MaximumHoyt

In 2018, I used VirtualBox to upgrade a hard drive to be used in my Tivo. It worked great and shortly after that, I used the same technique to install Windows XP on a solid-state drive (SSD) for use in another machine and then Mageia on another drive destined for anoter machine. I found myself in need of the same proceedure and pulled up my old page and found that Oracle had updated the command involved. The one on my old page,  $ VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename  /path/to/source_sdk.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sdk has been superseded by: $ VBoxManage createmedium disk --filename=VirtualBox VMs/Tiny10-Install/Tiny10.vmdk --variant=RawDisk --format=VMDK --property RawDrive=/dev/sdd This change allows some nice new features that might be useful to me in the future, but it did take me a while to figure things out, especially since the solutions offered to the problems I encountered were mostly for Debian-based distros (and many were ancient posts) and had no real appli...

  I recently purchased some inexpensive 4GB USB drives from Amazon and right away, I ran into problems. Mageia Linux essentially mandates that you use their utility, IsoDumper, to write ISO images to USB drives. A nice feature is that if any space is left on the drive, it can format it in one of several different formats compatible with whatever OS the ISO is. For example, I installed the FreeDOS ISO and formatted the remainder of the drive as a FAT partition, perfect for including some DOS apps. However, if the ISO image is installed and is corrupted, the drive becomes "read only" and can't be overwritten on a second attempt with IsoDumper. Unfortunately, because the USB's partition table seems borked, you can't just use: $ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4096 count=1 to zero out the partition table because it returns the error message that /dev/sdX is "read-only". I had an unused drive , so I imaged it with: $ sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=4MB_USB.img Yo...

 For over a decade, I have been interested in disabling the damn CAPS LOCK key. I frequently press it accidentally and it is a continuing aggravation. Trying several methods, I found one that works and thought I would update the post and try to get the formatting correct. CAPS LOCK KILLED SUCCESS!! I stumbled upon the file /etc/default/keyboard . It reads: # KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE # Consult the keyboard(5) manual page. XKBMODEL=pc105 XKBLAYOUT=us XKBVARIANT= XKBOPTIONS= BACKSPACE=guess Consulting the man page for keyboard reveals the following interesting information: KEYBOARD(5)              Console-setup User's Manual     NAME keyboard - keyboard configuration file DESCRIPTION        The  keyboard file describes the properties of the keyboard. It is read by setupcon(1) in order to configure the keyboard on the  console.   In Debian  systems  the  default  keyboard la...

Zoom is a popular, if somewhat insecure, videoconferencing application in wide use. It does offer Linux support, just not for Mageia7. However, if you head over to the Zoom Linux download page , and access the Download center for Fedora 21+, you can install the appropriate 32- or 64-bit RPM package which will install all the correct dependencies and Zoom will work on your Mageia7 system! Back on the site's Zoom Overview page, there is adequate help to get you started with the app itself. I'm using an older Logitech USB camera and had it working with cheese , a good way to test out your hardware. If you have video/audio issues, get them worked out before you install Zoom. That kind of hardware troubleshooting is beyond the scope of this short article. Remember that  Google Is Your Friend . There are some FOSS alternatives to Zoom , but unless you're just videoconferencing with your Linux buddies, you'll probably be forced to use Zoom. Google Meet seems to be po...

Not much has been mentioned about urpmi-proxy for Mageia. In theory, urpmi-proxy works as a local proxy for a Mageia repository. You set it as the source repository for all your machines and it downloads and distributes only what packages you need. For the most part, little configuration is needed "out of the box". It is configured by default to use the existing repositories that are already configured on the host/server machine but as pointed out, this creates a recursive loop should you update the server itself. The Wiki docs explain how to circumvent this issue. There are other package management systems available from Mageia, notably dnf which will become the standard system only after the Mageia build system, dependent on urpmi, can be translated to dnf .  Configuring the Server Simply invoke $ sudo urpmi urpmi-proxy And this will also install the apache webserver, which is used to serve the files to your other machines. Then restart Apache. $ sudo systemctl...

The Onion Router (TOR) is not a server frequently run by most Linux users, especially North American users. Many countries actively persecute their citizens for their beliefs and anonymity is important for their safety, so I wanted to participate in the effort to assist this project by running a TOR relay server. I have a dedicated computer that runs a webserver for a hobby site, so I felt that it would be the logical hardware to run the TOR server. It is important for TOR to have access to the correct and accurate time, so the NTP client needs to be installed and configured for your timezone. Configure the NTP Server $ xsudo drakwizard ntp and follow the instructions here  to install and configure it. You can launch X-applications over ssh using xsudo . Install the TOR Application $ sudo urpmi tor This will also install the SOCKS proxy software. You may also install a GUI configuration tool, vidalia . We won't be using vidalia , so it won't be covered here. How...

As extensive as the Mageia RPM package repositories are, they don't include every application possible and it makes sense to create a local repository of these additional RPMs since I have several Mageia workstations. Using a remote workstation running lighttpd that acts as a webserver for a car club, it is also configured to allow each user to use ~/public_html as their personal webserver, and so added mageia as a user and will host the custom RPM files there. Configuration for lighttpd can be found here . There must also be a way for urpmi to know what files are available, so install repoctl which includes the application genhdlists . There is also a stand-alone application, genhdlists2 that accomplishes the same thing and that's what was used here. $ cd /home/mageia/public_html $ genhdlists . If you also use yum of dnf , install mrepo to accomplish the same thing. Add a Local Repository To add the new http repository, use urpmi.addmedia.  For example, ...

Dropbox is a commercial cloud-based online file storage service. A Basic account provides 2GB of space at no charge. To begin installing Dropbox, go to their website and create an account. Step 1.  On your computer, install the Dropbox package. $ sudo urpmi dropbox This installs the Dopbox files and installs wget (if not already installed). Step 2. Begin the Dropbox installation by downloading and installing the proprietary daemon. $ dropbox start -i After the daemon downloads, Dropbox will open a web browser to the Dropbox login page. Step 3. Using your account information, you may log in. Dropbox will now take you to your personal Dropbox page and create the directory ~/Dropbox on your computer and open your file manager to that directory. Now, close all the open Dropbox windows. Step 4. Make Dropbox run automatically when you log in. $ dropbox autostart y If you don't want it to run automatically, you can use the start and stop commands from the command l...

Back in the early days of Linux, the changes to the operating system were so dramatic that even when updating withing the same distro, in-place point release updates were problematic enough and it was always recommended that a major version release be done from scratch. There were just too many major changes to the underlying subsystems and package naming conventions. Doing an in-place update was just asking for trouble. Modern distros have matured quite a bit even though there are occasionally some major subsystem changes being made. Yet it's never been easier to do an in-place major version upgrade. I just did the upgrade on several Mageia5 systems and the results were consistent and satisfactory, not to mention simple. Step 0. Always backup critical information. Have a Mageia5 recovery disc on hand. Read the Release Notes , the Documentation and the Errata for Mageia 6. Other than updated applications, the biggest changes are support for UEFI and the move to GRUB2....

I read an interesting piece about securing servers written by Greg Bledsoe in LinuxJournal . I thought I would try it out and it turns out that it needed a few massages to make it run on my Mageia5 system. There are two parts to his approach, a short script that runs as rc.local , which file does not exist in Mageia, but will be properly run if you create it in /etc/rc.d/rc.local . #!/bin/sh #/etc/rc.d/rc.local #REF: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/server-hardening?page=0,2 #create iptables blocklist rule and ipset hash /usr/sbin/ipset create blocklist hash:net /usr/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -m set --match-set blocklist  ↪src -j DROP This file owner should be root with 700 permissions. Once you create it, you should execute it manually because that needs to be done before you run the script to collect the blocklists. I put the blocklist collection script in /usr/local/bin . You will need to create the directory /usr/local/bin/tmp because the script wa...

Creating CHROOT Environment Mageia documents (link below) tell us how to set up a chroot environment in their Wiki . We'll set up both a 32-bit and a 64-bit environment for the current release as well as the development branch, Cauldron, and eventually use them with schroot, a tool that makes managing chrooted environments much, much easier. To summarize the steps to create a chroot using urpmi as follows: Create a Mount Point To create the mountpoint for the chroot environment for either or both 32- and 64-bit environments as well as Cauldron: # mkdir -p /mnt/chroot/mageia32 # mkdir -p /mnr/chroot/mageia64 # mkdir -p /mnt/chroot/cauldron32 # mkdir -p /mnt/chroot/cauldron64 Mageia can use either package set with your native urpmi application to install packages in the chrooted environment. 32-bit chroot For the 32-bit environment: Add the repositories. $ sudo urpmi.addmedia --distrib --urpmi-root /mnt/chroot/mageia32  --mirrorlist 'http://mirrors.mageia.o...

I started a MediaWiki wiki for my hobby, to serve as a convenient place to collect and centralize all the bits of information that I find scattered about the internet. Creating such a wiki can be a daunting task, but if broken down into small tasks, it can be done. The most difficulty I had was that there were no specific instructions for Mageia. The best general instructions I could find were from the Mediawiki site, but were  for Ubuntu . Mageia configures its default configurations slightly different. I chose to tun the wiki and its associated webserver and database in a virtual machinate using VirtualBox, so we can tackle that first assuming that you already know how install and configure VirtualBox. Installing A Minimal Mageia Base During the installation, deselect all the pre-configured options, but do select the option to select individual packages. You will select a minimal install with no X11 or documentation, but with urpmi . The remaining installation is ...

It appears that "the cloud" is the popular buzzword now. All cloud computing is is a remote file server where you can store, access, share and manipulate your files. While several commercial services are available, it's possible to create your own cloud service using the ownCloud software. As with any powerful server software, it's not out-of-the-box easy, but with some preparation and understanding, it's not that difficult. Most of this HOWTO is Mageia-specific; a lot of the configuration details are enumerated at the ownCloud website documents . We're installing ownCloud on a minimal Mageia4 virtual machine using VirtualBox just to go through the process. There is no X-server, so it's all done on the command line. Mageia5 documentation, installation discs and Errata can be found here . Part One -- Installing the Apache Webserver We must begin by installing the Apache webserver. It's certainly possible to use alternative webservers, but Apac...