, such as the C: in C:\Windows\System32\foo.dll , to indicate which disk drive a particular file is on. Linux instead merges all active filesystems into a single file hierarchy; different drives and partitions are grafted onto the tree in a process called mounting.

You can view the mount table, showing which devices are mounted at which points in the tree, by using the mount command:

$ mount

/dev/mapper/main-root on / type ext3 (rw)

/dev/proc on /proc type proc (rw)

/dev/sys on /sys type sysfs (rw)

/dev/devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)

/dev/md0 on /boot type ext3 (rw)

/dev/shm on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)

/dev/mapper/main-home on /home type ext3 (rw)

/dev/mapper/main-var on /var type ext3 (rw)

/dev/sdc1 on /media/usbdisk type vfat

(rw,nosuid,nodev,_netdev,fscontext=system_u:object_r:removable_t,user=chris)

While the cursor is on or adjacent to the ambiguous filename, press Tab twice. bash will display all of the matching filenames, and then reprint the command and let you continue editing:

$ lsa* (press Tab, Tab)

a2.html all-20090412

a3f1.html

$ ls a*

Type the first few characters of the filename, then press Tab. bash will fill in the rest of the name (or as much as is unique). For example, if there is only one filename in the current directory that starts with all :

$ ls all(press Tab)

$ ls all-20090412

Press Esc-_ (underscore) to copy the last argument from the previous command. For example, to create a directory and then change to that directory:

$ mkdir backup-directory-august

$ cd(press Esc, _)

$ cd backup-directory-august

To start up the vi editor, simply type its name at a shell prompt, optionally providing the name of a file you wish to edit as an argument:

$ vifilename

The screen will clear, and the specified file will be displayed, as shown in Figure 4-4 .

Figure 4-4. Initial vi display

Notice that unused lines are marked with a tilde (~) character.

vi uses two distinct modes:

 Normal mode , where the text keys issue editing commands. This is sometimes called command mode .

 Insert mode , where text keys insert text into the document.

The lower-left corner of the display shows the current mode: if it says -- INSERT -- , then you're in insert mode; otherwise, you're in normal mode.

You can move the cursor around using the arrow keys. If your arrow keys don't work (which may be the case if you're using a remote connection from a bad terminal program), you can use the h, j, k, and l keys, as shown in Table 4-7 .

Table 4-7. Basic vi movement commands

You can put a number in front of any command to repeat the command. For example, typing 10j will move down 10 lines.

There are several commands for inserting text, as shown in Table 4-8 .

Table 4-8. Commands to enter insert mode

All of these commands place the editor into insert mode; the only difference is where the cursor is positioned for the inserted text. The word -- INSERT -- will appear in the lower-left corner of the display.

To exit from insert mode and return to normal mode, press Esc. The -- INSERT -- indicator in the lower-left corner of the display will disappear.

vi offers three basic commands for deleting or yanking, as shown in Figure 4-9 . Deleting is roughly equivalent to cutting in a GUI-based editor, and yanking is similar to copying.

Table 4-9. Basic delete and yank commands

Typing / followed by some text (actually, a regular expression) and pressing Enter will search forward in the document. Typing n will repeat the previous search in the forward direction. Typing ? instead of / will search backward instead of forward; N will repeat a search backward.

Searching can be combined with deleting and yanking; for example, d/hello will delete from the cursor position up to the start of the word hello .

Pressing u will undo the last operation performed; pressing Ctrl-R will redo it. Typing a dot ( . ) will repeat the last operation.

There are a number of commands available for saving the document and exiting vi , as shown in Table 4-10 ; you must press Enter after these commands.

Table 4-10. Saving text and exiting vi

If you execute gvim instead of vi , a window will appear with a full graphical user interfaceincluding pull-down menus and a toolbaras shown in Figure 4-5 . Using the File→Save menu option, clicking on the Save toolbar icon, or typing the vi save command ( :w) will perform the same operation.

Figure 4-5. gvim: vi with a GUI

In addition to vi , Fedora ships with a plethora of other text editors, including:

 nano (an improved clone of the easy-to-use editor Pico )

 mcedit

 joe (the commands jstar , jmacs , or jpico will start joe configured to emulate WordStar , emacs , or Pico ).

 emacs and emacs-x

 kedit and gedit

All of these text editors are capable of editing just about any text file. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

Since the choice of editor is very personal, take some time to experiment with each of the editors to see which one you prefer. In any case, I'd recommend knowing the basics of vi so that you can always fall back to it if you encounter a situation where your favorite editor is unavailable.

You can change the runlevel on the fly, or configure your system to start in a different runlevel.

The Fedora boot menu can be used to specify the runlevel:

1. Press a key (such as the spacebar) when the Fedora Core boot display appears. This will reveal the boot menu.

2. Select the Fedora Core boot option you wish to use using the arrow keys.

3. Press the letter a (Append). An edit display will appear that allows you to append information to the boot command line.

4. Add a space and then the runlevel to the end of the list of boot options (for example, press space then 3 to select runlevel 3).

5. Press Enter to boot into the runlevel that you've specified.

Take the following steps to change the runlevel after booting:

1. Obtain a root prompt using the su command:

2. $ su

3. Password: rootPassword

4. #

System administrators often configure servers to start in runlevel 3, freeing up memory to increase the server's performance.

The default runlevel is controlled by a line in the file /etc/inittab ; to change the default runlevel, edit that file using the vi editor:

1. Obtain a root prompt using su .

2. Start vi with the /etc/inittab file:

3. # vi /etc/inittab

4.

The boot menu is configured using the file /boot/grub/grub.conf . You can edit this file so that options for various runlevels appear on the boot menu:

1. Obtain a root prompt.

2. Start vi with the /boot/grub/grub.conf :

3. # vi /boot/grub/grub.conf

4.

If the file /etc/inittab doesn't exist, init cannot start the system normally. Runlevel S was created specifically for this purpose; it's the only runlevel that doesn't require /etc/inittab , so it can be a lifesaver if that file is missing or messed up. In fact, init doesn't even ask for a password in runlevel S; it takes you directly to a root command prompt. This is useful if you've forgotten the root password, but presents a huge security risk.

To protect against the unauthorized use of runlevel S, it's a good idea to add a password entry to the boot menu. If you didn't do this during the installation, you can add the password at any time by following these steps:

1. Generate an encrypted password with the grub-md5-crypt command:

2. $ grub-md5-crypt

3. Password:

4. bigsecret

5. Retype password:

6. bigsecret$1$f1z061$j/UEYyBn0e0996w0gjq4k/

7.

Just because runlevel 3 doesn't offer a graphical login screen doesn't mean that you can't use a graphical user interface. If you log in on a character-mode display, you can start the GUI with this command:

$ startx

Select the menu option System→Administration→Services (in KDE, it is System→Services) to start the system-config-services tool, shown in Figure 4-6.

Figure 4-6. Services configuration window

The configuration of the current runlevel is shown by default. Every service with a checkmark in front of it will be started when that runlevel is entered; to add or clear a checkmark, click on the checkbox.

Click on a service name to see a description of that service and its current status ( running or stopped ). Click on the Save icon (or File→Save Changes) when you've configured the services to your liking; your changes will take effect next time you change runlevels or boot the system.

You can edit the settings for another runlevel (3, 4, 5, or all three at the same time) using options on the Edit Runlevel menu.

To start, stop, or restart a service immediately, regardless of whether it's configured to start automatically at boot time, click on the service name and then click on the Start, Stop, or Restart icon.

If you're not running a graphical user interface, you can use ntsysv , a character-mode program similar to system-config-services :

# ntsysv

This will configure the current runlevel. To configure a different runlevel, use the --level option:

# ntsysv --level 4

The display shown in Figure 4-7 will appear.

Figure 4-7. The ntsysv display

Use the arrow keys to select a service, the spacebar to check/uncheck a service, and Tab to switch between the service list and the buttons. When you are done, press Tab to advance to the OK button and then press Enter.

The chkconfig command provides an easy way to enable and disable services. The --list option displays the current service configuration:

$ chkconfig --list

NetworkManager 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off

NetworkManagerDispatcher 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off

acpid 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

amd 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off

anacron 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

apmd 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

arptables_jf 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

...(Lines snipped)...

The service command is used to manage running services. Two arguments are always used: first, the name of the service being managed, and second, the action that is to be performed. The most common actions are:

You can use the system-config-services or chkconfig tools to create a custom set of services for a runlevel and then use that either as the default runlevel or an option on the boot menu.

This technique is particularly useful on laptops, which may be used in different locations and need different services in each location.

To create a service:

1. Create a service script in /etc/rc.d/init.d . Include a chkconfig line as described in the previous section. (You may want to examine an existing service file to see how it works.)

2. Run the command chkconfig --add service to set up the default service links.

You can then configure your service in the same way as any of the other services, using system-config-services , service , and chkconfig .

Almost everyone identifies themselves as both an individual and as a member of several groups. Linux uses separate user and group identities to reconstruct this two-level structure inside the system.

For example, company employee Richard might be all of the following:

 A member of the IT department

 Located at the company's Toronto office

 The leader of the team putting together the big sales pitch to Acme, Ltd.

 Part of the Christmas party committee

 A player in the Tuesday evening company soccer league

(And that doesn't even touch on life outside of the company!)

The system administrator configures Richard's account to indicate his many involvements within the company. At the user level, the name richard is assigned to him, and a password and home directory are assigned. richard is then placed into the groups it , toronto , acmeproposal , christmas , and soccer .

Fedora Core extends this system using a scheme called user private group (UPG), which means that Richard also has his own private group, also named richard . UPG makes a lot of sense when you look at permissions.

The Fedora GUI tool for managing users and groups is system-config-users , which is accessed through the menu under System→Administration→"Users and Groups." After you supply the root password, the window shown in Figure 4-8 will appear.

Figure 4-8. The Users and Groups configuration window

This window has two tabs, one for managing groups and one for managing users.

To add a user, click on the Add User icon. The window shown in Figure 4-9 will be displayed.

Figure 4-9. The Create New User window

Fill in each of the fields:

User Name

The account name (username) you wish to use (such as jane ). This is what the user will enter when she logs in to the system. It should be an opaque string (no spaces) and consist of letters, digits, dashes, underscores, and periods. Although you can use uppercase characters, traditional user names are all-lowercase for ease of typing.

Full Name

The actual name of the user, in upper- and lowercase ( Jane Smith ). This information is optional and is used for reference only.

Password and Confirm Password

Type the new user's password twice.

Login shell

For most users, this field should be left as is; it can always be changed (using chsh ) later. If you are creating a user account that will never be used for logging in (such as an account used exclusively for email access or file sharing), select /sbin/nologin for the shell.

Create home directory

This should almost always be left checked.

Create a private group for the user

This enables the Fedora User Private Group scheme (which is a great idea), so it should almost always be left checked.

Specify a user ID manually

This controls whether the numeric user ID will be automatically or manually assigned. The only time you would want to specify it manually is when you are configuring the same user ID on two systems. In that case, check the box and enter the user ID in the UID field; otherwise, leave it unchecked.

Once you have filled in all of these fields, click OK. You will be returned to the main User and Group configuration window ( Figure 4-8 ).

To edit a user, double-click on the user's name, or highlight the name and click the Properties icon. An edit window will appear with four tabs, enabling you to edit values that cannot be set during the creation of the account; Figure 4-10 shows each of these tabs.

Figure 4-10. The four tabs of the User Properties window

The four tabs are:

User Data

Contains fields similar to those in the Create New User dialog ( Figure 4-9 ).

Account Info

Allows you to set an expiry date for the account or lock (disable) the account.

Password Info

Configures password expiration (also called password aging ). You can set the number of days before a change is required, to force users to change passwords periodically; the number of days after a change before another change is permitted, to prevent a user from gaming the forced password change by using a temporary password and then immediately switching back to her regular password; how far in advance the user will be warned about an impending password expiry; and the number of days of inactivity permitted before the account is locked as abandoned.

Groups

This tab is one of the least used, but most useful. Here you configure the groups to which the user belongs. In the case of our fictional example of Richard, you would check the it , toronto , acmeproposal , christmas , and soccer groups. By default, the user is automatically assigned to a group with the same name as his username. The significance of groups is that they can be used to manage file access.

The value of password aging is debatable; while it does limit the time that a compromised password can be used, forcing a user to change her password too frequently can make it difficult for her to remember the current password, leading to unsafe practices such as writing passwords on sticky notes or choosing weak passwords.

To delete a user account, click on the username and then click on the Delete icon. You will be warned if the user account is active (i.e., if the user is logged in or has processes running), and you will be asked for confirmation. The confirmation dialog has a checkbox that controls whether the user's files will be deleted along with the user account. If you are planning to keep the user's files, it may be better to lock the account than to delete it, so that the user's name continues to show up as the owner of those files (if the account is deleted, the account number is shown instead of the name).

The Group tab of the User Manager window works in exactly the same way as the Users tab. The only fields that appear in the Add Group dialog are for the group name and, if you want to set it manually, the group number. The Properties dialog adds a tab that shows you a list of all of the users on the system, with checkboxes to indicate which ones are in the group.

Fedora provides six utilities for managing users and groups from the command line. For users, there are useradd , usermod , and userdel ; for groups, there are groupadd , groupmod , and groupdel .

The express way to add a user is to use useradd and then set the new user's password using passwd :

# useradd jane

# passwd jane

Changing password for user jane.

New UNIX password:

bigSecret

Retype new UNIX password:

bigSecret

passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

passwd is used to set a user's password. Used by a normal user, it sets that user's password by asking for the current password and then asking for the new password twice:

$ passwd