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Showing posts from June, 2010

Mandriva InstantOn

Mandriva InstantOn is a variant of their main distro based on their commercial product named "Mini". InstantOn is a boot-in-20-seconds minimalist Mandriva 2010.0-based distro aimed at providing a few applications (web browser, email, Skype, instant messaging, video and pictures) with a simple interface (just a few icons to single-click on). The InstantOn iso image is an install image which can be transferred to a flash drive or a CD, whichever you prefer to boot from. It will install itself by default into a 1.8GB partition # 1 that it will create on your hard drive. You may choose to use custom partitioning or use the existing partitions. To gain admin access in InstantOn, click on the Multimedia icon, then the Home icon. Navigate to /usr/bin and click on the xterm icon. "su" to root: the password is "mini". To add software, use vi to edit /etc/mandriva-release to Mandriva Linux release 2010.0 (Official) for i586 , then add the 2010.0 reposit

Managing /etc/alternatives (Updated 2019-11-09)

A number of applications are configured by default to invoke the sendmail application to send mail messages. Sendmail is, of course, the iconic UNIX command to send mail. But in many cases, sendmail is overkill and most systems provide a default lightweight command, /bin/mail , that can be used instead. Another alternative is ssmtp . There are alternative applications for many standard applications. After all, what UNIX programmer can't think of a better or different way of doing something? But how is that choice of alternatives easily managed on a Linux system? In the old days, the sysadmin installed the alternative application and created a symlink to the alternative application in place of the expected default application, for example symlinking /bin/mail to /usr/bin/sendmail . But the update-alternatives method provides better control, in theory at least. My problem was that the default installation of Mageia does not provide such a choice. I filed a bug report abou