Bradleyland.net

Since I posted my 64 bit flash tutorial, I have been getting a lot of questions on how to enable a user to sudo on Fedora 10. For those of you that wanted it, here you go! Oh yeah, next time, RTFM. *grin*

Note that I am doing all of this from the command line. If you care to survive the Linux world, you should at least have a vague idea of how to use the command line. A terminal from within X will work fine as well for these steps.

Also note that this will work with MOST distros out there. I have yet to see a problem with any that I have tried, but I mostly work in the RPM world, so my exposure to other distros is somewhat limited.

Get logged in and open a terminal window if your system starts X automatically. If you need a tutorial on how to do that, google will be your friend for a while. Before we actually edit anything, we will be finding out what groups your user belongs to you will be looking for a couple of them that are quite important. “wheel” and whatever group mirrors your username.

[dude@computer ~]$ groups
dude wheel pulse-access pulse-rt pulse
[dude@computer ~]$

Once you are logged in and know what groups you belong to, you will edit “/etc/sudoers“. This will require you to be root to do this. (Type in “su” at the command prompt and enter the root password for the system when you are prompted.) Once you are root, enter the following command.

vim /etc/sudoers

Here is where those groups come in handy. If you had wheel listed, we simply have to uncomment a line. If not, we have to create a new line that includes your users’ group. It will make sense in a minute.

Lets start with the less likely situation that wheel was part of your groups list by default. You have two lines that you are looking for within sudoers.

# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL

# Same thing without a password
# %wheel        ALL=(ALL)       NOPASSWD: ALL

It is quite simple at this point. If you would like to require that the sudo enabled users put their password in every time they run a command with sudo, uncomment the “# %wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL” line by removing the # at the start of the line. If you don’t wish to require a password for every use of sudo, do the same with the “# %wheel        ALL=(ALL)       NOPASSWD: ALL” line.

Now, what if you are like 99.9% of the fresh installs out there? What if you are not part of the wheel group, or have a situation where you only want your user to have sudo access? This is also very simple. Simply change “wheel” on whichever line you prefer to your group name and uncomment as before.

Done!

If you have issues using VI, there are a multitude of VI tutorials on the net. If you would rather use EMACS or nano or something, feel free. It should all work the same.

I am using Wordpress MU for a project that I am working on right now and I have run into and found a solution to a problem that seems to be plaguing the blogsphere. The sad thing is that the solution was already posted in the MU forums, but not given the proper attention. I am here to fix that.

Problem Description

When installing WPMU, if the installation is not completed because of a database issue, an endless loop will occur. This happens because the DB is not populated with the correct information, but the wp-config.php has already been written. Every time you hit the index.php, it tries to look at the DB and notices that the information is not there. Default behavior seems to be to try again, which has the same behavior as the first time through. Endless loop, here we come.

Yeah, I know it is more complicated than that. I am trying to keep it simple.

To be truthful, this was my fault for not having my DB permissions set up correctly during install.

The Fix

The simple way to resolve the issue is to rename or delete the wp-config.php that was generated during the first install. After this is done, reload the site and go through the install again. Make sure you have corrected the DB problem before you go through the install again.

The Bitch

While it was my fault that I had the DB permissions jacked up, the WPMU installer needs to be tweaked a bit to avoid this issue. If the DB stuff fails, we should probably avoid writing the wp-config.php with information that isn’t going to do a whole lot of good and will probably scare off someone that isn’t as determined as I am.

This is the part where I get comments and emails telling me to fix it if I am that worried about it. This is also the part where I tell you that I am not a programmer. I am an admin and an enthusiast. If I could fix it, I would damn well do it.

This is also the part where I explain that this isn’t a gripe against Wordpress MU or Wordpress in general. They are great tools. I am just trying to help someone that might be having the same problem I had.

Ok. That’s all. Go about your business.

01000011010000010100010001001001010001010010000001101000
01100001011100110010000001100010011001010110011101110101
01101110001000000111010001101111001000000110000101110100
01110100011000010110001101101011001000000110110101111001
00100000011100110110010101110010011101100110010101110010
00101110001000000100100100100000011001000110111101101110
00100111011101000010000001101011011011100110111101110111
00100000011010010110011000100000010010010010000001101000
01100001011101100110010100100000011011010111010101100011
01101000001000000111010001101001011011010110010100101110
00100000010010010110011000100000010010010010000001100100
01101111011011100010011101110100001000000111001101110101
01110010011101100110100101110110011001010010110000100000
01110000011011000110010101100001011100110110010100100000
01110100011001010110110001101100001000000110110101111001
00100000011001100110000101101101011010010110110001111001
00100000011101000110100001100001011101000010000001101001
01110100001000000111011101100001011100110010000001110100
01101000011001010010000001100011011011110110110101110000
01110101011101000110010101110010011100110010111000100000
01010100011001010110110001101100001000000111010001101000
01100101011011010010000001110100011010000110000101110100
00100000011101000110100001100101001000000110001101101111
01101101011100000111010101110100011001010111001001110011
00100000011010110110100101101100011011000110010101100100
00100000011011010110010100101110001000000101001101100001
01110110011001010010000001111001011011110111010101110010
01110011011001010110110001110110011001010111001100100001

010000110100000101000100010010010100010100100000011

010000110000101110011001000000111010001100001011010

110110010101101110001000000110111101110110011001010

111001000100001001000000100010101010110010001010101

001001011001010000100100111101000100010110010010000

0010100000100000101001110010010010100001100100001

If this doesn’t explain exactly what I have been thinking for the last while, I don’t know what will. Read and learn.

Ok, you all have to check this out. I am going through fark.com/geek earlier, and I see this things about this superjesusfreak site that is attacking Olivia Munn. So I go, check it out, have an insane laugh, and decide to play along. In fact, I think I chose my camp on my first comment. I will be THAT guy. Hah

Either way, go check it out. I was just rolling when I was reading some of their stuff and watching some of their vids… Just some instant HILARITY!

http://www.christwire.org

You won’t be sorry.

Ok, so it wasn’t THAT bad. Lets get into some backstory…

My mother wanted to get a scanner so that she could make all of her pictures into ones and zeroes. I started looking around for something that would work for her needs and couldn’t find anything that would work with SANE. Go figure.

Ok, sidenote. Seriously. If CUPS can give support to damn near anything that prints since probably the 1950’s, why can’t SANE do something at least somewhere near that?!

I decided that since there wasn’t any simple way, short of writing a driver for the new scanner *cough*, that I could make this work with Fedora 10 in the timeframe I was working with.

So I get the new XP license in the mail today. I double check that the backups are done on her system. I put the CD in and reboot. I get the almighty Black Screen of Insanity +5. As you can imagine, I am getting a little bit pissed by now. I reboot real quick and jump into the BIOS to make sure that there isn’t anything odd looking in there. Nothing odd. Reboot and try to install again. No go again.

In the past, I had the same problem with a system that previously had Fedora Core 4 on it. Microsoft seems to want to make us jump through hoops if we are forced to go back to their stupid OS for any reason.

Come to find out, this is a partitioning issue. I guess that Microsoft doesn’t know how to read a partition table if it was written by another OS. Somehow, my jaded nature just doubled.

The solution was to rewrite the partition table with GParted. I downloaded the ISO from the GParted website and burned it using another system. After inserting the CD and booting from it, I was able to completely erase the partition table. A quick reboot from there, and Windows XP decided that it wanted to start working.

The moral of this story is very simple. Microsoft has been trying to find ways to keep ahead of Apple and the Linux community for years. They have done some good things and a load of bad things. The problem is, they have continued to write shoddy software. Their market share is slowly seeping over to the *NIX side of things, and they still fail.

Windows 7 may be able to turn this trend around, but what I have seen suggests that they are simply stealing ideas from the Linux community to rewrite and impliment in their own OS. Eventually, I believe this will catch up with them.

It was a great game and Utah came out on top. Congrats guys. Now get to work for next year!

I just read an article at http://spoilt.blogsite.org/ that went over how to install 32 bit Flash on both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Fedora 10. It however didn’t mention the new 64 bit beta of Flash that Adobe is testing.

If you are already running 32 bit Flash in 64 bit Firefox, make sure you remove that before you install the 64 bit version of Flash. This goes for both the system-wide install or the single user installs.

If you head to the Adobe Labs site, you can snag the .tar.gz file that includes the flash plugin.

To uncompress the bugger:

tar -zxvf libflashplayer-10.0.d21.1.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

After that completes, you should have libflashplayer.so in the same directory as the .tar.gz file. This is where you need to choose how you would like to do the install. You can install this for your user only, or install it system-wide. If you would like to install system-wide, you will do the following:

Change the user and group associations for the file to root.

sudo chown root:root libflashplayer.so

Then change the permissions if need be to 755. (This may already be the default, but you should still check to be safe…)

sudo chmod 755 libflashplayer.so

Time to move the file to the worldwide plugins directory…

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

This should do it. You should be able to restart Firefox and start seeing flash in all of its native 64 bit glory!

As for those of you that might not have permissions to do a system-wide install, you can do the following.

cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins

You don’t need to do any of those other steps besides decompressing the file and restarting Firefox.

I certainly hope this helps everyone out there dealing with the BS of having to get 32 bit Flash working on 64 bit Fedora. This should also work for just about any other distro out there. The locations might be changed, but everything is pretty much the same.

So I am working on getting myself moved back to Dallas, then I should be able to start pushing updates to the site again.

I leave on the 26th and should be down there and set up by the 30th or so. I am pretty stoked about going. I have a good opportunity that is starting to shape up with Verizon. Regardless, you should start hearing from me again soon. I have several projects that I want to start working on in the near future, and will keep everyone up to date on them. I also have a learning project that I am going to push. w00t!