MaximumHoyt

This will describe how to install and configure the Transmission torrent application on Mageia5 in a headless configuration, how to make it automatically download torrents by placing a .torrent file in a particular directory and admin the client remotely using both a cli (command line interface) and a GUI (graphical user interface) application. Transmission has both a Homepage ,  a Wiki and a Forum , so there's no lack of help and support. But as for installing it as a headless server on Mageia, all we found were HOWTOs for Debian/Ubuntu systems. We're assuming that you have Mageia5 installed and have configured your user to use the sudo command. INSTALL Begin by installing the transmission daemon and the command-line client. $ sudo urpmi transmission-daemon transmission-cli This installs  transmission-daemon, transmission-cli and transmission-common (which is mostly the documentation). All the binaries will be found in /usr/bin . The transmission package also...

I'm always looking for ways to speed up my computer, especially when it comes to the boot process and loading applications. A good overall discussion or improving system performance is at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Maximizing_Performance , just remember that it focuses on the ArchLinux distro, not the Mandriva (now Mageia) distro I use. READAHEAD A useful utility is readahead . According to its manpage, readahead populates the page cache with data from a file so that subsequent reads from that file will not block on disk I/O. On my Mandriva 2010 system, the default installation of readahead places a default file at /var/lib/readahead/default.early . To create custom files based on your system, you should reboot the system and pause the GRUB menu and add the following to the command line. init=/sbin/readahead-collector This will examine your system as it boots and create a list of what files are to be loaded in the order that they are loaded. The configuratio...

Back in the early days of Linux, the changes to the OS 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 although there are occasionally some major subsystem changes being made. Yet it's never been easier to do an in-pace major version upgrade. I just did the upgrade on several Mageia3 systems and the results were consistent and satisfactory, not to mention simple. Step 0. Always backup critical information. Have a Mageia3 recovery disc on hand. From GUI Step 1. $ sudo mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=4 Done. From CLI Step 1. Fully update the packages you now have installed. $ sudo urpmi --auto-update ...

The subject of third-party repositories for Mageia is a touchy one for some people. For the maintainers of a distro, they feel that third-party repos cause compatibility problems and the packages are not subject to adequate. The third-party maintainers believe that they are maintaining either specially modified packages useful to their members or packages that the main distro cannot, for legal reasons, maintain and distribute. Both are correct. If you need a package offered by a third-party repo, then by all means use it carefully. If not, don't even add the repos to your local repositories. For Mandriva, the PLF at plf.zarb.org  (project terminated) and MIB at PianetaLinux.org provide those services. For Mageia4, it looks like BlogDrake.net is taking the lead. They provide repositories for Mageia1 through Mageia8. You may add the appropriate Mageia4 repos as root using the commands below: (NOTE: the BlogDrake site appears to be down at this time) Mageia 4 urpmi.addmed...

I recently compared the installation of Mageia3 with Fedora 18 (both done in a VirtualBox virtual machine). When installed and fully configured to taste, you have essentially the same level of usability and ease of administration with a similar choice of desktop environments and current versions of applications running on a recent kernel using SysV-style init and RPM packaging. The meaningful differences are more easily illustrated with some history, so this will not be the typical, dull, useless version-to-version comparison with a plethora of gratuitous screen-shots and the inevitable inane jargon overload. Fedora has been the community release of Red Hat since RHEL became the primary distro for Red Hat proper. It enjoys a more frequent release schedule than RHEL and is more focused on the desktop. Think of it as the development version of the workstation companion to the Enterprise version of Red Hat Linux taht is now in its 18th release.  Mageia would se...

Part of the fun of Linux, for me at least, is the ability to fix things when they go wrong. And things generally go wrong when you don't follow the advice of conventional wisdom. Plus, my personal mantra is "fix it until it breaks". One of those great pieces of common wisdom when discussing Mandriva is that you only upgrade within major versions, like from Mandriva 2010.1 to 2010.2, but when moving between major versions, like from Mandriva 2010 to 2011, you do a clean install. If you have followed other convention wisdom, you have a separate physical partition for /home . With that configuration in place, you can do a clean install of the root filesystem and keep all you personal files and settings. But that can also pose problems since there is not always a clean upgrade path for the personal configuration files that live in the dotfile and hidden directories of your home directory. More on that at another time. I wanted to upgrade (not update) from Mandriva 2010...

There are two things that can help you to have some fun with Linux. The first is VirtualBox . Since you are not using it for commercial purposes, you may download and install the full-featured version for your host operating system. If you are a MS Windows user curious about Linux, this is ideal for you. If you are a Linux user curious about different distros, this works as well. After you install VirtualBox on your host operating system, you need to learn how to use it. the VirtualBox site has excellent documentation . My suggestion for configuration are give the virtual machine the maximum amount of RAM and video memory that is practical and set the network choice to "bridged" rather than "NAT". Next stop is to download the NetbootCD . This CD contains enough of an OS to enable wired Ethernet connectivity and download and install several Linux distros via FTP. What can you install? Ubuntu Debian GNU/Linux Fedora openSUSE Mandriva Linux Scientific ...