Fedora Linux

9 common mistakes in shell programming

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:17:43 GMT

I think, that all of you, who started to work with Unixes not so long ago face problems when using shell or trying to program in shell. Many of Unix novices dislike writing shell scripts, because it takes too much time from them, scripts does not work as expected, because shell 'is so dumb and it's impossible to write complex things in it'.

I wish to prove, that this is wrong and it's possible to learn shell programming very quick – in 7-10 days.

Thus I'm starting an online training for all Unix novices.

I've collected some questions which novices give about unix shell and categorized them. So let's go on and see, what usually makes difficulties for most of unix shell starters:

Misunderstanding now shell does command line expansion, how command arguments are processed and substituted in correct places. In fact shell does not do any magic when it executes command. It just replaces all things to be substituted (variables, command substitution, file patterns) and then executes resulting command.
Misunderstanding about how variable expansion works – why does it eat spaces some time, some time does not work at all and etc.
Novices practically do not use backtricks to do command substitution, which can be very powerful tool in their hands.
Some misconcepts about how input and output redirection works (<, >, >>). Usually novices do not ever heard of here-in documents(<<), which can make your shell scripts much more beatiful and compact.
Novices experience fear or difficulties with building long shell pipes (|). Usually you can write very long shell pipe, taking up several lines, which process data or texts and provide exactly that result, what you need.
Sed and awk – when I was learning unix, they kept me in awe, because it was too messy and difficult to understand how sed and awk programs work. After some time learning them, I finally got that it's quite easy – but manual pages wrote in a difficult way. It's better to learn sed and awk by examples – which makes learning much more easier, that reading man page.
Some great misunderstanding is tied with test command ([ ]), because most of the novices believe, that it is some 'magical' shell command, which is interpreted by the shell itself when used in if/while operators. Usually you can do a lot of funny tricks with it, it you understand how it works.
Most of the people experience difficulties with using xargs command in their scripts and command pipes. In fact xargs is very powerful tool too and it should be learned and actively used, when it's necessary – usually when you process huge amounts of data.
while operator may be used in a tricky way to parse input data and process them.

If you are really interested in improving your shell programming skills, you are welcome to join my free online training on unix shell programming. It will start 13 or 14 April and number of places is really limited.

Please see more details and subscribe for the training on the following page http://community.livejournal.com/bin_sh_en/348.html

I hope YOU will participate in that training, so GO ON and SUBSCRIBE NOW, while it's free.

With best regards,
Gaspar Chilingarov

Problems with dual-display in Fedora 7

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:52:09 GMT

I was given a second LCD monitor this week so I bought a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro (AGP) card, thinking it wouldn't be so painful to get it working.

I know it can feed both screens because (more by accident than design) I've seen output on both ... just not in the way I want to, but at least I know there's not a hardware problem.

My problem is that I can't get it to work how I want, which is to have one screen (the left one) as the primary screen and the second as either a separate or extended desktop - I'll settle for either now.

That website only has drivers for Windows XP and Vista, so I found the unofficial ATI Linux Driver Wiki - Fedora 7 installation guide, which led me to the official ATI Proprietary Linux Driver page, which in turn led me to a page where I could download Catalyst, which I did.

I tried running Catalyst and selected "Install Driver 8.471 on X.Org 7.1 and later releases" which, although it didn't report any problems, didn't work properly - it gave me an error along the lines of "No ATI graphics driver is installed, or the ATI driver is not functioning properly."

OK, so then I found a promising page entitled How to Install Video Drivers on Fedora 7. I skipped the nVidia section and went straight to "How to install ATI drivers". (I did download their version of the installer but it was older than the one I already had (from the ATI/AMD site) so I stuck with the first one.)

Building the drivers seems to have me stuck in a loop (me, not the machine!) because of the dependencies. I'm currently running with kernel-2.6.23.15-80.fc7; kernel-headers and kernel-devel match that version number.

I installed kernel-module-ATI-fglrx-2.6.23.15-80.fc7-8.471-1.f7.i386.rpm, ATI-fglrx-8.471-1.f7.i386.rpm and ATI-fglrx-control-center-8.471-1.f7.i386.rpm but ATI-fglrx-devel-8.471-1.f7.i386.rpm gave an error: Failed dependencies: /usr/include/GL is needed by ATI-fglrx-devel-8.471-1.f7.i386

Checking what needed to be installed to fix that dependency (yum whatprovides /usr/include/GL) returned 2 packages, but when I tried to install them (yum install xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-devel.i386 xorg-x11-proto-devel.i386) I was told Error: conflicts with ATI-fglrx ... but that's what I installed (from Catalyst) just a minute ago! Now I'm stumped.

I ran yum clean all ; yum update just to make sure everything was up to date (which I do most weekends) and it was. Oh, for completeness, the repositories I use are Adobe (http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/linux/i386/), Fedora (http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch), Updates (http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f$releasever&arch=$basearch), Livna (http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/) and Macromedia (http://macromedia.rediris.es/rpm/).

So, I guess my questions are has anyone got this card working with Fedora, and/or any suggestions as to how to move forward?

[Cross-posted to linux]

Trying to Create a Router...

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:57:42 GMT

Yea, I'm afraid I'm becoming a pain in the butt, but I'm not sure where else to go.

First of all, thanks to those who mentioned that it looked like the cable modem was doing NAT all by itself which is why I couldn't connect to my test-bed server from outside my test area. I have absolutely no idea how its doing that or how to do anything about it for now. I've had to drop that project in favor of another one.

I am trying to create a simple router in Linux - Fedora Core 7 to be exact. At this point it will function as a router only (because I can't even get that far). There is no NAT anywhere in this scenario. To the best of my knowledge SELINUX is turned off, as is all firewalls.

Eth1 points to the outside world and is configured like so:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
DEVICE=eth1
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=65.118.148.195
NETMASK=255.255.255.224
GATEWAY=65.118.148.195

Eth0 points to the inside LAN and is configured like so:
DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=65.118.148.194
NETMASK=255.255.255.224
GATEWAY=65.118.148.193

I need a routing table that looks like this:
>route
Dest Gateway Genmask Flags iface
65.118.148.192 * 255.255.255.224 U eth1
65.118.148.192 * 255.255.255.224 U eth1
127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0. U lo
default 65.118.148.193 0.0.0.0 UG eth0

No matter what I do, I end up with a routing table that looks like this:
>route
Dest Gateway Genmask Flags iface
65.118.148.192 * 255.255.255.224 U eth0
65.118.148.192 * 255.255.255.224 U eth1
169.254.0.0 * 255.255.0.0 U eth1
default 65.118.148.195 0.0.0.0 UG eth1

Now the orginal server had IPtables active for routing. All the examples I've been able to find use NAT, so I've not been able to translate them to my environment, nor did copying over the iptables-save.txt file and applying that work for the new server.

I have been trying to do the connection via route. Putting things in /etc/sysconfig/static-route didn't work. The file ended up looking like this:

eth0 net 0.0.0.0 netmask 0.0.0.0 gw 65.118.148.193
eth1 net 65.118.148.192 netmask 255.255.255.224 gw 0.0.0.0

Since the file was seemingly ignored, its gone now and the bad routing table I have put up above doesn't use it.

I then figured out that maybe I had to put text in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/route-eth0 and route-eth1, but I couldn't figure out the syntax of the text to put into those files.

So, I've been at this 2.5 days rather solidly. No go at this point.

Any thoughts?

Networking...

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:10:59 GMT

Hello folks.

First I want to thank everyone for the help they tried to give with regard to booting with FSCKing. The problem ended up working itself out in time as the disk did indeed FSCK itself. The problem seemed to be the RAID controller was not wired into the disk activity LED light and so I didn't have a way of knowing, from where I was, that there was anything going on.

shutdown -fr does work in these instances, except that I was trying to come up from a cold boot. Still haven't found a flag to come up from a cold boot without FSCKing the disk.

In any event, I'd like to bounce this issue off you folks. Its more of a general networking issue, but it ultimately relates to a Fedora server.

Basically I'm trying to set up httpd and SSH services on a test-bed Fedora server at my place. Locally these services seem to be working in that I can do "http://192.168.1.104/index.html" from another computer on the LAN, and I can also SSH from that computer to the Fedora server from within the LAN.

Its outside the LAN that I'm having problems. In the end, unfortunately, I think it may have something to do with the configuration of the NETGEAR router.

As I said things seem to be working in LAN, but I'm not sure why things are not working out of LAN.

I have, at this point, shut off the Fedora firewall. I have, via the router, set up port forwarding for all the needed service. In general, for "normal stuff," the router is working for outgoing things.

There are things in the router config that are frankly confusing me, however. The LAN IP setup makes sense. It is currently set to the 192.168.1.0 subnet (Yes, I know. Default. Don't bug me about that yet. :-) ). I've reserved the 192.168.1.120-250 for a DHCP pool. The server in question is 192.168.1.104, as I mentioned.

What really confuses me is that when I go to the basic settings of the router it says that the Internet IP address, received from the ISP is 192.168.251.199. That makes no sense to me since that block is not routable. I can't see how I would have gotten that from my ISP. However, if I go http://192.168.251.199/index.html, my web site works. I've not tried that URL from outside the home LAN because, since its not a routeable address I'd can think of no reason why it would work.

Now my outside WAN IP address lists as 65.110.148.55 via whatismyip.com. This makes sense to me. Its routable and it lists as my IP address when I SSH in to external accounts. Now if I try, from an external computer to http://65.110.148.55/index.html it can't find it. If I try to ssh to 65.110.148.55 it times out.

I'm stuck as to what I am missing.

Any thoughts?

a question about wallpaper inbetween KDM and KDE desktop during Ksplash

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 05:32:20 GMT

I'm trying to create a pretty cohesive theme on this machine and i don't get it.

I have a KDM theme.. it loads properly, i log in, my ksplash comes up.. but the background (not of ksplash itself) is a default blue color. And then KDE pops up with my wallpaper of choice.

How do i change the color of the background/wallpaper as Ksplash is displaying?

I've done this before but no idea how i did it. And it's not always just a default color.. (speaking my memory here, not recently). I've seen old wallpapers show up during this window of time i'm speaking up during the DE boot process.

anyone have any ideas?

I've asked on a multitude of other boards and not so much as gotten a response, any help would be appreciated.

btw i'm using Fedora 7, but this has happened to me in Ubuntu and openSuse as well.. i just never tried this hard to resolve it.

Booting WITHOUT FSCKing...

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:22:58 GMT

I'm in a situation where I need to boot a system, but not have FSCK check the disks on the way up. I seem to remember there should have been a flag to do this.

Do I need to put "nofsck" in the boot parameters?

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 15:19:24 GMT

hi all, i'm running fedora 8 on my laptop, and i don't like how it kind of sits for a bit while searching for a wired ethernet connection on boot. it reports this as a failed bootup item, but . . . come on, it's a laptop. it's not always going to be plugged in to via cat 5 cable.

is there any kind of setting that i can change so that it won't sit like this before progressing with the rest of the boot sequence? thanks.

atrpms package removal

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:47:00 GMT

This took me a while to work out and I figured it might be useful to others:

rpm -qa --qf "[%{NAME} - %{VENDOR}\n]" | grep ATrpms.net | sort | less

No Flash with Opera 9.23 on Fedora FC7

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:39:56 GMT

I'm not sure whether it was when I upgraded to Opera 9.23 (from 9.something) or when I updated the Flash plugin (now on flash-plugin.i386 0:9.0.115.0-release), but I can't see any Flash content.

I've followed the Opera instructions, checked the Flash test page, and I still can't see video on YouTube or more importantly HomestarRunner!

I found some discussions which strongly suggested using the gnash plugin instead of Flash but that's no better.

Any suggestions? (Those sites are fine with Firefox or Flock but I want to continue using Opera if I can.)

[Environment recap: Opera 9.23 with Flash plugin 9.0.115 or Gnash plugin 8.1-5 running on Fedora Core 7.]

Cross-posted to opera_browser

Secure Incoming Communications...

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 03:38:34 GMT

I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts from fellow Fedorians.

I'm using Fedora 6 and I'm looking to secure incoming communications. Truth to tell, I don't think that Fedora has much to do with this per se.

Right now, as it stands, our way of securing incoming communications is filtering by IP address. This works to a limited degree, depending on where our remote and home users are. I investigated doing the same filtering via MAC addresses, which I thought would have been great, but, of course, found that MAC addresses are filtered by routers to that the MAC address your firewall sees is the MAC address of the last upstream router.

I'm currently investigating OpenVPN as a general solution with regard to our folks laptops away from the office. While I am trying to deal with the myriad details of an implementation like that, it does seem a good way to go. I'd appreciate comments from you good folks either aye or nay with regard to this.

Those are my thoughts with regard to employee laptops. I also have one situation where one of our people goes to a facility where he has use their computers. Here the OpenVPN solution won't work, of course, because I can't install the software on these computers. Here I'm thinking about One Time Passwords, but I have to say I don't know much about an installation of this type. Does anyone have any pointers, especially with regard to Fedora?

ru-bacula

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:07:49 GMT

Приглашаем во вновь созданную группу.
http://groups.google.com/group/ru-bacula?hl=ru

Описание группы:

Bacula - сетевое резервное копирование, архивирование и восстановление данных.
http://www.bacula.org/

missing arrow keys with evdev (multiseat) [FIXED]

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 22:13:40 GMT

Using the evdev driver with Fedora 7 seems to stop the arrow keys working, while they were fine with Fedora Core 5 (although the uk layout does work this time).

It is driving me crazy.

Does anyone have an idea what is wrong?!

FIXED NOW:

Changed:
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
To:
Option "XkbModel" "evdev"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"

(Thanks to /usr/bin/diff and the files in this post.)

Missing Public Key for cups-libs

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 11:20:03 GMT

So FC6 wanted to do some updates last night. Okay, I sez, go to it, then the updater claims it can't verify the new cups-lib, because the public key isn't installed.

'kay. I looked around. Can't find it on cups.org. Yum passes back the error:

Public key for cups-libs-1.2.12-1.fc6.i386.rpm is not installed

and I was wondering if anyone else has this issue (pretty vanilla install of FC6) or knows just where to find the public key?

How to backup large file

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 03:12:30 GMT

I backup my main file using dump and then move them to an external HDD. Trouble is one of the dump files is big -- 4452096000 bytes (4.2Gb) according to ls. I can't write it to the external drive because it's shared with my wife's Winblows PC, hence it's formatted as FAT32 and that means a 4Gb file limit.

Apart from getting another external HDD and formatting for Linux only, any suggestions how I can backup my filesystem to an external medium (HDD or DVD)?

PCI Wireless Card

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 05:59:04 GMT

Hi,

I am looking to set up a desktop system I have with Linux. I unfortinatly am on a wireless network and need a suggestion for a good pci wireless card. I would like to use Fedora since that is what I have been useing recently but am open to other distros.

Thanks.

Display and NV drivers not working.

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:10:43 GMT

Hello,

I just installed Fedora 7 from Fedora core 6. New install.
It detected the video card just fine.
The display detected as a Generic CRT 640X480.
I tried to change it to Generic LCD 1024X768 but that did not thing to fix my video problems. I am only able to get 800X600 resolution.
Also when I type in the terminal

glxinfo | grep rendering

It tells me direct rendering: No

I have seen other peoples post on this asking for help, but I have not found an answer to these people's problems yet.
I have tried to install the drivers from Nvidia, but I have not been successful with that yet.
I am trying to install the drivers with the Xserver off, and as Root.

Chuck E Cheese and Linux

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 04:16:15 GMT

Thought this was rather amusing. Chuck E Cheese, which you've never been to it, is a Pizza and Family entertainment places that's all over the place. Well they have this picture taking booth that prints out the picture like someone sketched it. Well I'm sitting there with my daughter and wife eating pizza and notice people were standing at it waiting for it to reboot. I laughed out loud at this because it was booting Red Hat Linux.

adding routes automaticly

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:21:11 GMT

Hello,
I've never used linux, but desided to install it. Everything goes normally, but I still can't understand how to automatize the process of adding routes. I'm getting tired of adding them manually after each system start up. How to make it run automaticly, and how to make them be accessible for each user? (Example: I enter the system with non-root user, and have all needed routes added)

Default fonts

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 05:44:59 GMT

Hello,

I just got a new machine at my work, which is at a uni. (The implication here is that I don't have root access, although I can request stuff to be added or changed. But I can't easily tweak some stuff myself.) I'm dualbooting Windows and Fedora Core 6.

Immediately after opening up Firefox (1.5.0.8), I can't help thinking how badly the fonts are rendering. Stuff just doesn't seem smooth enough and it's just not as easy to read as it should be.

Firefox's default font seems to be DejaVu LGC Sans Condensed. What font configurations do you guys have? Anything you recommend?

cheers!

Logitech MX3000 keyboard and MX600 mouse

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 20:33:37 GMT

Does anyone know which settings I should use to get the most out of my Logitech MX3000 cordless keyboard and MX600 cordless mouse? I'm using the standard settings that I had with my original (vanilla) kbd+mouse, so my browser (Opera* on Fedora FC5) doesn't respond to the forward/back or zoom buttons.

*p.s. Firefox behaves the same way (i.e. doesn't respond to those buttons) so it's not just a browser issue.

[Cross-posted to linux - please comment there.]

Linux F/OSS Gaming Roundup 2006

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:17:38 GMT

Linux F/OSS Gaming Roundup 2006
by Hal Canary

I wanted to test out the response time of my new LCD monitor, so I downloaded some games for my Fedora Core 6 system.

All of the games I am reviewing are:

1) Free/Open Source Software, including the game data files. This is a fine distinction that I should explain. For example, Id Software has released the game engines for Doom and Quakes 1, 2, and 3 under the General Public License, but they did not release the game content under a new license. Qfusion is a derivative of the Quake2 engine that is FOSS, but the game Warsaw that makes use of the Qfusion engine comes with proprietary game content, so Warsaw as a whole is not F/OSS.

2) In the Fedora Extras repository. This guarantees that the game will run on my system and if I have a problem, I can file a bug against it at bugzilla.redhat.com. Installation is this easy:

sudo yum install supertux supertuxkart \
     ppracer prboom freedoom xpilot-ng

Supertux 0.1.3

Supertux is a game patterned after Super Mario Brothers. If I had a joystick similar to the NES controller (like maybe a Gravis (I used to have one, but I fried it while hacking my USB controller card.)), I'd probably be happier with this game. Or if it was 1986. Then I'd be super psyched about this game and every day all summer I'd go over to Wilson's house and play against him until I learned the game. This game is somewhat monotonous. Setting it in Antarctica limits the color pallet.

SuperTuxkart 0.2

Super Tux Kart is a homage to Mario Kart. It features a similar split-screen multiplayer mode. It might be fun to plug two or four USB gamepads into my USB hub and play with friends.

PPRacer 0.3.1

PlanetPenguin Racer is the current version of what used to be called Tux Racer 0.6.1, with a new development team. Not much has changed. It works perfectly on any accelerated video card, including my Radeon 9200+F/OSS driver.

If you've never played it, this is a downhill racing game. It's somewhat fun and fairly challenging.

PrBoom v2.4.7 / FreeDoom 0.5

PrBoom is the engine, derived from the Doom engine. FreeDoom is the F/OSS game content for that engine. The graphics for this aren't bad on my Radeon 9200 (with the free radeon driver) as long as you enable the openGL mode.

prboom -vidmode gl

Caveat: they aren't bad compared to, say the original Doom running on my 386 back in the day. They are primitive compared to quake3 or doom3 but I have yet to get those games to run under the F/OSS driver for my video card. But prboom -vidmode gl is almost as good as Quake1.

I hate to say it, but even after all these years this is a fun game. Who doesn't like to kill demons with a shotgun?

xpilot-ng-sdl 4.7.2

XPilot is a fun online multiplayer game. If you played SubSpace on Windows, you've seen a similar game. It's a Multiplayer Online Third Person Shooter (MOTPS). XPilot came out in 1991, had primitive graphics, and only worked on Unix/X11. In 1997, SubSpace was written for Windows: it had much better graphics and had been written from scratch. In 2000, the XPilot NG project was started to update the XPilot graphics system to use SDL/OpenGL (the cross-platform equivalent of DirectDraw/Direct3D).

Other

There are two multiplayer games I want to test out at some point in the future: OpenArena and Tremulous, both based on the GPLed Quake3 engine. Tremulous can be downloaded from Fedora Extras. OpenArena cannot yet.

For the Comments

Are there any other Fedora Core/Extras games you would recommend to me?

--
Copyright 2006 Hal Canary
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this entire document without royalty provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved. Please let me know if you do.

Fedora Core 6 display problem.

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:45:57 GMT

Fedora Core 6 display problem.
How would someone install Fedora on a system and tell it to use a specific video card?
When I install in text mode, all is good until I start gnome or KDE. At that time I get a ultra wide screen and I cannot click on anything to continue.
When I install in graphical mode, I get the same screen half way though the installation.
I notice on two computers, that it loads the S3 video driver.
How can I force an Intel or Nvidia driver to load? I have tried several different computers.
I have tried to use "linux display=1024x756" and smaller resolutions.
Text mode is great, no KDE or Gnome and the system runs great, but as soon as X Windows, KDE or Gnome start, a blind man can see more than I can.

Thank you for your help.

nfs wtf

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 19:57:55 GMT

I think I have found an answer (but not an explanation) to my previous nfs strife.

If the hostname of the fedora box is set to "machine.office.company.com" then it times out.

If the hostname is set to "machine.company.com", "machine" or "machine.somethingelse.company.com" then it works!

In the first instance, the appropriate DNS HOST and PTR records did exist.

Is anyone able to suggest a reason for the observed behaviour? Is it a fedora bug or an sfu bug? Or an error in my configuration?

Phantom drive with FC5

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 17:44:59 GMT

I've been running Fedora FC5 for some time (pretty much since it was released) but I've finally decided it's time to get to the bottom of some error messages:

Nov 5 12:32:03 animal kernel: hde: status error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
Nov 5 12:32:03 animal kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Nov 5 12:32:03 animal kernel: hde: drive not ready for command
Nov 5 12:32:08 animal kernel: hde: status timeout: status=0xd8 { Busy }
Nov 5 12:32:08 animal kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Nov 5 12:32:08 animal kernel: hde: drive not ready for command
Nov 5 12:32:08 animal kernel: hde: ATAPI reset complete

The odd thing is I don't have anything attached to /dev/hde - I have one IDE drive (/dev/hda), one SATA drive (/dev/sda) and one DVD writer, but that auto-mounts as /media/cdrom (or something like that).

Any idea why my system thinks there's an "hde" and what I can do to stop it looking for it?

[Cross-posted to linux]

Intro and failure at Flash 7

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:44:12 GMT

Heylo, I'm yet another new user to the world of Linux. I'm on a recent install of Fedora Core 5 on a moderately up-to-date Pentium 4 box, using GNOME, and this is the very first time I've ever attempted a non Windows OS. I consider myself a somewhat advanced user when it comes to Windows and I have a decent learning curve. I decided to learn Linux when I randomly recieved a free (albiet complete with a little fried hardware) computer at about the same time that my frustration of Windows becoming more and more like AOL on every release peaked last week. So I decided to dive right in, set up a Linux box (Fedora at the reccomendation of a friend who swear by it and occasionally at it), and see how long it takes before I realize what I complete noob I am.
To this point I've managed to solve most of my problems with the operating system on my own by doing silly things like checking documentation, readme files, and instructions. The chronicles of my bashing my head against this operating system can be found in my journal, but there's not too much wildly interesting stuff to read just yet. The major problem I've run into and have been unable to solve on my own is Flash 7. I can't get it to mix with FireFox properly. I've run Pup and updated everything about Fedora I could find to update, and I've successfully installed Java. It would seem I've successfully installed Flash because I've followed the directions thoroughly (even in a root session so it would install system-wide), and if I go into Firefox's plugins folder, the Flash file is there. I'm working with the most up to date versions of everything I could find being the first thing I learned in Windows was update frequently before someone else finds your bugs for you.
So.. Everything is up to date, I've run through the Flash install process in a root session as well as in a user session, and the Flash file is present in my FireFox plugins folder. However Flash does not work or is not detected, or something, and every time I run across a page that needs it FireFox asks if I'd like to install the missing plugin of Flash. Oh, I've logged into session, logged out, and rebooted entirely. So could someone please teach me the secret FireFox-Flashplayer club handshake and secret code so I can play too?