Centos 6

[viking60]

As one of the major distros out there I was wondering how Centos 6 worked, so I downloaded the Centos 6-3 minimal.iso and fired it up in my VB.
The download was fast because it is a small file.
The installation process was very clean and simple and basically prompted for the root setup.

In my case it was important to hit the Network button to set the automatic DHCPCD thing because the internet connection would not work otherwise.
And that was about it - super fast and super clean... time to reboot.
.....
And there I was with a CLI login. I am used to that from Arch and you really do not need a DE for a server, but I want to test this as a desktop distro so I need to install a DE. I logged in as root (remember we did not create a user?) and ran an update

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yum update

No problem.
Centos uses good ol' Gnome2 as a standard desktop so this command will fix the entire enchilada:

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yum groupinstall basic-desktop desktop-platform x11 fonts

Next you need to edit your /etc/inittab and change the line

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id:3:initdefault:

to

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id:5:initdefault:

And that is about it - time to reboot again...
And everything starts like it should and the systems automatically prompts me to set up a regular user - nice!
So I set myself up and voila I am running RedHat with Gnome!

Now the gnome here is very basic and I have a hard time setting the resolution bigger that 1024x768 but I will get around to it.
I want to use sudo so I instal it:
su
password

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yum install sudo

After that the good old:

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EDITOR=nano visudo

works just fine and I add my data just under root as described here
So far so good..

The first strange thing I discovered in Centos is that there is no gksu! This is bad for the autorun.sh in Vboxadditions because the skript uses gksu.
That explains why it is hard to set the resolution/make vboxadditions work!

[viking60]

Ok we cannot have Centos without setting up a lamp server so I installed the web-server Mysql and PHP.
It is what it is and it takes some time but by RTFM I managed quite well.
As always I end up scratching my head why I cannot access phpmyadmin.
An in this case I had to edit /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf
and basically change Allow from 127.0.0.1 to ALL.
Centos comes with SELinux and that has a long and distinguished story of fubaring Apache servers so i edited /etc/selinux/config

and changed the line

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SELINUX=enforcing

to

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SELINUX=disabled

Then I had to put a blowfish secret passphrase into /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php
Basically I go here and generate one and put it in the correct place.
So Now I am ready to log in to phpmyadmin.
It all works well and life is good, but it is complaining a bit about mcrypt so I will have to check the config there.....
But since I am lazy I thought I could cut some turns with webmin so I added the webmin repo like this:

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cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/webmin.repo << EOF
> [Webmin]
> name=Webmin Distribution Neutral
> #baseurl=http://download.webmin.com/download/yum
> mirrorlist=http://download.webmin.com/download/yum/mirrorlist
> enabled=1
> EOF


And the key like this:

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rpm --import http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc

and then simply I did a

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yum install webmin

Testing it in the browser with http://localhost:10000 and it works perfectly fine!

[viking60]

OK server stuff is a Centos forte. Apache, PHP.Mysql and Phpmyadmin work just fine. And Webmin is nicely integrated with its own Yum repo.

As a server it is a bit more rocky to install than Debian. as I recall it, but maybe it is worth the extra read. We all know what RedHat stands for in the server market; world domination!

Now lemme see if I can squeeze some groovy tunes out of this box...
I have added the rpmforge repo and I did successfully install the flash plugin, so I went to Youtube and played this video

And it played nicely until the system froze and got un-responsive. Well that could be a VB thing or a flash thing or a coincidence. So I restarted the system fired up Firefox and enjoyed that nice music until it froze again.

Okydocky let us try music without flash then.....
Trying to install Exaile music player and it complains about some lacking gnome-python modules.....So much for Yum fixing all the dependencies..
In these cases you can try using --skip-broken yum tells me, so I dance away and do a:

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yum install exaile --skip-broken

Problem it did install something but it skiped exaile Not going to come much music from that...
But yum is not out of advice because I can also try running rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest so it tells me.

But I sure do not know how to use it In short I am having major trouble in finding a music/media player for Centos.

[viking60]

Berserks don't give up so I want to try VLC. For this I need to add yeat another repo as root:

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rpm -Uvh http://dl.atrpms.net/el6-x86_64/atrpms/stable/atrpms-repo-6-5.el6.x86_64.rpm

And then I enable the repo and install VLC in one operation:

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yum --enablerepo=atrpms-testing install vlc

Lots of files installed there; now let us see if we can make some noize...

[rolf]

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$ man rpm
..
-a, --all
Query all installed packages.
..
VERIFY OPTIONS
The general form of an rpm verify command is

rpm {-V|--verify} [select-options] [verify-options]

Verifying a package compares information about the installed files in the package with information about
the files taken from the package metadata stored in the rpm database. Among other things, verifying compares the size, MD5 sum,permissions, type, owner and group of each file. Any discrepancies are displayed. Files that were not installed from the package, for example, documentation files excluded on
installation using the "--excludedocs" option, will be silently ignored.

The package selection options are the same as for package querying (including package manifest files as
arguments). Other options unique to verify mode are:
..
--nodigest
Don't verify package or header digests when reading.
--nofiles
Don't verify any attributes of package files.
..
The format of the output is a string of 8 characters, a possible attribute marker:

c %config configuration file.
d %doc documentation file.
g %ghost file (i.e. the file contents are not included in the package payload).
l %license license file.
r %readme readme file.

from the package header, followed by the file name. Each of the 8 characters denotes the result of a comparison of attribute(s) of the file to the value of those attribute(s) recorded in the database. A single
"." (period) means the test passed, while a single "?" (question mark) indicates the test could not be
performed (e.g. file permissions prevent reading). Otherwise, the (mnemonically emBoldened) character
denotes failure of the corresponding --verify test:

S file Size differs
M Mode differs (includes permissions and file type)
5 MD5 sum differs
D Device major/minor number mismatch
L readLink(2) path mismatch
U User ownership differs
G Group ownership differs
T mTime differs

..


AFAIK, the --verify option can tell you if something has changed between the rpm package and how it's installed on your disk. This can be normal, such as changes to a configuration file you make, or might reveal some sort of corruption or unwanted fiddling. I only use it as a preliminary check, usually against one package I'm having trouble with, not -a, and don't have a very profound understanding of its usage.


rpm is pretty complex, isn't it?

[viking60]

Ah thanks great stuff! + link you might want to follow


While you were delivering your Guru-stuff I did a

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yum install mencoder

Because my VLC did not play much - and now it all works!
Just to be clear - There never was a problem with sounds in Centos 6 - this commotion was only to get a media player.
And the VB tends to freeze when I play (youtube)videos. This may not be a Centos thing at all since I have experienced that freezing with other distros too. So I kind of am willing to accept that as a VB thing.

So here we are then with a server that works perfectly fine and a Centos media center
Here are the repos I have activated so far to make the mircale happen:

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[thomas@centos ~]$ yum repolist
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * Webmin: webmin.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk
 * base: ftp.uninett.no
 * extras: ftp.uninett.no
 * rpmforge: mirror.awanti.com
 * updates: ftp.uninett.no
repo id            repo name                                              status
Webmin             Webmin Distribution Neutral                              118
atrpms             Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 - x86_64 - ATrpms           2 219
base               CentOS-6 - Base                                        6 346
extras             CentOS-6 - Extras                                          4
rpmforge           RHEL 6 - RPMforge.net - dag                            4 391
updates            CentOS-6 - Updates                                       123
repolist: 13 201
[thomas@centos ~]$


[viking60]

I have some interesting discoveris regarding playing youtubes:
In firefox it plays well until FF freezes, so I added the Google repo and installed chromium. Interesting there the videos play at double speed so the artists sound like Mikey Mouse
It is confirmed: Chromium is the fastest Browser! It plays a 3 minute song in one minute
I am seriously suspecting flash here....