Hi, I'm a Linux newb with a ton of questions...

In My Humble Opinion
1

Are there any Linux experts out there? I’m trying out Fedora Core 3 for the first time and I’m kinda excited, but I had a few really dumb questions that I’m hoping you could answer. Any or all of the following would be much appreciated :slight_smile:

I’ve been using DOS and Windows for a few years and I’m fairly computer savvy. Please feel free to be as technical as necessary.

[ol]
[li]I heard something about a package management utility that will automatically download and install an application plus its dependencies. What is this application called, and is this the same thing as “apt-get”? How is that related to the “Redhat Package Manager?” And if these are not the same thing, which one would you recommend?[/li][li]Does Fedora come with a built-in firewall? If so, what are its limits? Does it only deal with ports or can it block applications the way ZoneAlarm and WinXP SP2’s firewall do?[/li][li]Which program would you recommend for:[/li][ul]
[li]Antivirus? It can be free or commercial.[/li][li]A media player? I’m hoping there’s something with Winamp’s power and ease of use. Would XMMS fit the bill?[/li][li]A DVD player? Do I have to pay for a software decoder the way I do with Wndows, or is there an open-source alternative?[/li][li]A packet sniffer? Ethereal?[/li][li]An archive manager? (ZIP, RAR, GZIP, ARJ)[/li][li]A multi-network IM client? GAIM?[/li][li]A multi-site webmail checker like ePrompter on Windows?[/li][li]Image manipulation? Is there anything better than The GIMP?[/li][/ul]
[li]Finally, are there any good online resources you would recommend? If it’s a site that can answer any of these questions, that’d be great as well![/li][/ol]

I’m sorry for the long list. They’re all really basic questions and I’m too lazy to go searching through several different variants of each one to find the answer :smiley:

Thank you much for any help you can give.

2

I’d hardly call myself a Linux expert, but I have been using Fedora Core 3 for a while now (in fact, I’m writing this port on my Linux box), and use Linux on a daily basis, so I’ll try and answer your questions.

[QUOTE=Reply]

[li]I heard something about a package management utility that will automatically download and install an application plus its dependencies. What is this application called, and is this the same thing as “apt-get”? How is that related to the “Redhat Package Manager?” And if these are not the same thing, which one would you recommend?[/li][QUOTE]

Redhat Package Manager is simply a program that will get the package you request and install it. It will fall over if the package requires dependancies, and you will have to install each dependant package seperately.

A nice version of apt-get is a program called “synaptic”. Its essentially a graphical front end for apt, but very very easy to use. You can download it from [freshrpms.net] - Apt

[QUOTE]
[li]Does Fedora come with a built-in firewall? If so, what are its limits? Does it only deal with ports or can it block applications the way ZoneAlarm and WinXP SP2’s firewall do?[/li][/QUOTE]

Yes it does come with a built in firewall. You can control the settings with system settings -> security level

[quote]
[li]Which program would you recommend for:[/li][list]
[li]Antivirus? It can be free or commercial.[/li][/quote]

I don’t know of a Linux anti-virus off the top of my head, sorry.

[quote]
[li]A media player? I’m hoping there’s something with Winamp’s power and ease of use. Would XMMS fit the bill?[/li][/quote]

Indeed it will. If its not already installed, use Synaptic to get hold of it from www.freshrpms.net and install it. It doesn’t come with an mp3 playing plugin (RedHat being ultra-paranoid), but you should be able download the xmms-mp3 from freshrpms.

[quote]
[li]A DVD player? Do I have to pay for a software decoder the way I do with Wndows, or is there an open-source alternative?[/li][li]A packet sniffer? Ethereal?[/li][/quote]

Not sure off the top of my head about these.

[quote]
[li]An archive manager? (ZIP, RAR, GZIP, ARJ)[/li][/quote]

You should get various archive managers built in. Many will work from the command line, such as tar, gzip, bzip. And there is also ARK, which is a graphical archive manager.

[quote]
[li]A multi-network IM client? GAIM?[/li][/quote]

Yep. This is far superior to KDE’s Knopete.

[quote]
[li]A multi-site webmail checker like ePrompter on Windows?[/li][/quote]

Don’t know, but I’d be interested in such a thing if there is one.

[quote]
[li]Image manipulation? Is there anything better than The GIMP?[/li][/quote]

Nope. the GIMP is useful for everything. :smiley:

www.fedoraforum.org is your best bet for everything Fedora Support related.

3

mplayer will take care of playing DVDs, along with most other video formats.

Gaim is indeed your best bet for IM. Ditto gimp for image processing (but there are better programs for other image-related tasks, eg. gthumb for browsing a big directory of images.)

I handle archives with the linux command line tools - tar, gunzip, unrar etc. but there are bound to be gui’s available if you want them.

A handy resource to know about is rpm.pbone.net for tracking down rpm packages.

good luck

4

apt-get is primarily Debian tool… here’s a rundown of the Deb tools vs. Redhat, based on my hazy recollections:

apt-get = up2date or apt4rpm
.deb = .rpm (the file)
dpkg = rpm (the application)

apt-get handles downloading and checking the dependencies of particular packages, and calls dpkg to extract and install the actual .deb files.

Dunno about a GUI-type firewall, but Linux allows you to manipulate the kernel’s IP info with a rather fine degree of detail. Try man iptables and man route, and do some googling.

As for your apps:
AV: I don’t really run one on my local machine. There’s ClamAV, but it’s primarily intended for server use, though I suppose you could set it up to scan locally.

Media player: XMMS it is. There are others that are more iTunes-like, but I hate iTunes.

DVD: Many distros don’t include DVD straight out of the box, because the decoding algorithm is proprietary. You’ll have to do some googling around for “decss” an your particular distribution for installation instructions.

Packet sniffer: Yup, Ethereal. You might also want to check out nmap, which is a command-line port scanner, among other things.

Archive manager: zip/tar/gzip/etc from the command line, and file-roller in GNOME.

IM: Gaim.

Webmail: Dunno.

Images: The GIMP, natch. Takes some getting used to, but it’s better than Paint Shop, if not quite as good as Photoshop.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/ and http://www.justlinux.com are pretty good sites for newbs.

5

You also might want to look into yum, although I’m not sure it’s needed for recent releases. (I have it on a RH9 system.) If you have questions, just post them.

The firewall iptables is built into the kernel. Not the easiest thing to modify manually, which is why RH provides lokkit. (I have no experience with lokkit, as I set my rules manually.)

There’s really no need. You can’t execute programs on linux without setting them to executable.

Google is your friend. I’ve never been unable to find what I need, although sometimes it takes some creative keywords and time.

6

I am curently using Fedora Core 3 (and similarly quite new to Linux.)

  1. Yum is it. There are a couple of config files you need to set up that tell it where to look for packages. The reference for how to do this was on the Fedora site–though I believe it was slighty out of date info, so you might need to wing it a bit.
  2. Dunno
  3. Dunno most. All archiving I have done through tar–but I haven’t encountered rar files or arj yet so am not sure if those are supported or even plug-inable.
  4. Google. :rolleyes: The Fedora site appears not to have been updated since Core 2 (?) so it’s info on the various config files is generally wrong. And pretty much it seems like everything in the Linux world is like this–every few weeks the config files, command line arguments, and whatnot change for every single application. So pretty much all up-to-date info is contained in two line BBS posts throughout the internet as people ask how to do what you’re trying to do.

And if the GUI is running slow for you, you might want to check out XFCE and I think I heard of another one (Window Maker?) which are faster. I haven’t been thrilled with the usability of XFCE so you might want to try a different one first.

7

Will have to check that out…

8

There’s also a program called Red Carpet (although since Ximian was bought by Novell, the name has been changed to ZENworks for Linux). The client should be freely downloadable from Novell’s website. I’m not sure if the server has packages for Fedora, though, but I can find out.

9

Just saw this on OSNews… it might be of some interest:

The table of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software in Linux

10

You won’t need one. Most executables for windows and other nonsense like VBS will not execute under linux. You may have to worry about overflow exploits and ensure that your passwords are secure (against human factors engineering). You may want to run something like tripwire which will log changes to the more sensitive programs (so if you do get hacked and someone covers there tracks by using stealthed copies of your utilities, you’ll find it in your logs).

An mp3 patched version of XMMS will fit the bill nicely if you want a GUI’d mp3 player, use mpg123 for a commandline utility. XMMS has a number of nice plugins available, anything from a lightshow, to skins, to a wav-file dumper, to cover-art displays. MPlayer will also play mp3s from the commandline.

MPlayer for the brave (comandline, sometimes a little finicky to install so you have access to all the goodies, but you do need to know the title number of the stream you want to watch (usually but not always title one)). If you want a pseudo dvdplayer experience with menus, use OGLE (so I’ve heard) or Xine, both will likely need libdvdread which you may need to hunt for. MPlayer is based in Hungary so the libraries to decode DVDs is built into the source tree.

dvdauthor/dvd-menu and similar tools (along with mjpegtools and transcode) are a must if you want to author your own DVDs, you will want dvdrecord to burn them (I haven’t had much luck with the DVD patched xcdroast).

gzip/gunzip, zip/unzip, and tar come standard, rar is free to download/install/use, bzip2 is worth grabbing – it tends to be a touch slower than gzip but is a bit more efficient on text files, not as widely supported as gzip.

GIMP is free and very good. I’m told Photoshop is better, but I’m not willing to shell out multi K$ to find out. If you want to try CGI type stuff (and this goes for you windows folk out there) try Blender (all open source including the PDF manuals). Again it is very good, Maya may be better but again I’m not going to shell out multi K$ to find out.

Sourceforge is a nice clearing house for a lot of software projects. Generally if I’m looking for a piece of software to do something, Google will point me at a project that fits the bill.

Also find your nearest Linux Users Group. They are usually populated with evangelical geek types willing to lend a hand for a beer or two and a Yoda promise[sup]*[/sup].

[sup]*[/sup]“Pass on what you have learned”
– Yoda, RotJ.

11

On Redhat 9 here.

I ftp the apt rpm file from ftp.freshrpms.net Then (as su) I rpm -iv apt* and it installs. Now what? If I issue an apt command it says “apt command not found”

Please excuse my greenishness. According to [freshrpms.net] - Apt if I did the things mentioned above I should be “all set”. Can someone define “all set”?

:slight_smile:

How can I get the apt command to work?

Thx

12

Where did you install it to? If you haven’t installed it to a location in your path (you can see what locations are in your path by typing “echo $PATH” without the quotes at the command prompt), then just typing in apt won’t work. You need to type the entire path to the file in that case, or add the location to your $PATH variable.

13

If I …

cd /rpm
rpm -iv apt*
I get an error that says “already installed”

This was where, and how, I did the original rpm that “installed” apt. Where is apt intalled? I have no idea. There’s no other directories or files in /rpm.

14

It should be installed in /usr/bin

15

In no particular order:

If you’re running KDE as your desktop, check out kpackage for managing RPM’s and the like. GIMP is the only really comprehensive image manipulation tool I’m aware of for Linux. GAIM is a godsend, despite its various shortcomings - I use it on Windows as well as Linux. Ethereal is the god of all packet sniffers, but you might also want to check out ettercap. Aside from XMMS for Winamp-style media playback, I’d check out Kaffeine - it’s very user-friendly compared to mplayer and, with a properly-compiled xine-lib (which it’s based on), can play DVD’s and the like, too. As others have said, anti-virus software isn’t really necessary on Linux, but if you do need anti-virus software, especially if you’re running your own mail server, ClamAV is nice. I run it on our mail server at work as well as my home mail server. Ark is the only multi-archive GUI tool I’m familiar with - I tend to use command-line tools for dealing with archives (speaking of which, when’s the last time you actually saw an ARJ file in the wild? Heh…) And finally, as far as firewalls go, the Linux kernel itself can do some amazing firewall/routing tricks, but I’ve never heard of anything like an application-blocking firewall under Linux. It’s not really necessary as the Linux world isn’t full of idiots who click every attachment they receive, nor applications that “phone home” to gather marketing data on you, check registrations, etc.

I hope this helps.

16

In /usr/bin I don’t find apt, but I do find apt-shell, apt-config, apt-etc…

I guess I will just use those. Is that the “apt” I installed?

17

I believe so. You may want to install synaptic as a gui though.

18

I don’t think I can install synaptic, or shall I say I don’t think I want the added complication (requires Gtk+, which requires ?, which requires ?..). Right now I am trying to get Qt to work.

Thanks.

19

Oh, boy! I didn’t know that apt was ported to RH. That’s awesome, I’ll have to check it out…when I have time. I use “dselect” on a Debian machine at the office; as I understand it, apt is a front-end for dselect. dselect is a helluva lot nicer than rpm…

At any rate, follow the link (from the link that you supplied) to the examples (found here). It’s not “apt” that you use, which is just a name for the collection of tools. To install, use “apt-get”. As they say on the front page for apt:

I put the actual command to be typed on the command line in bold; the && causes apt-get update to run and then, if it succeeds, the apt-get install synaptic will be run. Hope that helps…

20

Just so’s you know – that’s the beauty of apt. It (should) take care of all the dependencies and such for you (which is the very reason I dislike rpms by themselves). As they say, by running the command I copied in my last post, it should just work.

I feel the need to add the disclaimer that I haven’t done it yet myself, so I can’t claim first-hand knowledge.