Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov

More on FC6

Oct 29th, 2006 | Hardware, Linux, OS, Technology | No Comments

Ok, I am finally in the mood of posting some more info on my experience with fedora core 6.

First of all I would like tell one more time that I feel very impressed with new visual effects provided my Compiz. I have seen the 3d desktop effects before, but here it is much faster (almost no impacts on CPU) and there more effects with windows and others.

I have found a very nice post which shows how to set up nvidia drivers, install some missing parts of software so you can play MP3 files and more. In addition to this post, I would like to note that the described way of installing nvidia drivers didn’t work for me. There was a strange thing with pre-requisite of kernel RPM. It was trying to install the same version of kernel I already had and thus yum was giving me errors. What I did is I manually installed the package needed providing the –replace-files and –replacepkgs arguments to rpm command. After that the kmod-nvidia and xorg-x11-drivers-nvidia were installed successfully. Another note here is that apart of setting up additional options in /etc/X11/xorg.conf as described in the provided post I had to add a missing modes option to show which video resolutions are to be used.

Another thing I noticed is that compiz doesn’t work with KDE by default (provided you install KDE). There is a workaround though: create a bin directory in your home, create a shell script (something like compiz-KDE.sh) with the next content:

#!/bin/bash

compiz –replace gconf decoration transset wobbly fade minimize cube rotate &

gnome-window-decorator &

don’t forget to chmod +x the file. Then create a desktop shortcut to this script move the shortcut to ~/.kde/Autostart directory.

Basically, this will do the following: when KDE starts, it will run the script as autostart. The script will run compiz and tell it to replace the current VM. Then the script will run the gnome-window-decorator since the native KDE windows decorations are not supported. The only problem here is that KDE desktop pager doesn’t work properly.

Another thing is that if you don’t like the standard keyboard shortcuts used with compiz, you can change them with gconf-editor (First you need to get gconf-editor by running yum install gconf-editor). Open the gconf-editor and go to apps->compiz->plugins. Then just select a plugin you are interested to change keys for and do the needed changes :)

Finally, you might have problems with flash plugin for firefox. The problem is that flash graphics is displayed, but all text is missing. For this, you need to apply actions described at Macromedia FAQ #11 as follows:

mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/
ln -s /etc/X11/fs/config /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config

After that, just restart the firefox :)

If you have a laptop with Intel Wireless card (like mine - HP nx6110), then you need to do the same operations you did in FC5 - update the firmware by installing the ipw2200-firmware package (yum install ipw2200-firmware).
I think that this is it for the moment. If you have any questions and want some more info - just let me know :)

FC6 - WOW

Oct 26th, 2006 | Hardware, Linux, OS, Technology | No Comments

I just have installed the Fedora Core 6 on my laptop and the only thing I can tell at the moment is: WOW !!!

Since the first this after installing a new distro for me is to see new fancy stuff - I was just amazed by all those nice desktop effects I found out. And the best thing is they do work very fast even on my generic video card ;)

Fedora Core 6

Oct 24th, 2006 | Linux, OS, Technology | No Comments

Waiting for FC6 to come out. I was waiting for it too long and it was announced to be delayed a couple of times (a heart attack almost got me at each of this announcements). I really like Fedora distro and I always install a new major release as soon as possible.

While waiting, I was looking around and it seems that they have changed a lot in this release. I think I will post my small review here when I get and install it :)

FreeNX and MS Active Directory

Sep 14th, 2006 | Directory Service, Linux, NX, Networking, OS, Software, Squid, Technology | No Comments

I have managed to set up FreeNX to work quite smoothly with MS Active Directory authentication. Here are few steps to be done (assuming Fedora Core 5 as a FreeNX server):

1. Make the linux server where FreeNX will be installed an AD member

For this we will need samba and kerberos stuff which are either installed or easily retrieved with yum. So I will not bother describing on how to get packages :) If some configs mentioned below are missing, then obviously you are missing some packages
In /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[global]
netbios name = myhost
realm = mydomain.int
workgroup = mydomain
security = ADS
password server = pdc.mydomain.int bdc.mydomain.int
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=16384 SO_SNDBUF=16384
idmap uid = 10000-20000
winbind enum users = yes
winbind uid = 10000-20000
winbind gid = 10000-20000
winbind separator = +
winbind use default domain = yes
encrypt passwords = yes
log level = 3 passdb:5 auth:10 winbind:5
template shell = /bin/bash

In /etc/krb5.conf

[libdefaults]
ticket_lifetime = 600
default_realm = mydomain.int
default_tkt_enctypes = des3-hmac-sha1 des-cbc-crc
default_tgs_enctypes = des3-hmac-sha1 des-cbc-crc
dns_lookup_realm = false
dns_lookup_kdc = false

[realms]
mydomain.int = {
kdc = pdc.mydomain.int:88
kdc = bdc.mydomain.int:88
admin_server = pdc.mydomain.int:749
default_domain = mydomain.int
}

[domain_realm]
.mydomain.int = pdc.mydomain.int
mydomain.int = pdc.mydomain.int

[kdc]
profile = /etc/krb5kdc/kdc.conf

[logging]
kdc = FILE:/var/log/krb5kdc.log
admin_server = FILE:/var/log/kadmin.log
default = FILE:/var/log/krb5lib.log

This is enough to be a member of AD. Just make sure that smbd and winbindd are running. To join the domain, use net join ads command with required options (see net help join for more info)

2. Make domain users be able to login to linux server with SSH

I suppose there are many ways to do this, but I went with modifying the /etc/pam.d/ssh the next way

#%PAM-1.0
#auth include system-auth
#account required pam_nologin.so
#account include system-auth
#password include system-auth

auth required /lib/security/pam_securetty.so
auth required /lib/security/pam_nologin.so
auth sufficient /lib/security/pam_winbind.so
auth required /lib/security/pam_unix.so use_first_pass shadow nullok
account sufficient /lib/security/pam_winbind.so
account required pam_nologin.so
account include system-auth
session include system-auth
session required pam_loginuid.so

and now make system look for AD users by modifying the /etc/nsswitch.conf to contain the next lines:

passwd: files winbind
shadow: files
group: files winbind

#hosts: db files nisplus nis DNS
hosts: files DNS winbind
From now on the system will allow domain users to login with SSH.

3. Make it work

Now just install freenx:

# yum install freenx

Optionally make it work with default nomachine keys (so that clients will have less configurations to do) by reconfiguring freenx:

# nxsetup –override –install –setup-nomachine-key –clean –purge)

start nxserver

# nxserver –start

create home for desired domain users

# mkdir /home/mydomain/myusername

and finally allow the user to use FreeNX

# nxserver –adduser mydomain+myusername

4. Troubleshooting
All problems are seen in log files under /var/log

5. Other benefits

The way the samba is configured now, it is very easy to add SQUID with NTLM auth ;) If you are interested in this - just let me know in the comments - I will post the samples of config files.