| After a couple of years happily using Red Hat Linux
5.2, I was planning to install JBuilder 3 supplied with the April 2000
edition of PC Plus magazine.
Early investigations showed my C library was too old to work with the
Java Development Kit (JDK 1.2) required by JBuilder 3.
I had been considering an upgrade
anyway as a starting point for investigating Linux system security.
Fortunately the same issue of PC Plus included a
distribution of Mandrake 7.0. This is a version of Linux quite similar
to Red Hat but with a graphical install program noted for its ease
of use. This installation would upgrade my Linux kernel from 2.2.2 to
2.2.14 at a stroke and proved to be just what was required.
In subsequent years I subscribed to Linux Format magazine, and via
their CD distributions upgraded to Mandrake 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2. Much of
what follows remains true for these distributions, with the exception
that automation of the installation has improved to the point where
some of the manual steps mentioned below are now invisible to the user.
These notes only mention key points - for general Linux
installation issues, such as disc partitioning and dual boot
strategies,
you may want to refer to the earlier notes on Linux Red Hat.
Installation
Eventually I sat down one wet weekend to upgrade my
Pentium II system. Incidentally, by "upgrade" I really mean
re-installation. More recent versions of Mandrake allow both upgrade
(applying new versions of files in place of old versions, and merging
changes into existing files) and re-installation (removal and
installation of all files, excepting possibly user file systems).
The installation guide starts with "Index.htm" in the
"docs" directory of the CD. I opened this and printed the whole thing
out. Generally there were no fundamental differences from the Red Hat
installation I had done last year (although many details were
different).
The first excitement was that the graphical "rawrite"
program designed to make an install floppy did not work. This was
mentioned in an article on the PC
Plus Linux forum (753.4) on September 14th, 2000. I found an
undocumented DOS version of "rawrite" which I ran successfully using my
old Red Hat installation notes.
The developers forum mentioned other problems which I
fell for. First I tried to install from the install floppy without the
Mandrake 7.0 CD in the CD drive. Do not do this. It will confuse the
life out of you. The install program claims it can't work out which CD
drivers to use. Once I had started again with the CD in place, all went
much more smoothly.
One thing I found confusing was that I was not asked
whether I wanted to install the Linux boot loader (LILO) in the Master
Boot Record (start of drive) or the first sector of the Linux boot
partition. I was keen not to overwrite the MBR as I have PowerQuest
BootMagic installed there for dual Windows/Linux booting. This is also
highlighted in the PC Plus article accompanying the CD. The
installation guide was not very clear in section 7 on how LILO would be
installed. All appeared well as BootMagic still seemed to work
installation. However I found that BootMagic would no longer boot
Linux. I had to rerun the Boot Magic configuration in Windows to
re-establish the Linux boot capability. I concluded this was just a
side effect of reformatting the Linux partition during the
installation.
X Window System Configuration
During configuration of the display for the X Window System, the option
offered (1024x768 HF SVGA) resulted in the screen being shifted to the
right. I asked for an improved alternative and it correctly came up
with 1024x768 Non-Interlaced SVGA which I had been using with my
previous X server. So no problems there. Subsequently I logged in as
root and ran startx, when I found I had a problem with the operation of
quite a lot of utilities failing to start correctly. Error messages
were appearing all over the show saying that libz.so.1 could not be
found. I soon found that this was a symlink in /usr/lib to a file that
did not exist called libz.so.1.1.3. I also discovered a file
libzgcj.so.0.0.0 which I guessed was created by someone called gcj
around the time of the release. I copied this to libz.so.1.1.3 and
miraculously everything I then tried worked. I found it quite scary to
think the release can have gone out with files missing but I have no
other good explanation.
Environment configuration
I decided I wanted to change the default colour scheme
which was using an almost unreadable bright green to display executable
files with the "ls" command. I discovered that my $HOME/.bashrc file
sources global definitions from /etc/bashrc, which in turn sources
/etc/profile, which then sources the files in /etc/profile.d to set up
"ls" to be an alias. During this process, "dircolors" is used to set
the LS_COLORS environment variable from the contents of
/etc/DIR_COLORS. I copied this file to $HOME/.dir_colors and changed
green to red, then added the following line to the end of
$HOME/.bashrc:
eval `dircolors $HOME/.dir_colors`
This does the job. Finally I changed cyan to magenta settings
in .dir_colors, and made the same changes for the root user.
Printer configuration
I was impressed that installation automatically detected my printer (HP
895CXi) and no further setup was required. More recent versions of
Mandrake automatically install and configure the CUPS printing system
to use this printer.
Mounting Windows file systems
I found that a mount point had been automatically
created in /mnt/DOS_hda1 for the Windows file system and all files were
present and correct. So no more playing with mount commands as before.
Recent versions of Mandrake create /mnt/windows instead,
but the net effect is the same.
Internet connection
Unlike Red Hat 5.2, which required me to install a PPP
connection program, Mandrake 7.0 has PPP connection utilities already
installed.
I was able to type in the telephone number of my ISP
and the IP addresses of their DNS servers during installation. You do
not need to set a domain name at all (defaults to localdomain which is
fine). Subsequently I had no problems making Internet connections, just
starting "kppp" under the Internet folder, and selecting "Connect".
Starting "Netscape" in the same folder, or from the shell, worked fine.
I checked out of curiosity that the expected configuration files are
still used by Mandrake (/etc/resolv.conf).
A few weeks later I even worked out how to enable my
modem sound (I just like the whirring noises during dialing and
connection establishment). Do this using "kppp", under options
Setup->Modem.
Configuration of the loopback device
I felt the need to start the Apache Web server, and
test that I could connect to it locally using
"http://localhost.localdomain". This did not work at first, even though
an alias for localhost.localdomain was set up as follows in /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
A suggestion from an Internet search was to ensure that
ifconfig lo
successfully displays a loopback device. It did. Still no joy. Finally
the PPP documentation in /usr/doc/ppp-2.3.10/README.linux sorted the
problem out. I had never run the command
ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1
which is needed to configure the network address of the loopback
device. Now I could connect to the Apache Web server locally and browse
the documentaion.
Internet clients
I came across notes on the KDE based news reader and
email client in the January 2001 edition of PC Plus magazine.
The KDE mail client can be started from the Internet
folder on the start menu (its just called Mail client). As explained in
the article, it automatically runs through configuration the first time
it is started. I used the following settings in the Identity
and Network tabs, and had no difficulties in sending and
receiving mail:
| Identity |
| Name |
David Cater |
| Email |
dave@dcater.fsnet.co.uk |
| Reply to |
dave@dcater.fsnet.co.uk |
| Network |
| Server |
smtp.freeserve.net |
| Port |
25 (the default) |
| Name |
dave |
| Login |
dcater.fsnet.co.uk |
| Password |
******** |
| Host |
pop.freeserve.net |
| Port |
110 (the default) |
Internet file transfer
The following ftp commands can be used to download HTML
files to my Web site at Global Internet (you need a username and
password of course!):
ftp
open www.users.globalnet.co.uk
cd public_html
cd dave
mput *.html
quit
By the time of Mandrake 9.2 I graduated to a graphical
ftp client called KBear.
More recently I found that you need to disable the "Extended passive" mode in Advanced options in KBear.
Web development
In recent times I have used Mozilla composer for editing web pages.
Refer to my Perl pages for more
details of other tools used for web development.
Package upgrades
Around the second half of 2002, I found some
software (OpenOffice, see below) that was unable to run due to a
dependency on a newer version of the glibc RPM package. A quick search
at Google showed there was a version available for my now aging
Mandrake version 7.0, which I downloaded. I found the RPM documentation
in the Mandrake User Guide installed in
/usr/doc/mandrake/en/index.html, browsable via Netscape. I also refered
to the rpm(8) manual page,
The following commands showed the RPM version:
rpm -q glibc
rpm -qf /lib/libc-2.1.2.so
As if I hadn't already guessed, version 2.1.2 of glibc
was installed and I needed version 2.1.3 or higher.
First I produced a listing of all the files in the glibc
package, as well
as those in the new package file, using these commands, and saved the
output just in case something went wrong later:
rpm -ql glibc
rpm -qpl glibc-2.1.3-18.2mdk.i586.rpm
I diffed the output files, compensating for the change
of version
numbers from 2.1.2 to 2.1.3:
sed -e 's/2.1.2/2.1.3/' glibc-2.1.2-list | diff glibc-2.1.3-list - | more
Most of the differences were the result of new locales and timezones.
Next I wondered whether the new package had any
depencencies on any other new packages. By default, these should be
reported and installation should be prevented. I tested the
installation and no problems were reported when using the command:
rpm -U --test glibc-2.1.3-18.2mdk.i586.rpm
then I went ahead and upgraded the glibc package using the command:
rpm -U glibc-2.1.3-18.2mdk.i586.rpm
After installation I noticed that running Perl gave
connected with
setting the locale - presumably from calling setlocale(3). I was using
the
following innocuous-looking environment settings:
LANG=en
LANGUAGE=en
LC_ALL=en_GB
A review of the documentation for the package, in
/usr/doc/glibc-2.1.3, showed the likely problem was failure to install
the locale database. The following command installed the locale and
fixed
all those problems:
localedef -i en_GB -f ISO-8859-1 en_GB
OpenOffice
I installed OpenOffice from the July 2002 issue of Linux Format. I was spurred
into action by an article in the November 2002 issue.
I wanted all users to be able to access the packages,
so I attempted the "network" install (mentioned in the article).
Actually that's not quite true - I tried a single user installation
first then changed my mind after working out what I really wanted. This
involved trying the OpenOffice de-installation process which worked
fine.
I found I had to download installation instructions
from the OpenOffice site as
the article was not detailed enough for my liking.
Having installed the packages once, the setup stage for
each user is quick as it installs only "local" settings in the user's
home directory, together with an "soffice" executable that's just a
symlink to the network version.
Unlike other office packages, OpenOffice starts a
single
process which can invoke word processor, spreadsheet, and so on, as you
require them. By default, a word processor appears. If you do want to
start with a spreadsheet, say, a command line argument can be used.
OpenOffice also supplies the following
wrapper scripts to supply the appropriate argument for each
application:
| Wrapper |
Application |
| swriter |
Word processor |
| scalc |
Spreadsheet |
| simpress |
Slide presentation |
| sdraw |
Graphics |
| smath |
Formula editor |
| sweb |
Web page editor |
|