Display hardware information
To display information about your computer’s hardware from the Fedora live CD open a
Terminal window (from the main menu, select Applications System Tools Terminal).
Then, from the Terminal window, type the following command:
Check hardware
$ /sbin/lspci -vv | less
Press the spacebar to page through the list of PCI devices on your computer (press q to exit).
Note the model names and numbers of any hardware that doesn’t seem to be working. Next
plug in any USB devices you want to use (USB flash drives, cameras, Webcams, and so on)
and type the following:
$ /sbin/lsusb
If you would like a more graphical way of displaying hardware information, and you have an
active Internet connection, you can install the Hardware Browser to your running Fedora live
CD. To install Hardware Browser, type the following:
# su -
# yum install hwbrowser
Video card — To check your video card, open the Display Settings window (select
System Display). Select the Hardware tab to see your video card type and monitor. If
you prefer to use the command line to check what video card was detected, type the
following from a Terminal window:
# grep Chipset /var/log/Xorg.0.log
You can try other hardware devices as well by opening whatever applications you need to
access the device (a Web browser, a file manager, and so on). Many USB devices (digital
cameras, pen drives, and so on) will be detected and often displayed on the desktop. Running
the lsmod and modinfo commands can help you determine which devices were loaded for
those modules. Here are a few other quick commands for checking out your computer:
• cat /proc/interrupts — Shows what interrupts are in use.
• cat /proc/cpuinfo — Shows CPU information.
• cat /proc/bus/usb/devices — Shows attached and detected USB devices.
• /sbin/lspci — Shows listing of PCI devices found (-vv for more verbose info).
• cat /proc/cmdline — See command line options the system booted with.
• cat /proc/ioports — Shows ioports in use and the devices using them.
• less /var/log/messages — Page through the log of system start-up messages.
The following procedure describes how to do those things.
1. Check partitions. To determine which partition contains your Windows file system, use
the fdisk command as follows:
# fdisk -l
2. Get NTFS support. If you have a VFAT file system, you can skip this step. If you have
an NTFS file system, and NTFS support is not already installed, you can install the
necessary drivers and tools to be able to mount and use your NTFS file system in Linux
by running the following yum command as root user from a Terminal window:
# yum install ntfsprogs ntfs-3g
Assuming you have an active connection to the Internet, this will install the NTFS
support you need to access your NTFS partitions from Linux.
3. Mount Windows file system. You can access your Windows file system from Linux
using the mount command. Assuming your Windows partition is an NTFS file system on
/dev/sda1 (as in the example above), you could type the following to create the
Windows mount point and mount the file system there:
# mkdir /mnt/win
# chmod 755 /mnt/win
# mount -oro -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/win
# chmod 755 /mnt/win
# ls /mnt/win
To see how each partition is being used on your current system, type the following:
# df –hChecking system activity
In addition to being a multiuser operating system, Linux is also a multitasking system.
Multitasking means that many programs can be running at the same time. An instance of a
running program is referred to as a process. Linux provides tools for listing running processes,
monitoring system usage, and stopping (or killing) processes when necessary.
The most common utility for checking running processes is the ps command. With ps, you
can see which programs are running, the resources they are using, and who is running them.
The following is an example of the ps command:
$ ps au
To set an environment variable temporarily, you can simply type a variable name and assign it
to a value. Here is an example:
$ AB=/usr/dog/contagious/ringbearer/grind/ ; export AB
This example causes a long directory path to be assigned to the AB variable. The export AB
command says to export the value to the shell so that it can be propagated to other shells you
may open. With AB set, you can go to the directory by typing the following:
$ cd $AB
$ export XYZ=/home/xyz/bin
You can override the value of any environment variable. This can be temporary by simply
typing the new value. Or you can add the new export line to your $HOME/.bashrc file. One
useful variable to update is PATH. Here is an example:
$ export PATH=$PATH:/home/xyz/bin
There are several ways to place an active program in the background. One mentioned earlier is
to add an ampersand (&) to the end of a command line. Another way is to use the at command
to run commands in a way in which they are not connected to the shell. (See Chapter 12 for
more information about the at command.)
To stop a running command and put it in the background, press Ctrl+z. After the command is
stopped, you can either bring it to the foreground to run (the fg command) or start it running
in the background (the bg command).
Starting background processes
If you have programs that you want to run while you continue to work in the shell, you can
place the programs in the background. To place a program in the background at the time you
run the program, type an ampersand (&) at the end of the command line. For example:
$ find /usr > /tmp/allusrfiles &
To check the background commands, use
$jobs
Moving commands to the foreground and background
Continuing with the example, you can bring any of the commands on the jobs list to the
foreground. For example, to edit myfile again, type:
$ fg %1
You can skip the percent sign, %, if you wish. As a result, the vi command opens again, with
all text as it was when you stopped the vi job.
Type the following:
$ bg %5
After that, the job runs in the background. Its jobs entry appears as follows:
[5] Running nroff -man man4/* >/tmp/man4 &
Several configuration files support how your shell behaves. Some of the files are executed for
every user and every shell. Others are specific to the user who creates the configuration file.
Here are the files that are of interest to anyone using the bash shell in Linux:
• /etc/profile— This file sets up user environment information for every user. It is
executed when you first log in. This file provides values for your path, as well as setting
environment variables for such things as the location of your mailbox and the size of
your history files. Finally, /etc/profile gathers shell settings from configuration
files in the /etc/profile.d directory. Note that you can override all of these settings
in other start-up files.
• /etc/bashrc — By default, this file is executed for every user who runs the bash
shell, each time a bash shell is opened. It sets the default prompt and may add one or
more aliases. Values in this file can be overridden by information in each user’s
~/.bashrc file.
• ~/.bash_profile — This file is used by each user to enter information that is
specific to his own use of the shell. It is executed only once, when the user logs in. By
default, it sets a few environment variables and executes the user’s .bashrc file. You
can instead create a file named ~/.bash_login to serve the same purpose as
~/.bash_profile.
• ~/.bashrc — This file contains the information that is specific to your bash shells. It
is read when you log in and also each time you open a new bash shell. This is the best
location to add environment variables and aliases so that your shell picks them up.
• ~/.bash_logout — This file executes each time you log out (exit the last bash shell).
By default, it simply clears your screen.
To change the /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc files, you must be the root user. Users can
change the information in the $HOME/.bash_profile, $HOME/.bashrc, and
$HOME/.bash_logout files in their own home directories.
When you try to create a file, by default it is given the permission rw-r–r–. A directory is
given the permission rwxr-xr-x. These default values are determined by the value of
umask. Type umask to see what your umask value is. For example:
$ umask
022
The umask value represents the permissions that are not given on a new file. It masks the
permissions value of 666 for a file and 777 for a directory. The umask value of 022 results in
permission for a directory of 755 (rwxr-xr-x). That same umask results in a file permission
of 644 (rw-r–r–). (Execute permissions are off by default for regular files.) The default
umask value on Fedora is 0002.
TIP: Here’s a great tip for changing the permission for lots of files at once. Using the -R options of
chmod, you can change the permission for all of the files and directories within a directory structure at
once. For example, if you want to open permissions completely to all files and directories in the
/tmp/test directory, you can type the following:
$ chmod -R 777 /tmp/test
This command line runs chmod recursively (-R) for the /tmp/test directory, as well as any files or
directories that exist below that point in the file system (for example, /tmp/test/hat,
/tmp/test/hat/caps, and so on). All would be set to 777 (full read/write/execute permissions).
CAUTION: The -R option of chmod works best if you are opening permissions completely or adding
execute permission (as well as the appropriate read/write permission). The reason is that if you turn off
execute permission recursively, you close off your ability to change to any directory in that structure. For
example, chmod -R 644 /tmp/test turns off execute permission for the /tmp/test
directory, and then fails to change any files or directories below that point.
Third-party Fedora repositories — Because of licensing issues and patent questions,
some software that is popular to use with Fedora is not included in Fedora itself. For
example, commercial DVD movie and MP3 music players are not included in Fedora.
There are third-party Fedora repositories, however, that make that software available. In
particular, http://rpmforge.net, http://rpm.livna.org,
http://dag.wieers.com, http://freshrpms.net,
http://dribble.org.uk, and http://ATRPMs.net are popular third-party
repositiories. You can download packages directly from these sites or (preferably) set up
yum so you can download and install packages more easily.
The yum package is included on the Fedora DVD that comes with this book. To use yum to
install RPM software packages, follow these basic steps:
1. Determine the software package you want. Yum is delivered with the current Fedora
repository already configured. Use yum or PackageKit search tools (described later) to
find packages you want. Or add more repositories for yum to search to your
/etc/yum.conf file or /etc/yum.repos.d directory (also described later). (Many
software repositories offer RPM packages that automatically configure entries in the
yum.repos.d directory to point to those repositories.)
2. Configure yum. You have the option to configure the /etc/yum.conf file to set
options that relate to how you use your yum repositories, as described in the next section.
Then add any repositories, outside of Fedora , that you want to get packages from.
Several popular Fedora software repositories offer RPMs that install the information yum
needs to access those repositories.
3. Run yum. The yum command can be used to download and install any package from the
yum repository, including any packages the one you want depends on.
NOTE: You can clean out a lot of the data cached by yum with the command yum clean all.
Keep in mind that these repositories change over time, as new ones are added, some are
neglected and others are consolidated. The locations of repository directories and GPG keys
can change without notice. In fact, the RPM Fusion Project (http://rpmfusion.org) is
gearing up to merge the Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna repositories.
NOTE: I recommend only adding repositories you need. Adding unnecessary respositories can slow down
the performance of yum.
• Livna.org (http://rpm.livna.org) — Begun as an extension of the Fedora.us
site, rpm.livna.org contains RPM software packages that are outside of the Fedora
Project. This is a good place to get audio and video players (such as xine, mplayer,
ffmpeg, ogle, and so on) that may not meet the licensing requirements adhered to by Red
Hat, Inc. By installing the livna-release RPM, yum is configured to access the
rpm.livna.org repository. Look for the Fedora 10 livna-release RPM at the following
URL:
http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/
• Dag (http://dag.wieers.com/packages) — This site contains more than 45,000
RPMs from more than 2400 different projects. Currently, the repository has not been
updated for the latest Fedora release and there is no RPM to automatically set up access
that repository from yum. You can, however, look for Dag packages from the merged
RPMForge.net site.
• FreshRPMs (http://freshrpms.net) — Another site with a good selection of
high-quality RPMs is FreshRPMs.net. This site has a good selection of audio and video
players that are outside of the mainstream Fedora repositories. By installing the
freshrpms-release RPM, yum is configured to access the FreshRPMs repository.
• Dribble (http://dribble.org.uk) — RPM packages focused on fun software are
contained in the Dribble repository. Many of the packages are for games and console
game emulators. Look for a dribble-release package, which you can use to automatically
enable the Dribble repository for your Fedora system, at this URL:
http://dribble.org.uk/listrpms1.html
• ATRPMs (http://atrpms.net/dist/f10) — This site has RPMs containing
many drivers for video cards, wireless cards, and other hardware not included with
Fedora. If you want to try out a personal video recorder, this site also has RPMs for the
MythTV project. By installing the atrpms-package-config RPM, yum is configured to
access the ATRPMs.net repository. Look for the Fedora 10 atrpms-package-config RPM
at the following URL:
http://atrpms.net/dist/f10
• RPMforge.net (http://rpmforge.net) — This site represented a merge of three
separate repositories that offered Fedora RPM packages: http://dag.wieers.com,
http://freshrpms.net, and http://dries.ulyssis.org. This repository is
transitioning to the RPMrepo project (http://www.rpmrepo.org). During the
transition, RPMforge offers packages for RHEL and CentOS
(https://rpmrepo.org/RPMforge/Using).
Using yum for listing packages
Besides downloading and installing new RPM packages, yum can also be used to list available
packages as well as those that are already installed. The following examples illustrate some
uses of yum.
If you want to see a list of all packages that are available for download from the repositories
you have configured, type the following:
# yum list | less
Adding the less command to the end lets you scroll through the list of software (it could be
long, depending on which repositories you point to). If you try to install a package and it fails
with a message like package xyzpackage needs xyzfile (not provided), you
can check for packages that include the missing file using the provides option as follows:
# yum provides missingfile
With the provides option, yum will search your repositories for whatever file you enter
(instead of missingfile) and return the name of any packages it finds that include that file.
To search software descriptions in repositories for a particular string, use the search option.
For example, the following command searches for arcade in any package description (this
search will find some games):
# yum search arcade
Because yum packages are not automatically deleted after being installed, you might want to
go through on occasion and clean them out. To clear out packages from subdirectories of the
/var/cache/yum directory, type the following:
# yum clean packages
If you would like to check to see RPMs that were installed from repositories outside of the
main Fedora repository, you can do so using the list extras option. Here is an example:
# yum list extras
Getting manual updates with yum
At any time you can check whether updates are available for RPM packages installed on your
Fedora or RHEL system. Before doing updates with yum, however, you should always update
yum itself first:
# yum update yum
(including virus scanners like klamav and clamscan) are already available for any Linux
system that chooses to include them. (For more information refer to
http://www.clamav.net and http://klamav.sourceforge.net.)
Available emulation programs include:
• DOSBox (http://www.dosbox.com), for running many classic DOS applications
that won’t run on new computers. (Install it from Fedora by typing yum install
dosbox as root.)
• DOSEMU, also for running classic DOS applications. (Refer to the DOSEMU site at
http://dosemu.sourceforge.net for information. Select the Stable Releases link
to find RPM binaries of DOSEMU that run in Fedora.)
• WINE, which lets you run Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000,
Windows NT, and Windows XP binaries. Windows NT and XP programs are not as well
supported. However, because many Windows applications are written to work in earlier
Windows systems (why limit their market just to use a couple of XP-specific calls?),
they will run just fine in WINE as well. Check the documentation for the Windows
application. If it only requires Windows 95 or Windows 98, it will often run in WINE
Running Microsoft Windows applications in Linux
There are several promising approaches you can take to get your Windows applications to
work during a running Linux session. Here are a few of them:
• WINE — The WINE project (http://www.winehq.org) has been making great
strides in getting applications that were created for Microsoft Windows to run in Linux
and other operating systems. WINE is not really an emulator because it doesn’t emulate
the entire Windows operating system. Instead, because it implements Win32 application
programming interfaces (APIs) and Windows 3.x interfaces, the WINE project is more
of a “Windows compatibility layer.” WINE doesn’t require that Windows be installed. It
can, however, take advantage of Windows .dll files if you have some to add.
• Win4Lin — Win4Lin (http://www.win4lin.com) is a commercial product for
running a Windows system in Linux. You can try the software free for 14 days.
QEMU — QEMU (http://bellard.org/qemu/) is an open source project that
acts as a processor emulator. It can either emulate a full system or work in user mode
emulation (where it can be used to test processes compiled for different CPUs). In full
system emulation, QEMU can run a variety of operating systems, including Windows
3.11, 95, 98SE, ME, 2000, and possibly XP.
The rest of this section describes how to get and use WINE to run Windows applications in
Linux. To get WINE for your Fedora system, you can go to the following places:
• WINE in Fedora—As of Fedora 7, WINE became part of the main Fedora software
repository. The wine and wine-core packages are needed to use WINE. Additional
WINE support comes in the following packages: wine-capi (ISDN support), wine-cms
(color management), wine-esd (ESD sound support), wine-jack (JACK sound support),
wine-ldap (LDAP support), wine-nas (NAS sound support), wine-tools (useful Windows
utilities), and wine-twain (scanner support). Add wine-docs for further documentation or
wine-devel, for WINE development components.
• Cedega — A commercial version of WINE called Cedega (formerly called WineX) is
available from TransGaming, Inc. (http://www.transgaming.com). TransGaming
focuses on running Windows games in Linux, using WINE as its base. See Chapter 7 for
descriptions of Cedega.
• CodeWeavers — If you need Microsoft Office or Web browser plug-ins, CodeWeavers
(http://www.codeweavers.com) offers CrossOver Linux. Although CrossOver
Linux costs some money, it offers friendly interfaces for installing and managing the
Windows software. A 30-day free trial is available.
Running Windows Applications in WINE
For WINE to let you run Microsoft Windows applications, it needs to have an environment set
up that looks like a Microsoft Windows system. The following section takes you through the
steps of installing and configuring the wine RPM available from Fedora. You can install wine
over the Internet by typing the following:
# yum install wine wine-tools wine-core wine-docs
Although you only need the wine and wine-core packages, wine-tools offers some nice
graphical tools for working with your WINE environment and wine-docs offers some useful
documents in the /usr/share/doc/wine-docs* directory for developing software and
using WINE. The yum command line shown above will also pull in other wine packages from
the Fedora repository (such as those that include additional support for sound, scanners, and
other features mentioned earlier).
The location of the basic Microsoft Windows operating-system directories for WINE is the
$HOME/.wine/drive_c directory for each user, which looks like the C: drive to wine. The
$HOME/.wine directory is created automatically in your home directory the first you run
Wine Configuration (select Applications Other Wine Wine Configuration) or type the
winecfg command:
$ winecfg
This opens the Wine configuration window, where you can do most of your activities to add
applications, configure the operating system, and integrate with the desktop. Figure 5-5 shows
an example of the Wine configuration window.
Text processing with Groff
The nroff and troff text formatting commands were the first interfaces available for
producing typeset quality documents with the UNIX system. They aren’t editors; rather, they
are commands that you send your text through, with the result being formatted pages:
• nroff ⎯ Produces formatted plain text and includes the ability to do pagination,
indents, and text justification, as well as other features.
• troff ⎯ Produces typeset text, including everything nroff can do, plus the ability to
produce different fonts and spacing. The troff command also supports kerning.
The groff command is the front end for producing nroff/troff documentation. Because
Linux man pages are formatted and output in Groff, most of the examples here help you create
and print man pages with Groff.
People rarely use primitive nroff/troff markup. Instead, there are common macro
packages that simplify the creation of nroff/troff-formatted documents:
• man — The man macros are used to create Linux man pages. You can format a man
page using the -man option to the groff command.
• mm — The mm macros (memorandum macros) were created to produce memos, letters,
and technical white papers. This macro package includes macros for creating a table of
contents, lists of figures, references, and other features that are helpful for producing
technical documents. You can format an mm document using the -mm groff option
me — The me macros were popular for producing memos and technical papers on
Berkeley UNIX systems. Format an me document using the -me groff option
There are also a variety of graphics formats. Fedora and RHEL come with lots of utilities to
convert documents and graphics from one format to another. The following is a list of
document and graphics conversion utilities:
• dos2unix — Converts a DOS text file to a UNIX (Linux) text file. A reason you might
want to use this command is that DOS text files include double-character carriage
returns, whereas Linux (UNIX) text files have a single-character linefeed.
• fax2ps — Converts TIFF facsimile image files to a compressed PostScript format. The
PostScript output is optimized to send to a printer on a low-speed line. This format is
less efficient for images with a lot of black or continuous tones. (In those cases, tiff2ps
might be more effective.)
• fax2tiff — Converts fax data (Group 3 or Group 4) to a TIFF format. The output is
either low-resolution or medium-resolution TIFF format.
• gif2tiff — Converts a GIF (87) file to a TIFF format.
• man2html — Converts a man page to an HTML format.
• pal2rgb — Converts a TIFF image (palette color) to a full-color RGB image.
• pdf2dsc — Converts a PDF file to a PostScript document DSC file. The PostScript file
conforms to Adobe Document Structuring Conventions (DSC). The output enables
PostScript readers (such as Ghostview) to read the PDF file a page at a time.
• pdf2ps — Converts a PDF file to a PostScript file (level 2).
• pfb2pfa — Converts Type 1 PostScript font (binary MS-DOS ) to ASCII-readable.
• pk2bm — Converts a TeX pkfont font file to a bitmap (ASCII file).
• ppm2tiff — Converts a PPM image file to a TIFF format.
• ps2ascii — Converts PostScript or PDF files to ASCII text.
• ps2epsi — Converts a PostScript file to Encapsulated PostScript (EPSI). Some word
processing and graphic programs can read EPSI. Output is often low quality.
• ps2pdf — Converts a PostScript file to Portable Document Format (PDF).
• ps2pk — Converts a Type 1 PostScript font to a TeX pkfont.
• ras2tiff — Converts a Sun raster file to a TIFF format.
• tiff2bw — Converts an RGB or Palette color TIFF image to a grayscale TIFF image.
• tiff2ps — Converts a TIFF image to PostScript.
• unix2dos — Converts a UNIX (Linux) text file to a DOS text file.
Using text-based Web browsers
If you become a Linux administrator or power user, over time you will inevitably find yourself
working on a computer from a remote login or where there is no desktop GUI available. At
some point while you are in that state, you will probably want to check an HTML file or a
Web page. To solve the problem, Fedora and RHEL include several text-based Web browsers.
With text-based Web browsers, any HTML file available from the Web, your local file system,
or a computer where you’re remotely logged in can be accessed from your shell. There’s no
need to fire up your GUI or read pages of HTML markup if you just want to take a peek at the
contents of a Web page. Besides letting you call up Web pages, move around with those pages,
and follow links to other pages, some of these text-based browsers even display graphics right
in a Terminal window!
Which text-based browser you use is a matter of which you are more comfortable with.
Browsers that are available include:
• links — With links (elinks package), you can open a file or a URL, and then traverse
links from the pages you open. Use search forward (/string) and back (?string)
features to find text strings in pages. Use up and down arrows to go forward and back
among links. Then press Enter to go to the current link. Use the right and left arrow keys
to go forward and back among pages you have visited. Press Esc to see a menu bar of
features to select from.
While links doesn’t allow you to display images inline, if you select an image it will be
displayed on your desktop in gThumb image viewer (by default). You also have the
option of saving the image to your local hard disk.
lynx,w3m
Using Remote Login, Copy, and Execution
This section describes some features for allowing users to use resources across a network.
They are the telnet, ssh, ftp, and wget commands.
$ su
Password: ******
#
When you are prompted, type in the root user’s password. The prompt for the regular user ($)
will be changed to the super user prompt (#). At this point, you have full permission to run any
command and use any file on the system. However, one thing that the su command doesn’t do
when used this way is read in the root user’s environment. As a result, you may type a
command that you know is available and get the message “command not found.” To fix this
problem, you can use the su command with the dash (-) option instead, as follows:
$ su -
Password: ******
#
You still need to type the password, but after you do that, everything that normally happens at
login for the root user will happen after the su command is completed. Your current directory
will be root’s home directory (probably /root), and things like the root user’s PATH variable
will be used. If you became the root user by just typing su, rather than su -, you would not
have changed directories or the environment of the current login session.
TIP: When you become super user during someone else’s session, a common mistake is to leave files or
directories in the user’s directories that are owned by root. If you do this, be sure to use the chown or
chmod command to make the files and directories you modify open to the user that you want to own them.
Otherwise, you will probably get a phone call in a short time, asking you to come back and fix it.
You can also use the su command to become another user than root. For example, to have the
permissions of a user named chum, you could type the following:
$ su – chum
Even if you were root user before you typed this command, you would only have the
permission to open files and run programs that are available to chum. As root user, however,
after you type the su command to become another user, you don’t need a password to
continue. If you type that command as a regular user, you must type the new user’s password.
Besides opening a shell session using su (to run a bunch of commands as root), you can
instead just apply root permission to a single command or window. This approach is
considered more secure than leaving a shell open with root permission if you are just doing
one administrative task. For example:
• GUI admin tools — When you run GUI administration tools as a regular user, you are
usually prompted for the root password (as described the section “Using graphical
administration tools” later in this chapter). If a GUI administration tool fails and doesn’t
prompt you for a password, refer to the sidebar “Becoming Super User in X.”
• sudo command — You can run the visudo command to configure a user in
/etc/sudoers to be allowed to run administrative commands. After that is done, that
user can run the sudo command, followed by a single administrative command, to run
that command as root would. When that single command completes, the root permission
to run that command ends as well.
• Server Settings — This submenu accesses the following server configuration windows:
• Domain Name System (system-config-bind) — Create and configure zones if your
computer is acting as a DNS server.
• FTP (system-config-vsftpd) — Configure the vsftpd FTP server. You may also see this
under the System Tools menu under the Applications menu.
• HTTP (system-config-httpd) — Configure your computer as an Apache Web server.
You may also see this under the System Tools menu under the Applications menu.
• NFS (system-config-nfs) — Set up directories from your system to be shared with other
computers on your network using the NFS service.
• Authentication (authconfig-gtk) — Change how users are authenticated on your
system. Usually, Shadow Passwords and MD5 Passwords are selected. However, if your
network supports LDAP, Kerberos, SMB, NIS, or Hesiod authentication, you can select
to use any of those authentication types.
• Boot Loader (system-config-boot) — Configure the default boot entry and timeout
value (in seconds) for your GRUB boot loader.
• Date & Time (system-config-date) — Set the date and time or choose to have an NTP
server keep system time in sync. Figure 10-2 shows the Date/Time Properties window.
Display (system-config-display) — Change the settings for your X desktop, including
color depth and resolution for your display. You can also choose settings for your video
card and monitor.
• Firewall (system-config-firewall) — Configure your firewall to allow or deny services
to computers from the network.
• Keyboard (system-config-keyboard) — Choose the type of keyboard you are using,
based on language.
• Language (system-config-language) — Select the default language used for the system.
• Logical Volume Management (system-config-lvm) — Display and manage logical
volumes and related disk partitions.
• Network (system-config-network) — Manage your current network interfaces, as well
as add interfaces.
• Printing (system-config-printer) — Configure local and network printers.
• Root Password (system-config-rootpassword) — Change the root password.
• Samba (system-config-samba) — Configure Windows (SMB) file sharing. (To
configure other Samba features, you can use the SWAT window. SWAT is described in
Chapter 18.)
• Services (system-config-services) — Display and change which services are running on
your Fedora or RHEL system at different run levels.
• Users & Groups (system-config-users) — Lets you add, display, and change user and
group accounts for your Fedora or RHEL system
The following tools associated with system administration can be started from the System
Tools menu (Applications System Tools):
• Configuration Editor (gconf-editor) — Change settings associated with your GNOME
desktop system.
Disk Usage Analyzer (gnome-utils) — Displays and analyzes data on the use of your
computer’s hard disks.
• Hardware (hwbrowser) — View information about your hard drives, network devices,
sound cards, and other hardware. (Install the hwbrowser package to see this item.)
• Kickstart (system-config-kickstart) — Create a Kickstart configuration file that can be
used to install multiple Fedora or RHEL systems without user intervention.
• System Log (gnome-system-log) — Displays messages (by date) for log files stored in
the /var/log directory.
• System Monitor (frysk-gnome) — Shows information about running processes and
resource usage.
