Shady Goings On

Don’t worry! You can set a new one if you have sudo set up on your system.
See my post about setting up sudo on your linux box if you haven’t already…

sudo allows a regular user to perform single commands as root (or another user), this can be used to set a new password for root and is also safer than using su on it’s own for general admin tasks.

To set a new password for root::
[shady@localhost ~]$ sudo passwd
Password:
Changing password for user root.
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
Password updated

[craig@localhost ~]$
Well done! Now you can be root again!

Since I installed Fedora on my pc I haven’t had any audio, a shame but I’m not too bothered.

Any way today I thought I’d have a stab at getting it working. The audio comes through an on-board chipset. by Realtek. Thankfully they have the Linux drivers available on their site (see others) and was a simple download/install/reboot job and I now have audio.

Next I’m looking at how I can play my Windows games on Linux.
The main methods seem to be either using Winex or Cedega

A handy feature of Fedora 7 (and most Linux’s) is to be able to run a command as admin (root). In the past I’ve done this by using su but it’s not really a good idea for security reasons.
Using sudo will just run the one command as root, so it’s a lot safer, plus you give your own password - not roots. Here’s how I set it up.

Open a terminal session (look in the menu under Applications -> System Tools).
Then type:

[craig@localhost ~]$ su
Password:
[root@localhost craig]# /usr/sbin/visudo

You will now be in a vi-like editor.
Find the line like root ALL=(ALL) ALL and make a copy of that line just below it.
Substitute your user name for root.
Type [esc]:wq (that’s the escape key followed by colon then wq then enter)

You will now be back at roots command prompt, type exit to return to your own command prompt:
[root@localhost craig]# exit
[craig@localhost ~]$ whoami
craig
[craig@localhost ~]$
As you can see above, the whoami command prints the userid is use.
You can now use this to test out your newly configured sudo!

[craig@localhost ~]$ whoami
craig
[craig@localhost ~]$ sudo whoami
Password:
root
[craig@localhost ~]$

Note that the password entered is your own - not roots!

Yesterday Google released it’s popular Windows tool Google Desktop for Linux, see their blog about it here.

I was looking for exactly this type of program, what a coincidence that Google should create one just in time!

There is already one similar product (that I know of) called Beagle, I haven’t tried it yet but I’ll try them both out now.

Well the results are back and I scored 82%, it seems quite high but the results page tells me that about 40% of students scored over 85%, so I could have done better.

I got 4 questions wrong, one was a stupid mistake: I ticked the wrong box in the multiple choice answer form, even though I checked it twice - next time I’ll check it 3 times! The other three were tricky and were more down to interpretation than simply knowing the answer

The next assignment is out now and looks even trickier so I have to really pay attention to the wording of the questions.

After more investigation last night it seems the root of the problem my be a hardware issue rather than anything to do with Windows, I also had some issues with Linux.

I left the box powered off at the mains over night and this morning I was able to boot both Linux and Windows. It seems to be a heat issue, perhaps caused by the processor-intensive DVD conversion I mentioned earlier. It may also be some BIOS quirk or ACPI (power management) problem.

Hopefully no permanent damage has occurred, time will tell.