Installing an RPM package with yum automatically resolves all the dependencies

Linux / tagged , / / by

To install an RPM package with the rpm command, you need to first resolve the dependencies. You can either query your system for dependencies:

rpm -qpR the-package.rpm

or try to install and observe the error message that shows a list of dependencies:

rpm -ivh the-package.rpm

Installing all the dependencies can be quite time consuming because the packages listed by the above commands may themselves depend on other packages that you have to install, resulting in a long dependency chain.

Alternatively, you can use yum to resolve all the dependencies automatically like this:

yum --nogpgcheck install the-package.rpm

Many thanks go to the developers of yum.

Bye Firefox; Hello Chrome

Opinion / tagged , / / by

I have long been a fan of Firefox but since version 1.6.6 it has turned into a nightmare. Firefox has become really slow, it crashes and can not recover from the crashes even if you reload the browser in safe mode. I had to remove and reinstall it to solve the problem. Too much hassle.

Chrome is fast and stable. I have yet to see it crash (and yes, I have also added a few extensions). Chrome has become my primary browser now.

Firefox remains the development browser of my choice until Chrome catches up with extensions for development.

SitePoint speculates “Dark Cloud Computing” because of recent Gmail outage

Opinion / tagged / / by

Recently I see a lot of negative posts on SitePoint against cloud computing. Cloud computing is fine. The problem is the huge user base of Gmail.

If a problem like this occurs to a smaller company that offers SaaS services, it won’t have such a big impact.

If you should always have access to your emails, backup your emails or go offline with google gears and stop complaining :)

Restore file ownership and permissions in RPM based Linux distributions

Linux / tagged , / / by

If you have messed up the file permissions and ownerships of installed packages on your Linux box for any reason, you can fix these for all the packages that were installed by rpm. This method will only work for RedHat, CentOS, Fedora and other rpm based Linux distribution.

This will restore ownerships and then restore permissions for all installed packages

for p in $(rpm -qa); do rpm --setugids $p; done
for p in $(rpm -qa); do rpm --setperms $p; done

Russian and US satellites collide

Uncategorized / tagged , , / / by

BBC reports that US and Russian communications satellites have collided in space in what is thought to be the biggest incident of its kind to date.

The US commercial Iridium spacecraft hit a defunct Russian satellite at an altitude of about 800km (500 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, Nasa said.

The risk to the International Space Station and a shuttle launch planned for later this month is said to be low.

The impact produced a cloud of debris, which will be tracked into the future.

Since the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, it is estimated about 6,000 satellites have been put in orbit.

Satellite operators are all too aware that the chances of a collision are increasing.

The Americans are now following the debris path from the impact. It is hoped (!) that most of it will fall to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere.