Follow me as I struggle with rogue technology, insane programmers, and impossible math questions in a battle to the death.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Add the terminal to the desktop right click menu in Fedora or Ubuntu

When you right click the mouse in Red Hat Enterprise, you get the terminal in your menu. I've always wondered why you didn't get that feature in default in the default Gnome for Fedora or Ubuntu

It turns out it's easy to add in at the terminal in either.

In Fedora:

sudo yum install nautilus-open-terminal

In Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal

Then reboot X.

Found on the Fedora Forums.

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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Fedora conquered

I finally ended up installing Fedora using the text based installer and it worked. It's also possible that the problem with the computer in the optics lab was due to errors in the install discs I was using since it said there were errors, but I find that unlikely since the second set of discs reported errors as well. I think that more likely the media tester and the graphical anaconda installer both have some serious issues.

In retrospect, I should have just used Ubuntu. I only chose Fedora because that's what the the people in the lab were accustomed to.

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Monday, September 29, 2008

Fedora is driving me insane

I've been trying to install Fedora Core 9 on an ancient computer in the Optics Lab at school and I'm experiencing all sorts of craziness. When the graphical installer gets to the end it says:

No kernel packages were installed on your system. Your boot loader configuration will not be changed.

What on earth could cause a linux distro to NOT install the kernel? It boggles the mind.

I've had this problem since last week and even posted on the Fedora Forums, so far to no avail.

Today I got the smart idea to run the media test on the cds I was using to install Fedora. The very first disc got registered as bad by 12% in. When I saw Fedora complaining about the disc I thought that it could either the ISO or the cd itself. I downloaded JSummer and ran it against all the ISOs and as far as I could tell they were all good. At this point I figured it had to be the cd and not the ISO so I tried burning it again, but the second cd failed in exactly the same place, so I started downloading a new copy of the 600+ meg ISO. By then I had to leave, tomorrow I'll burn the new download of the ISO and try it again.

Tonight when I got home I downloaded all the ISOs off bittorrent. I burned the discs and started an install on an old box that's been collecting dust in the corner. Before I started the installation I ran an SHA1SUM on the ISOs and they all checked out. When I ran the media check on the first disc it got all the way to 100% and then it said the disc had errors! I decided I didn't care and went ahead with installing anyways, but at some point during the installation of libraries from disc2 it bombed out on me.

So, either I downloaded bad ISOs both at work and at home and yet they still managed to get past SHA1SUM and burn the discs correctly, or, all the cds I'm using are bad. I find either of these possibilities unlikely. I think it's more like that the Fedora Core 9 graphical installer is just bad for anything but the latest and greatest computer.

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