An eye on simpleLinux GNU/Linux

I am closely following the development of this interesting project from Malaysia known as simpleLinux GNU/Linux  , it has interesting news on its development page about their forthcoming release of the version known as SAKURA which is based on Tinycore . The news are exciting and I am patiently waiting what they will release soon as they are promising .

How to Change Mirror for PCLinuxOS LO manager from default to a faster one

PCLinuxOS uses LO manager script for downloading libreoffice directly from download.documentfoundation.org and then installs it for you . Somehow the default mirror for libreoffice has a snail walk like speed and it becomes painful to install libreoffice from it .


I followed these steps to change the mirror to a faster one for me .

1 ) Open the script file called lomanager located in /usr/bin as a superuser mode in a text editor

2 ) Located line 93 and change it from default to this one as shown here

Default line 93

httpsource="http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/3.4.3/rpm/"$sysarchdir"/"  # http-source

Change it to

httpsource="http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/tdf/libreoffice/stable/3.4.3/rpm/"$sysarchdir"/"  # http-source

Save , exit and reload LO manager.

You can choose mirror that works faster for you as in my case ftp.heanet.ie always works perfect for me . 

Multi-mixed repositories on Fuduntu

Running multiple repositories on a distribution is sometimes problematic and ends up in conflicts regarding different packages . But for those packages which are missing from Fuduntu`s native repositories due to legal matters you can enable third party repositories at your own risk and expertise level of how to handle problems that might arise at some stage due to the third part packages.

ATrpms is one such repository that I enabled to get packages I needed and missing from Fuduntu`s native repositories.

This is what I did :

1 ) Opened /etc/yum.conf file as super-user in a text editor ( leafpad : my favourite ! ) and copied these lines into it

• [atrpms]
  name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
  baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
  gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
  gpgcheck=1

So it looks like as below

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever
keepcache=0
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
plugins=1
installonly_limit=3
color=never

#  This is the default, if you make this bigger yum won't see if the metadata
# is newer on the remote and so you'll "gain" the bandwidth of not having to
# download the new metadata and "pay" for it by yum not having correct
# information.
#  It is esp. important, to have correct metadata, for distributions like
# Fedora which don't keep old packages around. If you don't like this checking
# interupting your command line usage, it's much better to have something
# manually check the metadata once an hour (yum-updatesd will do this).
# metadata_expire=90m

# PUT YOUR REPOS HERE OR IN separate files named file.repo
# in /etc/yum.repos.d

[atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1

Save and exit

2 )

Executed this command to refresh packages list

saleem@home-pc ~ $ sudo yum check-update

3 ) Installed the packages I needed as

saleem@home-pc ~ $ sudo yum install rar libdvdcss libdvdcss2

4 ) Disabled  ATrpms from Yumex which is very easy by unchecking it from the list .

It is important to keep in mind that if you have rpmfusion repository enabled also then the packages from it and ATrpms will conflict with each other and you will  have to manually diable rpmfusion repository for time being . It is also important not to keep ATrpms repository enabled all the times but only when a package is needed from this repository .