Changing the Grub Boot Screens

Grub boot screens are actually a gzipped XPixMap format image file stored in the /boot/grub directory with an ‘xpm.gz‘ extension. To change this you can either download it from internet or make your own custom one. Then you will need to change the grub.conf file appropriately.

So steps involved are,

• Download or Create yourself the Grub Boot Screen (which is a .xpm.gz file)
• Copy it to the /boot/grub directory
• Make appropriate changes to the grub.conf file (or  menu.lst file in certain linux distributions)
• Restart the computer

Here are a few good sites that provide good Grub boot screens

http://www.schultz-net.dk/grub.html
http://schragehome.de/splash/

If you want to make your own splash images, its even more simple. Open Gimp make a new image or open an existing image. Resize it to 640*480 pixels. From the menu go to image >mode >indexed and change the no. of colours to 14. Now save it with the filetype .xpm and gzip it with the command
$ gzip splash1.xpm
and you will have ‘splash1.xpm.gz‘ file.

Copy this file to your /boot/grub directory

Now edit the grub.conf file which would be residing in your /boot/grub directory.
If you already have a splash screen it would be enough you edit the existing line. Here is an example

splashimage=(hd0,4)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
Change the splash.xpm.gz to your images file name in this case splash1.xpm.gz.
If you dont see such a line just add it. However note that the number 4 in (hd0,4) shown in this example is the /boot partition of your linux installation; so you will have to change it correctly.  If you dont know the exact number of the partition look something for like ‘root(hd0,4)’ in the same file. So you could use the same (hd0,4) in the splash image line.

Save and restart. You should see your new image.

Removing the Redhat Network Alert Applet

The RedHat Network alert Icon (the red exclamation mark in the panel) and the Up2date are not useful unless you have a Redhat Subscription.

To remove them,
Go to Desktop > System Settings > Add/Remove Applications and under “X Window System (details)” uncheck the checkboxes for “rhn-applet” and “up2date-gnome“. Then save and close. You can also disable the rhnsd service in Desktop > System Settings > Server Settings > Services.

Restart the computer and it shoulld be gone..

su and su -

Every time I type su and become root and issue a command like ifconfig and will get the result ‘command not found’..
Was really irritated by the need to type the full path /sbin/ifconfig to get it working.
Later I discovered the blunder, i had to type ‘su -‘

when you issue an su without ‘-‘ what you will get is a shell with root user rights, but not with root’s environment. Use “su -” to get root rights and also roots environment(including $PATH).

Setting Up an ADSL connection

One of the first things you need in a linux environment is a good internet connection….

Mine is a Dataone connection from BSNL and modem supplied was Huawei SmartAX MT 880. SmartAX is actually a ADSL modem/router. It can be used either as a router or as a modem(in bridged mode). In the router mode the connection is ready as soon as you switch on it. But for the modem mode you will need to dial from your computer to establish the connection.

I decided to use the modem mode as I’ve two accounts and so its easier in the dialer to change the account. I’ve created shell scripts which dials the required account.

Well the basic steps for this setup are:

• Set up a network link between your computer and the modem
• Run adsl-setup and create a ppp0 connection.
• Once ready, start or stop the connection using the adsl-start and adsl-stop commands

I connected the modem to my ethernet card. The modem’s IP is 192.168.1.1 so I setup my NIC via Desktop > system settings > Network as

eth0
Static IP and not DHCP
IP 192.168.1.2
Subnet 255.255.255.0
Gateway 192.168.1.1

Before proceeding further, I did some routine checks:
ping 127.0.0.1 -if you get reply your systems networking is okay…
ping 192.168.1.2 -if you get reply your NIC is working
ping 192.168.1.1 -reply means that the connection to the adsl modem is ok

So if the above tests are successful you are ready to go…

Type ‘su -‘ (don’t forget the – ) and type the command adsl-setup

adsl-setup is really a shell script which guides you through the process of setting up a ppp0 connection. It asks you several questions and usually gives you a choice of answers.

Here, I’ve posted the steps involved and have scrapped-off some of the irrelevant details.

=====

Welcome to the ADSL client setup. First, I will run some checks on
your system to make sure the PPPoE client is properly installed…

LOGIN NAME

Enter your Login Name (default john): myusername

INTERFACE

Enter the Ethernet interface connected to the ADSL modem?
(default eth0): eth0

Do you want the link to come up on demand, or stay up continuously?
Enter the demand value (default no): no

DNS

Please enter the IP address of your ISP’s primary DNS server.
Enter the DNS information here: server ## server means that DNS will be obtained from ISP

PASSWORD

Please enter your Password:
Please re-enter your Password:

USERCTRL

Please enter ‘yes’ (three letters, lower-case.) if you want to allow
normal user to start or stop DSL connection (default yes): yes

FIREWALLING

Please choose the firewall rules to use.
The firewall choices are:
0 – NONE: This script will not set any firewall rules. You are responsible
for ensuring the security of your machine. You are STRONGLY
recommended to use some kind of firewall rules.
1 – STANDALONE: Appropriate for a basic stand-alone web-surfing workstation
2 – MASQUERADE: Appropriate for a machine acting as an Internet gateway
for a LAN
Choose a type of firewall (0-2): 0 ## I had a firewall script ready and wanted to use it

Start this connection at boot time

Do you want to start this connection at boot time?
Please enter no or yes (default no):no

** Summary of what you entered **

Ethernet Interface: eth0
User name: myusername
Activate-on-demand: No
DNS addresses: Supplied by ISP’s server
Firewalling: NONE
User Control: yes
Accept these settings and adjust configuration files (y/n)? y
Adjusting /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0
Adjusting /etc/ppp/chap-secrets and /etc/ppp/pap-secrets
(But first backing it up to /etc/ppp/chap-secrets.bak)
(But first backing it up to /etc/ppp/pap-secrets.bak)

Congratulations, it should all be set up!

Type ‘/sbin/ifup ppp0′ to bring up your xDSL link and ‘/sbin/ifdown ppp0′
to bring it down.
Type ‘/sbin/adsl-status /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0′
to see the link status.

=======

Here you are, now type ‘adsl-start‘ and try
ping 64.233.167.99 # this is the ip of google.com, if you get reply then connection is okay
ping www.google.com # if you don’t get this right then you will have to manually enter your DNS information.

Setting up a Dual Boot System on a SATA hard disk (using GRUB)

In Linux the SATA disks are usually detected as sda and not as hda. So naturally we think that it should be sd0 and not hdo with grub, but its not.

Grub identifies the first hard disk as hd0 no matter it is IDE or SATA.

Now this grub uses a configuration file grub.conf situated in /boot/grub directory, which specifies the hard disk and partition in which linux is installed. There should be a line like this: ‘root (hd0,11)‘ here hd0 means the first hard disk and 11 is the partition number.

I’ve had problems for booting Ubuntu, but with Fedora it was ok. Fedora seems to identify the hd0 issue

So a typical grub.conf file for a SATA hard disk should look like this:

#boot=/dev/sda
#
default=0
timeout=15
#
splashimage=(hd0,9)/splash/splash1.xpm.gz
#
#hiddenmenu
#
#==========List items==========
#
title Fedora Core 4 (2.6.11)
root (hd0,11) ### see here, hd0
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=LABEL=/12 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
#
title Windows XP Pro Sp2
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
#=====================================

Booting to a new system

Well usually after a fresh windows install, you enter into a totally useless system. I remember my Windows98 days, we start off with installing drivers, then you go on to install office, winamp, antivirus, winzip, winrar, wordweb, nero, messengers, acrobat reader and so on. With XP you need an additional thing called firewall , of course with XP the driver issues are mostly solved. It usually takes 1 or 2 days to setup a fully functional system.

But in Fedora it was another story, it comes default with most of the things described above, only the names will be different The only thing I installed was XMMS for mp3 support and then mplayer for watching movies in webpages.

Here I’ve to mention a great site called fedorafaq.org it has answers to most of the problems haunting a newcomer, whether it is mp3 to java runtime. I take this opportunity to thank its creators.

You can have a look at my system here.

The FC4 Installation

A few info about my system: it’s an AMD Sempron64 2600 on an Asus K8V-MX with onboard SATA, 512MB of RAM and with a Ge Force MX graphics card. I have two NICs one VIA onboard and then a Realtec 8139. Two hard disks, one Seagate SATA 80GB on to which fedora is installed and then a Samsung.

The installation part was real fun and smooth. There were no problems at all. The only thing is that you need to have a general idea about partitioning. It will always be better to read the ‘Installation Guide’ before starting.

I downloaded the ISO images from the mirror sites and did the installation from the images itself. This was done by the linux askmethod option at the boot: prompt. Now you can give the location of the images in the hard disk like /dev/sda1 as in my case. But later i felt that this method is a bit slower than the CD installation method.

In the installation type i chose ‘work station’ and later checked ‘Customize software packages to be installed’

Next is partitioning. I chose manual and created four partitions, 75 MB for /boot, 512MB swap then another 512MB swap on my second hard disk and a 10GB /(root) partition. I’ve read that having a second swap partition in the second hard disk improves the system performance..

For boot loader i chose Grub.

I chose ‘no firewall’, i had a firewall script with me and wanted to use it. SE Linux was disabled.

Now comes the packages.. these are some of the things i felt as a must..
selected both KDE and GNOME
Selected Thunderbird and gftp in Graphical Internet
Selected K3b and Xcdroast from sound and video(for cd burning)
Selected Server Configuration Tools and Administration Tools, Windows File Server
Selected Development Tools, X Software Development and Gnome software development.(needed for compiling things)
Selected nmap-gui, ethereal from System tools.

Now the actual installation started and since I was installing from hard disk there was no need to change the CD’s. The installation took almost 33 min.

After reboot, to my surprise, Fedora detected my video card, onboard sound card..two NICs, even my monitor model (LG 700) and I am ready to go…