Last week I helped a friend configure wireless driver on his brand new HP Compaq Notebook PC. Fedora 9 X86_64 did not detect the wireless device automatically.

The first thing I did was list all PCI devices on the laptop PC.

At the end of the output I noticed

PackageKit is intended to be a great feature introduced in Fedora 9. Certainly not for me and like minded. It is rather an annoyance. It tries to update software on the computer without giving much information. It launches itself when you login to gnome and starts doing package management mysteriously. It corrupted my RPM database today. I had to rebuild the RPM database to get yum working again. Yum would simply hang and the yum processes never finished. They kept on running in the background. I thought disabling it would be a good idea.

How to play music and video(MP3, MPEG, AVI, FLV and other multimedia files) in Fedora 8?

Due to patent encumbrance codecs required to play some proprietary file formats are not shipped with Fedora 8. Codecs are the programs that encode and decode digital data. These codecs are available in the livna repository for Fedora 8. You will be able to play mpeg, mp3, avi, flv and other commonly used file formats for music and video. You will require an Internet connection to download and install these packages on your computer.

If you are using Fedora 7 proceed to this blog post.

Let us get started. Are you ready?

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.

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

• 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

• Have you used Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS before and looking for equivalent commands in Ubuntu?
• Are you a Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS user looking for configuration files location in Ubuntu?
• Vice-versa?

If you answered yes to any of the above, read on. I am trying to help you start using Ubuntu without much Googling.

This post provides a brief introduction on available Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS equivalent commands in Ubuntu. This will also be handy for Ubuntu users that have delved into the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS world.

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.

So, you've got a tarball and want to know how to extract it, huh?

Some background info about tar: In the olden days, people primarily used tape devices to store and retrieve data. Tape drives still exist and folks use them to archive data. The name tar is derived from from tape archive. The name of the program that creates and extracts tar files also has the same name - tar. Tarball refers to the archive file. They usually have the extension filename.tar.gz.

Extracting tar files with extension .tar.gz: To extract a tar.gz file use the below command. Assuming you have a tarball by name archived-file.tar.gz:

• z - filter the archive through gzip. gzip aka GNU Zip is a program used to compress files. When you use -z option, gzip will be used in tandem with tar.
• x - extract files from an archive. Pretty self explanatory, huh?
• v - verbosely list files processed. The -v option prints information on the screen when the files are being extracted from the archive. If you do not use this option, tar still extracts files silently.
• f - use archive file. This option tells tar to extract from a file. The -f switch is required.

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:

FTP is an acronym that stands for File Transfer Protocol. As the name suggests, FTP is used to transfer data from one computer to another over Internet or through a network. By default, FTP servers listen on port 21 for incoming connections from FTP clients.

An FTP client is a program that allows you to easily move files from your computer to FTP server.

For example, FTP can used to upload Web page files. Those files are normally created on a author's computer and then uploaded to a Web server.