Amazon.com not only has an outstanding collection of digital downloads in their music section (as covered by Martin in his insightful article “Amazon DRM Free MP3 Store“), they offer a completely cross-platform tool to make this process simple. The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a very simple (as well as required) tool that enables you to purchase music from Amazon.com and use it at your leisure. And since the files are DRM-free, you aren’t limited to putting them on one device and only one device. Instead you can download your music, burn it on to CD, copy it to your device, copy it to your friends device…what have you.

But in order to take advantage of this service, you MUST have the MP3 downloader installed. That’s where this tutorial comes into play. Here you will see how to install and use the Amazon MP3 Downloader on your Linux box.

Getting and installing

Point your browser to the download page and download the proper file for your distribution. As of this writing you have the choice of files for the following distributions:

• Ubuntu 8.10/9.04
• Debian 5
• Fedora 10
• OpenSuSE 11

Yes, Amazon is a bit behind the times, but you can get around this (at least on Ubuntu 9.10). Below you will find the steps to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader on Ubuntu 9.10.

Download the .deb file for Ubuntu.

Open up a terminal window and issue the command (from within the directory the file was saved) sudo dpkg -i amazonmp3.deb.

You will see a bunch of errors that will end with the warning: Errors were encountered while processing: amazonmp3.

• Issue the command sudo synaptic.
• You will get a warning that you have 1 broken package.
• Go to the Edit menu and select Fix Broken Packages.
• Click Apply in the new window.
• Close Synaptic when the packages have been fixed.

Using Amazon MP3 Downloader

There are two ways you can use the downloader. The first is to start up the application by clicking on Internet submenu of the Applications menu. From within this menu click on the Amazon MP3 Downloader entry.

When you first launch it your default web browser will start up with a “congratulations” page informing you that the Downloader will launch the next time you download a song from Amazon.com. You also will get the chance to download a free song. When you click on the button (on Amazon.com) to download a free song you will taken to the Amazon.com login page. Log in and then you will have the chance to download your free song.  Go ahead and download your free song.

What you will download is an .amz file that links to your download. Your browser, by default, will ask you what to do with the file. Go ahead and let the Amazon MP3 Downloader open that file and the download will being.

But where did that file go? The Downloader will, by default, download all files to ~/Music/Amazon MP3/. If you open up that directory (after you download your file) you will see the sub-directory containing your new download.

Figure 1

Another way to use the Downloader is to open up the tool and click the

Configuring the Downloader

There aren’t many options in the Downloader’s preference window.  From within that window you can click the button “Shop Amazon MP3 Store”. This will automatically open your default browser to the store.

In order to configure the tool click on the File menu and then select Preferences. From within this window you can configure the following:

• Download directory.
• Automatically check for updates.
• Proxy settings.

And that’s it. But what more would you need to configure for such a simple tool? The only option I always change, by default, is the Download Directory. I tend to change this to the directory used by my multimedia player so I don’t always have to add the new media to the player when I download something. Of course, in order to have this work you have to have your media player set up to automatically scan for new files.

Final thoughts

If you are a Linux user, and a purchaser of digital music, you should do yourself a favor and give the Amazon MP3 Downloader a try. If for another other reason, all Linux users should give it a go in order to show support for Amazon’s support for Linux.

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Upon installation you might not immediately notice the improvements. They are there and eventually these improvements will impress you. So instead of you having to wade through the distribution to witness these improvements, I will highlight those that will have certain impact on the user…whether directly or indirectly.

Bluetooth Support

You might be wondering why I am starting with a feature that isn’t used by everyone. The main reason is because this is the update that might excite users (at least mobile users) the most. With the latest release not only has bluetooth support matured, but tethering support has become almost foolproof! So now that laptop can tether to your cell via usb. But the improvements don’t end there. One of the issues, prior to 12, that plagued Linux bluetooth users was battery drain. Now bluetooth services are run “on demand” so that thirty seconds after the last bluetooth device was used, the service is suspended.

Network manager improvements

Another large step forward is with the Network Manager. Although this is the best of the best Linux network management tools, it still had room for improvement. What has been improved is:

• IpV6 support.
• Better shared, static, and system-wide connection support.
• Easy to configure bluetooth tethering

Out of the box tablet support

This will come to the surprise of anyone that has had to get tablet support working with Linux. Fedora 12 will work without having to muck around with xorg.conf! Tablet pressure sensitivity, handwriting recognition, and many more features will work, out of the box! This is big news for anyone who wants to use a tablet PC with Linux.

Updates improvements

For those of you who grow more and more frustrated with the constant barrage of updates with a Fedora distribution, you will be happy to know that Fedora has made some serious improvements. First RPM now uses XZ compression (instead of gzip), so packages are smaller. Also, the Presto plugin is now enabled by default. Presto uses RPM deltas which only use files that have changed. Between XZ and deltas file downloads are considerably smaller and updating is noticeably faster.

Bug reporting

One thing to keep in mind is that Fedora is a cutting edge distribution, so bug reporting should be a task most Fedora users follow through with. Fedora 12 makes this task very simple. When an application crashes data is automatically collected (without the user having to run back traces and such). With the help of the new Abrt tool, reporting bugs is about as simple as possible. The user doesn’t even have to go to Bugzilla to report a bug!

Graphics

There have been a number of improvements for graphics with Fedora 12. One of the more important updates is the experimental drivers that give 3D support for graphics cards without the use of proprietary drivers.

Clustered Samba

Another exciting addition is the GFS2 Fedora 12 Samba allows you to  have multiple instances of smbd across different nodes of a cluster. With this you can export a gfs2 filesystem through one or more nodes in the cluster. Clustered Samba will provide high-availablity of the Samba service.

Final thoughts

This is just a taste of what Fedora 12 is brining to the Linux table. There is a veritable plethora of new features available with Fedora 12. For a complete list, take a look at this Wiki page for an all encompassing  look at the feature list.

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In this article I will give you reasons why you should and should not make the jump to the most recent release of your distribution. Hopefully, after reading this you will either want to immediately download the latest ISO or you’ll close your browser and go about your merry business.

Ubuntu

The Ubuntu update enigma can be made very simple by looking at one unique feature: LTS. LTS means Long Term Support. Every 2 years Ubuntu releases a new LTS version. When a release benefits from LTS it means it will enjoy three years of support on the desktop and five years on the server. This means that for 3 and 5 years your installation will get free supported updates. With a non-LTS release you only get 18 months of free, supported updates. When dealing with a server this can make a huge difference.

Now it does get a little confusing here. Why? Because a new Ubuntu is released every six months. So in the period of two years you will have gone through four releases. So the question then becomes “Do you deal with one release for two years that will always have updates, or do you just update the latest greatest every six months?”

I think most will agree that updating every six months is a bit much. And “updating” is a tricky word to use as the experience with updating from one release to another is not always the same…especially when looking at a major release update (going from 8.10 to 9.04 for example).

If you are still unsure if you should update your machine the next question you should ask yourself (once you’ve managed to get beyond the LTS or non-LTS question) is to find out if there is a new technology that you must have. For example, the 9.04 release of Ubuntu offers the ext4 file system and a brand new desktop messaging system. For some the ext4 file system was enough to win them over. But for others, a brand new file system is something that will need to have the bugs worked out before they are ready to use.

So ultimately with Ubuntu you have to first ask yourself if you want Long Term Support. If you do want LTS then you will update every two years. If you do not want LTS then you need to go to the next question: Is there something in particular in the new release that you want? If so take the plunge. If not, then you will want to wait for either a new LTS release or a the secondary release of the major release (i.e. 9.10 instead of 9.04).

Fedora

If you are using Fedora you are using the cutting edge. And using the cutting edge comes with a price. Often upgrading the latest Fedora will result with broken features or hardware that won’t work. With the update from Fedora 10 to 11 there are a number of complaints arising from the community. In particular are: Intel graphics issues, Sound issues, Font issues, and more. And with Fedora updating is more of a crap shoot than any other distribution. But, as stated, you know you are living on the edge by choosing Fedora as your distribution. So if you are using Fedora the choice to upgrade should be a no-brainer.

Remember, Fedora Linux is the primary testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The more people use the lastest release, the more bug reports are sent in. The more bug reports that are sent in means RHEL will continue to improve. The more RHEL improves the more likely enterprises will make the move to Linux.

But even knowing that Fedora is a cutting edge distribution, when you have finally managed to get everything running exactly how you want it, the idea of breaking all of that hard work is something that will cause many a fanboy to hesitate. But where is the fun in that? Fedora is about testing, tinkering, and reporting.

User types

There are generally two types of Linux users: Those that like the latest-greatest, and those that are happy that everything works. If you are one of the former groups you know that nothing will stop you from updating your machine. You are probably anxiously awaiting for the second the new release hits the mirrors so you can burn it and install it.

If you are one of the latter users than you wait, patiently, to hear the reports of how a release is going. For those people I will give this advise: Subsribe to the users mailing list of your distribution of choice. By subscribing to that list you are going to know, right away, what the problems are for that new release. And most likely you will see something pass through that list that will sway you one way or the other.

Final thoughts

It’s not an easy choice. But it is one you will have to make at some point. And I realize that this choice is based on personal taste, time, resources, and knowledge. But the temptation to upgrade is a power to be rekoned with.  I have often succumbed to that temptation. And just where do I stand now? I am currently still using an older version of Elive Compiz because I know the latest version still has some bugs to be worked out (bugs that directly effect the very reason I use that particular distribution.) So I am in a holding pattern until the 2.0 release of my favorite distribution comes out.

What about you? What is your choice? Do you constantly live on the edge, or do you play it safe and stick with a release that works for as long as you can?

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Not only is Revisor easy to use, it’s easy to install. But you do need to make sure you have plenty of space available on your hard drive. You are, after all, creating a a complete iso image. Or, thanks to Revisor, you might be splitting a DVD image into a CD set.

Unfortunately Revisor hasn’t reached a point (and may never) where it will be a tool that will allow you to create your own flavor of Linux (it is a Fedora tool after all). But you can customize the packages you include in your respin. You can even customize the iso itself which requires making major changes to a kickstart file (that goes beyond the scope of this article.)  But for creating a LiveCD with the most updated packages and even user-specific packages. With all of that said, let’s see how Revisor is used.

Getting and installing

Since Revisor is a Fedora tool it will be in the Fedora repositories. Installing this tool is simple. Open up a terminal, su to the root user, and issue the following command:

yum install revisor

You will have to accept the installation of the dependencies before Revisor will install. Once it is installed you can start Revisor with the command revisor. You will also find a Revisor entry in the GNOME desktop menu Applications. Look in the System Tools sub menu and you will find an entry for Revisor.

Using Revisor

Revisor is basically a wizard that walks you through the steps of creating your iso. The first screen of the wizard is just a welcome screen. On this screen click Get Started to begin.

Figure 1

The next screen (see Figure 1) requires you to choose the type of media you will be creating. There are two types: Installation media and Live media. Within each media type you can select either DVD, CD, optical, or USB (NOTE: USB will be disabled because it is still experimental.)

Once you choose your media type click Forward to take you to the next screen of the wizard. The next

Figure 2

screen requires you to make configurations and add/remove repositories for your iso image (see Figure 2).

You can use the defaults in the upper section. In the lower section you will want to select the repositories and add any third party repositories you will want. These third party repositories are required if there is software you want to include that is not standard fare for the Fedora distribution. If you do decide to add repositories you will need to know:Base URL, Mirror List, and GPG Key File. You can also choose to include/exclude any packages from the repository, as well as give the repository a name and description. Make sure you save this to configuration if you know you will be creating more respins based on this setup.

The next step in the wizard is for adding a kickstart file (should you want to use one) as well as taking care of a few advanced options regarding your kickstart file.

Figure 3

Now Revisor will load up your repositories. Once the repositories are loaded you can add or remove any packagees to be included in your respin.

Make note that you have to go through and select every package you need. This includes the base packages, networking packages, etc. If you don’t add it, it won’t be on your system.

You can also add optional packages by highlighting the category and clicking the Optional Packages button.

After you have selected all of your packages click Forward and you will see a screen that indicates how many packages and the size of the build. If you are okay with what you see click Forward which will take you to the final configuration steps. Included in these final steps are the root user password, default language, keyboard type, target architecture, and time zone. Click Foward when you have completed these options.

You are now ready to add any kernel boot parameters. Generally speaking you should be fine with the defaults. But if you know that you will need a different boot parameter, add it here.

The next screen allows you to add a network device. Don’t worry, this isn’t about adding the specific hardware. This section allows you to add an interface (such as eth0 using DHCP). Make sure you at least add one interface so networking will be enabled (especially with a Live CD).

Click Forward and you will see the Authentication window. This will be of use if you know you are going to be needing to add any particular authentication such as LDAP, SMB, Name Switch Cache, NIS, etc. If you do not need any authentication click Foward to move on to the Firewall configuration.

Figure 4

In this window you can set up a default firewall. This section should not be overlooked. If you are creating a respin of Fedora you want to keep security in mind, so make sure you aren’t creating a wide-open respin for people to install.

Figure 4 shows the firewall setup window. As you can see you can set this up to allow specific services through. Choose wisely. Click Forward when you are finished to take you to the X Windows configuration. In this window you are going to set up much of X including which graphical environment starts up by default. You can also set up the display options as well.

Complete this section, click Forward, and you will find yourself on the user customization. Here you can add a user to the respin. If you add a user you can set it up to automatically log in with this user.

That’s the last step. Once you click Foward here Revisor will set out to create your respin, which might include a lot of downloading. This final step can take quite some time, depending upon how many packages you have included.

Once Revisor has completed you will find your iso image in the destination directory you configured during the setup process. Burn that iso with your favorite burning software and you now have your very own respin of Fedora Linux!

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The tool will setup Fedora on the USB stick giving the user the option to either select an already present Fedora distribution on the local computer system or to download one of the available Fedora distributions from the Internet. Available distributions include the latest Fedora 11 Beta, Fedora 10 and 9 as well as Sugar On A Stick. The Fedora 11, 10 and 9 editions can be installed as both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Sugar On A Stick has been designed to give children access to a computer system. The downloads can take a while depending on the connection speed of the local computer system and the selected Fedora distribution. Another interesting option is the allocation of persistent storage on the USB device which can later be used to store data on the USB device itself.

The tool will automatically detect connected USB devices that are suitable for installation. The Fedora Live USB Creator is available for both the Linux and Windows operating system. Jack posted an interesting article a while ago about Linux Live CDs that is a good read for users starting to discover Linux.

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In this article I will show you how to add name-based virtual hosts in your Apache web server. This will require you to edit the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file so be prepared for some command-line action. NOTE: This file can be located in various locations

If you’ve never edited your httpd.conf file don’t worry, it’s not that difficult. Just make sure you use good comments so you know what you did and where you did it. Otherwise your virtual host section could get lost in the other sections.

The section of Apache where your virtual hosts will go is called, aptly, Virtual Hosts. The format of an entry looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@dummy-host.example.com
DocumentRoot /www/docs/dummy-host.example.com
ServerName dummy-host.example.com
ErrorLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-error_log
CustomLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Before you actually start configuring your virtual host you need to make sure you have the NameVirtualHosts line uncommented out. The line will look like:

NameVirtualHosts *

You can find the line by using the grep command like so:

grep -n NameVirtualHosts /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

(NOTE: Edit the path to your httpd.conf file to reflect your setup.)

The grep command will return to you which line the NameVirtualHost entry is on. Now open up the Nano editor and scroll down a bit. You can hit the key combination Ctrl-c to find out what line you are on. Once you find the line you will remove the “#” character (no quotes).

With that out of the way you are ready.

To illustrate how this is done I will show you how to create a virtual server for mail. The following assumes the doc root is /var/www/. Add the following entries to your httpd.conf file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /www/yourcompany
ServerName www.yourcompany.com
# Other directives here
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /www/mail
ServerName mail.yourcompany.com
# Other directives here
</VirtualHost>

NOTE: Where yourcompany.com is the actual FQDN you use.

NOTE: If you need to change your port you can change it to suit your needs from the default port 80.

The above is the bare minimum configuration for your virtual servers. There are a LOT of possible directives you can use. For example, you might want to add error logging to these virtual hosts for debugging purposes. To add error logs to your virtual mail host? you would add the lines:

ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/mail-error_log common
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/mail-access_log common

To your mail virtual host entry (above the </VirtualHost> line.)

Once you have these entries complete you will need to save the httpd.conf file and restart Apache. To restart Apache issue one of the following commands:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

or

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

You’re done. You should now be able to hit the new virtual hosts.

Final Thoughts

Creating virtual hosts is a quick way to expand the capabilities of your Apache server, cut costs, and save IP addreses. Have you ever deployed virtual hosts with Apache? If so, share your experiences.

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In this article I am going to introduce you to the system-config-network tool that ships with the Fedora distribution. The specifics of my particular installation are:

• Fedora 10
• GNOME 2.24.3

Generally speaking networking in Linux is a no brainer. Especially when your machine receives its IP address via DHCP, it’s almost always just “plug and play”.? There are, of course, times when you have to configure your machine manually to use a static IP address. For this the system-config-network tool comes in very handy.

Starting the Tool

From the GNOME desktop go to the System menu and click on the Administration sub-menu. From there click on the Network entry (not the Network Device Control) to start up the tool. You will need the root password to start (and use) this tool.

system-config-network

As you can see (in the image to the left) the tool has a very user-friendly interface.? there are four main sections:

• Devices: This lists the devices associated with physical hardware on your machine.
• Hardware: this lists the actual networking hardware on your machine.
• DNS: The hostname and DNS servers needed for your network.
• Hosts: This allows you to add entries to the hostname routing table (/etc/hosts).

Configuring a New Device

Device Type

The first thing you need to do is to click the New button to begin the device setup wizard.

You will have six different types of devices to choose from. Most likely you will be configuring an Ethernet or a Wireless connection.

Once you have selected the type click the Forward button.

Let’s configure an Ethernet connection.

Which Hardware?

If your particular network card isn’t listed then most likely drivers haven’t been installed on your machine. Fortunately Linux has reached a point where most network cards are supported.

Select the card you want to configure and click the Forward button to continue on with your network configuration.

Network Settings

The next step is to actually configure the settings for your hardware. In this example a Static IP address is to be configured.

Enter in all of the relavent information for your network configuration.

Once you have completed this configuration click the Forward button to move on. The next screen only serves to review the information you have configured. Once you have reached that window, if the information is correct, click Apply to complete the setup of your network device.

You are probably asking yourself “Where is the DNS configuration?” Good question. The answer is simple. From the main window click on the DNS tab to reveal the location of DNS information for your network. Most likely it’s not there yet. On that tab you can edit the hostname of the machine and the primary, secondary, and tertiary DNS addresses. You will notice a lack of a Save button on this tab. In order to save this information you have to go to the File menu and click the Save entry.

Activate Your Interface

Go back to the main window and click on the Devices tab. Now select the interface you want to activate and click the Activate button to start the device. If you do not have access to the Activate button that means you have to go back to the devices tab, select the hardware you want to be able to activate, and click the Edit button.What you need to do is to click the “Allow All Users To Enable and Disable The Device” entry. Now save the changes (File | Save) and go back to Activate the device.

Your network device should now be up and running!

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What exactly is a Live CD? A Live CD is a CD (or flash drive) that contains a complete and bootable operating system that is run directly from the CD and not the hard drive. There are many types of Live CDs that serve different purposes. There are live distributions for repairing Windows or Linux systems (such as SystemRescueCD). There are live cds for nearly every Linux distribution that allow you to test and/or install the distribution (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Mandriva, ELive). You can even do stress testing and benchmarking with Live CDs like Inquisitor. Or what about a complete, embedded firewall distribution m0n0wall.

Why Use a Live CD?

The main purpose of a Live CD is to test drive Linux. A Live CD runs directly from the CD and the PCs RAM and does not even need a hard disk to run. Because of this, you can rest assure that a Live CD is not going to alter your hard disk unless you actually choose to install the Live CD onto your drive.

There are many reasons why a Live CD would be preferred. For instance, hardware diagnostics. I have employed Puppy Linux on numerous occassions in order to get information on a piece of hardware or test to see if a piece of hardware is working. I have also used that same Live distribution to run older machines where only certain functions are necessary. Live CDs are also great choices for cafes where you want to start with a clean slate every day. Another great use for a Live CD is when a machine has no mutable storage (a hard drive) and you want to run the computer as a pseudo “dumb terminal” or “thin client”. This would allow users to execute certain tasks so long as they didn’t need to save any work.

But what if you want to save information? For that you can use the flash drive-based Live distributions. With a large enough flash drive the user can also save data as well as run the operating system. If you’re looking for a pre-installed solution Mandriva has the Mandriva Flash Drive which has 6 gigs of free space for data.

One of the best reasons for using a Live distribution, in my opinion, is testing to see if that distribution works well with the hardware you have. I have one particular laptop that, when it comes time to upgrade operating systems, I wind up burning numerous distributions onto CD and running each one of them until one of them can work with the finicky hardware on that machine.

Drawbacks

One of the biggest drawbacks of using a Live CD is the speed. Remember, you are running this from RAM so the amount of RAM the machine has (as well as the speed of the CD drive) will determine how fast your Live CD distribution will run. So a machine with low RAM will run poorly. This isn’t such an issue if you are planning on installing immediately. But using the Live CD on a low-RAM machine will be painfully slow.

The other drawback was already mentioned, unless you are using a flash drive-based Live distribution, you can not save data. If you are only testing the distribution out to see if you like it, that’s not a problem.

Final Thoughts

Live CDs are here to stay. They have many uses and few drawbacks. If you are hesitant to use a Live CD because you don’t want to lose data, you shouldn’t worry about that (unless you accidentally click the installation button and accidentally click through all of the steps to install the operating system.)

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The first thing you must do is make sure you have the applications installed on your machine. One reader pointed out that gtkpod had trouble with XMMS (which, I admit, is an old-school application). With modern distributions XMMS is not typically installed, yet gtkpod still defaults to XMMS being the default player on some distributions (Ubuntu and Mandriva for example). We’ll fix that.

Let’s first show how to get gtkpod running with a command line player. We’ll use mpg123 because it’s one of the more universal players. You can install mpg123 either from command line or from the Add/Remove Software utility. From the command line the installation would be something like:

apt-get install mpg123

or

yum install mpg123

One mpg123 is installed you can then fire up gtkpod for configuration.

From the Edit menu select Preferences to open up the configuration window.

Gtkpod Preferences Window

There are two lines to configure:

Command for ‘Play now’

Command for ‘Enqueue’

Both of these can be configured with the command. As you can see, in the figure above, my Fedora 10 default installation of gtkpod defaults to using XDG. This is an outstanding GUI application for use with gtkpod. But let’s make a simple change. Edit that line to read:

mpg123 %s

and click OK. Now go back to gtkpod, right click on a song and select “Play Now”. The selected song should start playing. Now here’s one issue with using a command line tool for playback: In order to stop playback you have to open a terminal window and issue the killall command. In our example you would issue the command killall -9 mpg123. Or you could wait for the song to complete. If you queue a number of songs for playback then you will definitetly have to issue the killall command to stop playback.

The same configuration holds true for an external GUI application. The good news about using a GUI application is that you can control the playback of the file much better.

Should you want to use XMMS for the playback of files you will most likely either have to delete the current XMMS (if you do not have mp3 support rolled into your current XMMS installation.) Say you are using Fedora. To change XMMS for mp3 support issue the following commands (as root):

rpm -e xmms (Only if XMMS is already installed)

yum install xmms-mp3

Now if you use XMMS as your playback application you would have xmms %s for your playback configuration.

Final Thoughts

Yes it’s true, it would be nice if gtkpod had a built in player. However, having a reliable application for syncing an overly-flaky, yet overwhelmingly popular music device far outweighs having to configure the application to use a working playback system.

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