Tag Archives: Fedora

Changing rpmbuild working directory

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Usually, rpmbuild related variables are set in ~/.rpmmacros. To change the current working directory, one could simply alter the default settings: This would change rpmbuild’s working directory on a per-user basis. Sometimes it’s quite convenient to keep the default setting and change the working directory on a per-project basis: To use the current directory as working directory, one could invoke… Read more »

Bootstrapping a Fedora 15 rootserver

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In certain situations where you don’t have physical access to your server it can be quite helpful to know how to install a new os without physical media like CD/DVD/USB or pxe. This brief example shows you, how to bootstrap a rootserver (that of course already has a linux os installed that you can access through ssh) to install Fedora… Read more »

Shutting down kvm guest on host shutdown

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Per default, kvm instances are suspended when the host OS shuts down. This is down through an init scripot (libvirt-guests) that comes out of the box with Fedora and RHEL 6. To change the guests’ shutdown behaviour, have a look at /etc/sysconfig/libvirt-guests. If you would like to send an ACPI system_powerdown event to the guest (i.e. a regular shutdown) instead… Read more »

Installing yum build dependencies with yum-builddep

After fiddling around with rpmbuild for quite a while, I stumbled upon yum-builddep. It’s basically a tool to install all packages required to rebuild an RPM package from the SRPM. So if you want to install all “BuildRequires” mentioned in the spec file of a package, invoke The source RPM for the specified package must be available in the yum… Read more »

Display current git branch in bash

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Sometimes it’s very useful to know which git branch you are working on right from the command prompt. There are many solutions out there, but most of them include python and some awk or grep magic which can time a serious amount of time when you cd into a reasonably large git tree. But you can also take advantage of… Read more »

Granting access to X server with xhost

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Every X server internally manages an ACL (Access Control List) of those hosts, that are allowed to connect. The server only authorizes connections from X clients, whose host is on that list and rejects access to all others. The xhost program is used to add or revert access to the X server for specified hosts. It’s also possible to specify… Read more »

Dealing with .rpmnew and .rpmsave files

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When an upgrade includes changes to a default configuration file, the package will write either a .rpmnew or a .rpmsave file instead of overwriting the configuration file on your system. Which file a package creates is up to the discretion of the package maintainer. From “Dealing with .rpmnew and .rpmsave files” By Bruce Byfield: An .rpmnew file contains the new… Read more »

Cleaning up locally-installed RPMs with package-cleanup

Sometimes, packages you never actually use get installed as dependency by yum (or even during initial installation by anaconda). package-cleanup is a great tool that helps you find packages not required by other packages. It it part of the yum-utils package which can easily be pulled with yum: 1. Find and review “unused” packages You can find packages not required… Read more »