Linux User Group of Gaia's Tip, Tricks, How-tos, and FAQs

Installing Active x in Linux

This is a complete rewrite of the original "How To" on installing Active X which only worked if you have a SuSE system. This version of the How To works as long as you have a installed and configured WINE on your Linux box.

-What you will need:

1. Wine installed and configured
2. A windows version of a web browser (Links to some of Mozilla's browser can be found later in the post)
3. Active X control for your web browser

-Steps

1. If you have not already download and install WINE for your system, then configure it (Version 0.9.39 can fake any windows system from Windows 2.0 - Vista, but you need to look at the 95 - Vista range for this)
2. Download a windows web browser (Mozilla Suite (A bit old but still works), Firefox, SeaMonkey (Replaced Mozilla Suite))
3. Next you need to download the Active X control for your browser. (Mozilla Active X Control)
4. Make sure you saved the browser and the Active X control to ~/.wine/drive_c if not you need to move them there now.
5. Now you should download the msvcp60.dll and mfc42.dll Make sure to save them in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 that way "Windows" can find them.
6. Now it is time to install everything, for this I will use the Mozilla suite as an example, the only thing you need to change is the name of the .exe file you want to install.

First you need to install your web browser by going to your fake C drive, to do this open up a shell and cd to ~/.wine/drive_c. Next you need to run this command
wine "c:\mozilla-win32-1.7.12-installer.exe"
Do the same to install the Active X control for your Web browser. If you get an error about the missing .dll files and you know that you downloaded them and placed them in the right spot then you need to run this command before trying to reinstall the Active X controls
regsvr32 ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/mozilla.org/GRE/1.7.12_2005091517/mozctlx.dll
*Note: If you still have problems installing your web browser or Active X try setting Wine to fake an older Windows OS.

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How to install berly on Ubuntu

Here are some links look trough all of them and find the one that feets you the most.

Ubuntuforum 1.
Ubuntuforum 2.

If you find more help on this write it in to your post but only berly for ubuntu hire for now.

Submitted by: GodFly

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RPM Package Manager

RPM is a recursive acronym for RPM Package Manager. It is the default package manager in RedHat as well as RedHat based linux distributions like Mandrake. It is very powerful and can be used to install, deinstall, update softwares, as well as a whole lot of other things in linux. Basically, RPM can be divided into 3 main areas of functionality.
1. Packages - Files that are compressed and contain applications, data and other files.
2. Database - A list of installed packages in a system.
3. Compilation - Bundling a bunch of files into a package suitable for installation on other systems.

Here, I will explain a few important RPM commands that are frequently used by linux users.

Querying

You can query the RPM database to know more details about a particular package that is installed in your system. To see if a particular program (say gedit, a text editor) is installed or not, use -q to activate the query mode in RPM. RPM usually responds with the name, version and release of the package installed or, more likely reports that it is not present. To see all the files that are installed for gedit and their full path, use the -l sub parameter with the query mode. Here -q is the mode and -l is the submode. Usually you can bundle the mode and sub-mode parameters together as follows: You can also try... ... for a more verbose output.
To find, in which package the file /bin/sh is located, try : ...which tells that the file /bin/sh is situated in the package bash-3.2-61.
Now to get more details about the bash package execute the following command: ...which will give a whole lot of details about the bash package installed in your system.

Installing and removing packages

Suppose you want to install a package (say gedit):

To update gedit to a newer version: The -U mode means, if this package is not installed, install it; if an older version of this package is installed, upgrade it.
There is a third installation mode, called freshening, represented by -F. This is similar to -U in that it upgrades a package that is installed, but it adds one restriction - it ignores any packages that are not of the same name as a package that is already installed on your system. So if you have a directory containing a bundle of rpms - say security patches - then you can move into that directory containing the security patches in RPM format and execute the command: ... which will install only those security patches which are related to the packages that are already installed in your system and will ignore the rest.

To remove gedit, just type:

Drawbacks of RPM

RPM has one difficulty, ie it will not install a package if that package depends on another program that is not already installed on your system. This is known as a dependency issue. RedHat provides two utilities called rpmdb-redhat for RedHat enterprise linux and rpmdb-fedora for Fedora Core. Once you install one of these on your system, RPM will automatically begin suggesting dependency resolutions. Ofcourse, you can force RPM to install a package even without resolving a dependency problem by using the --force and --nodeps parameters to both the installation related modes and the remove mode. They ignore conflicts and dependencies respectively. Suppose you do not want to install an RPM package but get one or more files in it. You can use a utility called rpm2cpio to convert your RPM package into a cpio package (which is more or less similar to a tarball) then use the command cpio to extract all the files into a directory as follows:

This will extract all the files from the RPM package into the current directory. This is only a small subset of the power of RPM. To know more about it try:

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Autopackage

When ever I decide to download and install a software on Linux, I am given the choice of a plethora of packages to download - each targeted at a particular distribution. And many times different versions of the same distributions needing different packages. For example, if I am using Fedora Core 2 and I want to download and install a software, then it will have separate packages for debian, fedora, redhat, mandrake and so on ; and I have to choose the package targeted at fedora. And if by any chance you don't have a package of the software for your distribution, you might have to download the source and compile it yourself and install it.

Lets say that you want to install Super Tux on Linux. When you go to the website you will soon find out that they have a signle binary file made for any Linux distro. How is this possable? They used a program called Autopackage to compile a single binary file.

So what is Autopackage

In a end users perspective, autopackage lets you install an up to date software without any hassles like dependency issues and more importantly, you don't have to choose which distro you run based on how many packages are available. For developers, autopackage lets you create binary packages for Linux that will install on any distribution, can automatically resolve dependencies and can be installed using multiple front ends (command line, GUI etc).

So when you download the program, in our case Super Tux, you should get something that looks like this supertux-0.1.3.x86.package from the website. First you need to make that file excutable by running the following:

(Note: This can be done in KDE by right clicking the file, choosing properties and then clicking the permissions tab and checking the "is executable" checkbox.)

Then just run the program by clicking on it, or you could also run this in the command line:

If you happen to get a bit ahead of yourself and try to install a .package file without Autopackage, don't worry you won't look to much like an idiot instead you will just get this error
autopackage for "SuperTux platform game"
The installation of this software requires some additional support code to be installed.

A] If the support code is found in a local directory, it will be used.
The file containing the support code will be called:
"autopackage.tar.bz2"
or

B] If there is an active Internet connection, the support code will be
downloaded from:
"http://autopackage.org/latest/autopackage.tar.bz2"

Proxy users should ensure the http_proxy environment variable is set, otherwise the download may fail.

Selection B --> OK to download and install support code now? (Y/n):
By typing Y Autopackage will automatically downloading and installed on your system, it give you an option of making it system wide or not (Root Password is needed to make it system wide).

Things to remember

1) Autopackage installs the software by default in /usr directory. If you want to install it elsewhere, you have to modify the file /etc/autopackage/config and change the autopackage_prefix section to point to another location.
# FILE: /etc/autopackage/config
...
autopackage_prefix="/usr/local"
...
Or you can also use the --prefix switch while installing using command line.

2) Autopackage uses the package program to manage (install, uninstall) the softwares. For example, to uninstall the Super Tux game, I just run the following command by logging in as root :
# package remove supertux
It is as simple as that.

Advantages of Autopackage

Supports automatic dependency resolution like in apt and emerge.
One common package for all known Linux/Unix distributions.
Double click and install softwares like in Windows OS.
Choice of GUI based and command line method of installation.

Drawbacks of Autopackage

If you install using autopackage, it will not update the RPM database.
There is no package signing.
Autopackage cannot be used to build Linux distributions.
Is not cross-platform. Supports only x86 and x86-64 (might change at a future date).

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Convert between RPM, DEB, and TAR package formats

If you are using a debian (based) linux distribution like Ubuntu, then you will not be able to use the rpm command to install software in RPM format because Debian uses its own package management called dpkg. But there is an experimental software called Alien, that converts between the rpm, Debian deb, stampede slp, and slackware tgz file formats. For example, if I want to install Inkscape which is in a binary RPM format in Ubuntu (or any debian distro), I use the following command:

The above command will unpack the rpm package into a directory, create a deb package and then install it on your system. Ofcourse, you can uninstall the package at a later date by using the relevent dpkg command.

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How to make your own package CDs for offline use

If you can't use the DVD images for some reason or want to help a friend with low internet bandwidth, here's a quick'n'dirty way to make your own transportable package CD:

Download all needed packages.
Put them all in one directory.
Open a terminal window, cd to the directory.
Enter the following command :
$ dpkg -scanpackages . /deb/null | gzip > Packages.gz
Burn the directory on CD.

You can later add the CD as a package source with the command:

The 'add' option is used to add a new disc to the source list. It will unmount the CDROM device, prompt for a disk to be inserted and then proceed to scan it and copy the index files. If the disk does not have a proper disk directory structure, you will be prompted for a descriptive title. APT uses a CDROM ID to track which disc is currently in the drive and maintains a database of these IDs in /var/lib/apt/cdroms.list .
If the dpkg didn't give it away this only works on Debian based distros

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Intalling Mono in Linux

Mono is an open source initiative spearheaded by Novell to extend Microsoft's .NET on Linux and other non-microsoft platforms. The advantage of mono over .NET is that any software compiled using mono can be ported to any operating system with ease. Mono also makes use of GTK# libraries. There are a number of excellent GPLed applications that are developed using mono framework. For these applications to run on your computer, you need the mono runtime libraries installed on your machine. In order to get mono you may need to pay a visit to there website mono-project.com and download it from there they have both binary packages and a .bin installer. To install mono you first have to make it executalbe, like any other program, to do this just run chmod then you can run the installer.

The people who have migrated from windows to Linux will feel right at home using this installer which sports a nice clean GUI and there is also an uninstaller with which you can remove the software at a later time if you so choose. By default, the software installs the files in the /opt/mono-1.1.6 directory though there is an option available to install in a different location. I installed it in the /usr/local/mono-1.1.6 directory. During installation, it added the path of the mono binaries to the .bashrc file of the user account. Here I ran into a slight problem because I installed the software by logging in as root. So the installer only updated the root account's .bashrc file. Since I use an account other than root to do my work, I had to manually include the path to the mono binaries in my normal account's .bashrc file which I did as follows:
#FILE: .bashrc
$PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mono-1.1.6/bin
export $PATH
Once the installation was completed, I took a cursory glance in the /usr/local/mono-1.1.6/bin directory. And I found lots of utilities including a command line compiler for the C# language - 'mcs', an IDE called 'monodevelop' which can be used to create applications using C# and of course a Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) virtual machine that contains a class loader, Just-in-time compiler and a garbage collecting runtime similar to those found in Sun's Java development kit.

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