On a Fedora system navigate to the System menu –> Preferences –> Keyboard then go to the Layouts tab, select the default layout (e.g. USA) then go to the Options box under Keyboard Model. Here, depending on your Fedora version, you’ll see a line “Adding EuroSign to certain keys” (Fedora 13) or “Adding currency signs to certain keys” (Fedora 14). Select a key that you want to use in combination with a so-called 3rd level key (I use the E key).
Then scroll down a bit and you’ll find the “Key to choose 3rd level” line which allows you to select a key or key combination to use with the E key above to create the Euro symbol (I use Left-CTRL).

That’s it. Now you’ll be able to type the Euro sign (€) by simply pressing Left-CTRL+E.

You’ll learn about two kernel crash tools:

LKCD (Linux Kernel Crash Dump)

• limitations: unable to save memory dumps to local md RAID devices, netdump server must be on the same subnet

Kdump

• advantages: ia64, ppc64 arch support, sends dumps to a wide range of devices and network shares (NFS, CIFS, FTP, SSH)

The next two chapters describe the crash data collection process and the actual data analysis that is performed to investigate the cause of the crash:

Crash Collection

• crash setup and running the crash utility

Crash Analysis

• analyzing the crash reports (backtrace)

You’ll also learn how to:

• trigger a kernel dump by forcing a kernel panic
echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq ; echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger

• send memory dumps to a remote machine (netdump server)

• compile a kernel module and use it to create a kernel panic.

Enjoy your reading and don’t forget that submitting kernel crash reports is very important for the developers, as the author points out:

When your kernel crashes, you may want to take the initiative and submit the report to the vendor, so that they may examine it and possibly fix a bug. This is a very important thing. You will not only be helping yourself but possibly everyone using Linux anywhere. What more, kernel crashes are valuable. If there’s a bug somewhere, the developers will find it and fix it.

You can get the book from dedoimedo.com.

Here’s how you can update your existing Vbox 3.x installation on Fedora 14:

The above commands will remove the old package, install the new one and compile the kernel modules. If you want to use USB 2.0 devices on your guests, you’ll also have to install the extension pack (available on the Downloads page).

Additional links:

• release announcement
• release notes
• download page

You can see there a bunch of *.json files.

If you use more than one machine or you’ve recently changed / reinstalled your OS and you want to restore the old bookmarks, you need to import them manually:

• backup your bookmarks files to a safe location e.g.
  cp -r ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/bookmarkbackups user@other_machine:~

• on your new / other machine, open firefox then go to Organize Bookmarks
• go to Import and Backup –> Restore and choose the most recent file from the list of *.json files that you previously copied

That’s it. You can now use your bookmarks. There are, of course, other (more elegant) solutions such as using a browser addon (e.g. Xmarks) but some people are concerned about privacy, or they just don’t want to complicate things.

Links:

• changelog
• download page for all platforms

You can download the magazine or browse it online.

I could use an unofficial repo, such as Remi, to get the updates more quickly, but the easiest way for me is to use the precompiled binaries from Mozilla, available for download as a tar.bz2 archive. This way, I’ll always get notified when an update is available and –just two clicks away — I’ll be running the latest version.

Here’s how you can do it:

• download the archive to /opt
  $ cd /opt ; wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/3.1.2/linux-i686/en-US/thunderbird-3.1.2.tar.bz2
• unpack it
  tar jxvf thunderbird-3.1.2.tar.bz2
• remove the tarball
  rm thunderbird-3.1.2.tar.bz2
• run it using
  /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird
• add a launcher to the panel — Right click on the main panel –> Add to Panel –> Custom Application Launcher –> Add

You can choose an icon for the new launcher from

That’s it. Make sure you configure it to automatically check for updates (Edit –> Preferences –> Advanced –> Update) and you’ll always run the latest version:

Updated packages to fix these bugs were released 2 weeks ago, but the users were not prompted to install them, since the update applet was broken. Users who perform manual updates using yum are not affected.

To fix your system, you need to run yum as root:

• to update all packages:
  yum –skip-broken update
• to install updated versions to fix the two issues:
  yum –skip-broken update gnome-packagekit selinux-policy

After the installation a reboot is required / recommended depending on the option you choose.

More details on Fedora Project mailing list.

Yesterday, August 3^rd, two Linux recovery operating systems received minor updates: my favorite, RIPLinuX (10.7) and another OS which I wrote about a while ago, Parted Magic (5.2).

The changelog files show these new releases include bug fixes, minor enhancements and updated versions for the main packages (e.g. partitioning tools).

Changelog for RIP LinuX:

http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/Changelog

Changelog for Parted Magic:

http://partedmagic.com/change-log/158-parted-magic-52.html

I’ve always been amazed by these lightweight Linux distributions (~100MB) which you can use for almost anything. Not only do they provide tools to help you troubleshoot your system, but they can also be used as regular OS’s for browsing the Internet, chatting with friends or even listening to music.

So although I generally agree with the saying, I can admit – in this case – that size doesn’t always matter.