Problem kickstarting Mandriva 10.2

Tuesday, October 11th, 2005

So you’ve read through the Auto Install Documentation and you are on to the “postInstall” part of your auto_inst.cfg and you have script a bit of extra post install fun like say urpmi.addmedia … . But for whatever reason it just hangs on “examining pubkey file of …”!

This is because the install proccess did not clean up after itself, so you must do so for it:


# Cleanup old lock from the install.
rm -f /var/lib/urpmi/.LOCK /var/lib/rpm/RPMLOCK

Now all urpmi.* activity should continue properly.

Posted in General, work | No Comments »

Upgrading Mandriva/Mandrake via URPMI

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

Here are a quick few lines to upgrade your version of Mandriva to the latest and greatest version all using your handy update tool; URPMI. The following will migrate your 10.0 box to 10.1, but the same should work regardless of version.

urpmi.removemedia -a

urpmi.addmedia ftp.sonic.net-install »ftp://ftp.sonic.net/mirrors/mandriva/10.1/i586/media/main/

urpmi.addmedia ftp.sonic.net-contribs »ftp://ftp.sonic.net/mirrors/mandriva/10.1/i586/media/contrib

urpmi.addmedia --update ftp.sonic.net-updates »ftp://ftp.sonic.net/mirrors/mandriva/updates/10.1/main_updates/ with media_info/hdlist.cz

urpmi urpmi

urpmi --auto --auto-select

urpmi kernel

Update: This works great for the latest Mandriva release; 2006 (aka 10.3).

Posted in General, work | 2 Comments »

FreeNX on Mandrake 10.1

Friday, March 11th, 2005

FreeNX is an open source alternative to NoMachine’s NX Server. This means super speedy remote desktop access over SSH; I was streaming audio, surfing the web, chatting, checking email at home and doing the same via the nxclient on my work machine without any noticeable lag on the remote box.

There were however some hoops to jump through, so I chronicle them here.

Server: (aka work/remote machine)

To make things a bit easier you will want to add these install media.

urpmi.addmedia mirrors.usc.edu_devel_contrib-i586 rsync://mirrors.usc.edu/mandrakelinux/devel/cooker/i586/media/contrib/

urpmi.addmedia mirrors.usc.edu_devel_contrib-x86_64 rsync://mirrors.usc.edu/mandrakelinux/devel/cooker/x86_64/media/contrib/

By the way; rsync media seems to be less popular, and less likely to be flooded with a bunch of people, than FTP media.

Next install freenx via urpmi:

urpmi freenx

Along with the freenx package this will also install its dependencies; nxagent, libnxX11_0, and nxproxy.

Then do the following:

chmod 640 /var/lib/nxserver/nxhome/.ssh/client.id_dsa.key

Rename the following to stay more in line with standards:

mv /var/lib/nxserver/nxhome/.ssh/authorized_keys2 /var/lib/nxserver/nxhome/.ssh/authorized_keys

cat ~augie/.ssh/authorized_keys2 >> ~augie/.ssh/authorized_keys .

Add the user(s):

nxserver –adduser augie
nxserver –passwd augie

I keep sshd pretty tight, so this may or may not be needed for you.

Add ListenAddress 127.0.0.1 to /etc/ssh/sshd_config if need be.

Client: (aka home)

urpmi nxclient

Copy /var/lib/nxserver/nxhome/.ssh/client.id_dsa.key from server to /usr/NX/share/client.id_dsa.key on the client

chmod 644 /usr/NX/share/client.id_dsa.key

Run nxclient –wizard as root.
Copy /root/.nx to ~augie/ .
chown -R augie:augie ~augie/.nx/
Edit ~augie/.nx/nxclient.conf

Posted in General, work | 8 Comments »