Tech Chorus

Everybody has their own personal preferences in all walks of life. Desktop computer is no different. Every time I install Fedora, I immediately change few settings. The default settings in some applications may not appeal to every body. They certainly don't, for me at least. I will not discuss configuring network, Internet, printer, audio and video drivers in this post because they are more of necessity than personal preferences. Here goes the list.

Nautilus: The first time you open nautilus(aka File Manager), you will notice each folder opening in different windows. Click on your home folder icon on the desktop and click on few other folders. Your desktop looks clumsy with a whole slew of unwanted windows. The fix:

1. Open File Management Preferences. Click System>Preferences>Personal>File Management. You can also open it by launching a nautilus window and then clicking on Edit and then Preferences.
2. Click the Behavior tab on the File Management Preferences window.
3. Select "Single click to open items" 
4. Select "Always open in browser windows"
5. Click close

In this article you will learn how to create ZIP archives, list, test and extract them. After reading this article you will know how to manipulate ZIP archives on GNU/Linux systems. We already know that zip works well with tar from the Using TAR Command post. Let us discuss how to work with zip and unzip.

How to create a ZIP archive?
I believe learning by example is the easiest way. Let me walk you through an example straightaway. Let us assume we have two files - abc.txt and xyz.txt in the current working directory.

In my previous post we discussed how to create and extract ZIP archives. This post will teach you how to password protect your ZIP archives. While creating a ZIP archive, optionally, you can encrypt its contents using a password. Take advantage of this option to secure your ZIP archives. This tutorial is short and easy to learn.

How to password protect ZIP archives?
Let us assume we have two text files - abc.txt and xyz.txt in the present working directory.

[sudheer@localhost zip]$ ls
abc.txt  xyz.txt

Let us now create newarchive.zip and encrypt its contents with a password. The syntax is:

zip archivefilename file1, file2, ... -e

• zip is the command
• archivefilename is the name of the ZIP archive to be created
• file, file2, ... are list of files to be included in the archive
• -e is the option that tells ZIP to encrypt the contents using a password typed in the terminal in response to a prompt

When choosing the MySQL field type to store dates, date is the preferred type. MySQL stores dates in the format yyyy-mm-dd which is seldom used to print dates on web pages. As a PHP developer you will eventually come across a need to convert the MySQL date format into dd-mm-yyyy or mm-dd-yyyy or another format. This post tells you how you can do that in your PHP programs.

Let us create a hypothetical situation to demonstrate the program.

Create the MySQL table.

CREATE TABLE dates (
  name varchar(30),
  birthday date 
) 

Issue: The laptop PC has the PS/2 Synaptics TouchPad. The tap function or the double click function does not work out of the box on a fresh Fedora 9 install.

Solution: Add psmouse.proto=imps to the grub configuration file

Step 1: Open the grub configuration from a text editor
vi /etc/grub.conf
 
Step 2: Append psmouse.proto=imps to the kernel line
I am pasting the information from my computer. It may vary slightly on your computer.
 
Before: kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.10-86.fc9.i686 ro root=UUID=c1c4deb3-cc72-4ce6-b76f-4c4a8d61b61e rhgb quiet 

You want to connect to a wireless network and you can't figure out how to get the Network Manager icon to appear on the GNOME Panel. How frustrating.

Don't worry, here's how you can sort it out.

You have to make sure that

1. Network Manager service is started and
2. You have enabled the Network Manager Applet

Below are the steps you need to follow to get Network Manger icon to appear on the GNOME Panel

Step 1: Install Network Manager if not done already
yum install NetworkManager
 
Step 2: Start the Network Manager service

We discussed how to install LAMP in one of our previous articles. Some of you may be wondering how to create databases, users and tables on your newly installed MySQL server. This blog post introduces the preliminary steps to work with your new LAMP server.

We are going to learn the following:

• Changing MySQL user password
• Creating databases
• Deleting databases
• Creating MySQL user accounts
• Deleting MySQL user accounts

LAMP is an acronym which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The letter P also stands for Perl and Python programming languages. LAMP is a free software stack which powers, primarily, web servers. Most GNU/Linux distributions bundle these packages in the install media and repositories. Let us take a look at how to install LAMP using Fedora. I will restrict the P in LAMP to PHP only for this article. Perl and Python fans, bear with me.

While installing Fedora you can choose to install "Web Sever" which contains these packages. You can install them later also. Let me walk you through the actual steps to get LAMP working on your computer. I assume you are running Fedora 8 on your computer.

1. Launch the terminal by clicking

Applications>System Tools>Terminal

Do you want to copy your pidgin settings from one computer to another? Do you want to fiddle with your pidgin settings? You are likely to look for a directory called .pdigin.

Pidgin stores its files in ~/.purple

Copy that directory to copy your pidgin settings on the new computer.

The problem: You fire a KDE application, the application requires a password to continue, the KWallet window pops up asking for its password. You try your frequently used passwords. None of them work.

This happened to me when I tried to open a password protected PDF document with Okular. I knew I never set the KWallet password on this computer.

The solution: To reset your KWallet password, delete the kwalllet directory.
Type this in your command line:

rm -rf ~/.kde/share/apps/kwallet/