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Showing posts from August, 2008

Hex Editor for GNome

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Lately, I have been working on a project to parse a binary log file into text format. The requirements are that logs with 30 000 + records must parse quickly with low overhead on the production server. In order to achieve this, I needed to know how the binary log was formatted. This was the most difficult part and I quickly realised I needed a descent Hex Editor. I settled on GHex ( Hex Editor for Gnome. ) Fedora 9 ships GHex in the Yum repositories. # yum install ghex HEX data can be viewed as bytes, words or long words. The data can be selected and there is a search tool. Find the project's home page here: http://directory.fsf.org/project/ghex/

Google Gadgets on Fedora 9 x86_64

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If you have Fedora 9 64 bit and want to check out the google gadgets then read on. Google Gadgets is very much like the Windows Vista sidebar. You can add all sorts of little toys to the side bar. I have a resource meter, news feed and pictures gadget. Installing the gadgets application was relatively simple. Here are some links to get you started: http://code.google.com/p/google-gadgets-for-linux/ - The homepage http://code.google.com/p/google-gadgets-for-linux/wiki/HowToBuild - Official Build instructions http://groups.google.com/group/google-gadgets-for-linux-user/web/building-instructions-addendum - Build instructions for different distros. So here is a little command line script to make the instructions work. ( I executed this a root - and I run gnome so didn't worry about the QT stuff. ) # yum install dbus-devel js-devel libxml2-devel gstreamer-plugins-base-devel gstreamer-devel libtool-ltdl xulrunner-devel xulrunner-devel-unstable gtk2-devel librsvg2-devel curl-devel I

Allow httpd ( apache ) to write to files and folders with SELINUX

You may have read my previous post about configuring apache for public_html with selinux. Now today we look at extending this a little with enabling write permissions on special folders with SELinux enabled. There is sweet little help on this available on google so I thought I would throw in my two cents. In summary the file context needs to be changed for folders where the httpd daemon needs write access. These would folders that contain cache, images, logs and other things... To recap: Step 2 - Ensure that selinux is enabled for user_dir #> setsebool httpd_enable_homedirs true Step 3 - Ensure the correct access permissions are set on the home directory As normal user in home directory ~> chmod a+x ~ Step 5 - Create the public_html directory ~> mkdir public_html Step 6 - Set the selinux type label for public_html ~> chcon -t httpd_sys_content_t public_html Now your installer script for modx ( say for example ) tells you that it can not install because the cache folder

VMWare Server on Fedora 9 x86_64

A little while ago ( like when I first installed my 4Gb of RAM ) I thought I might give VMWARE server a try. VMWARE server is available for free from http://www.vmware.com/download/server/ . Needless to say it didn't work. There was an issue with compiling the 64bit modules for networking with the kernel and kernel-devel packages at the time. Happily, Fedora has updated the kernel and kernel-devel packages and the issue is gone! Last week I gave it another go and now have VMWare Server running smoothly on my Fedora PC. I use it for a range of different things and prefer it to Qemu for a range of different reasons. My list of VMWare pros over Qemu: VMWare is very good at sharing host resources amongst the guests. One can assign more virtual memory to each guest and have them run concurrently without incurring exorbitant overhead costs. VMWare deals with bridged networking without much input from the person behind the keyboard. All I had to do was tell VMWare server that my gue