[lug] Installation Questions for Fedora

[D. Stimits]

Siegfried Heintze wrote:
> Is this an appropriate place to post linux questions? I have some basic ones
> concerning the installation of Fedora core 4 FC4. There is probably some
> forum out there for shell questions that is not specific to boulder... If
> such a forum is more appropriate, let me know.

Hmm...figured other people would answer, I'm not very good at this, but 
maybe I can start it off. Beware, I don't use special tools in most 
cases, I just edit the config files (except during initial install).

> (1) I just figured out how to ping my router using the ifconfig and route
> commands. Do I have to edit some file to make these changes permanent?

Fedora has a subdirectory /etc/sysconfig/ which has many configuration 
items in it. Within this is yet another subdirectory, network-scripts/, 
which contain scripts that run as ethernet interfaces go up or down. If 
you have a single ethernet, the file there "ifcfg-eth0" contains the 
parameters that ifconfig controls. Here's a DHCP example:
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=00:01:02:03:04:05
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
DHCP_HOSTNAME=some_domain.com

If you edit this, run as root "service network restart".

> (2) What is the command to specify my DNS server? 

I simply add this to my /etc/resolv.conf *IF* I don't have scripts 
auto-generating it. The top line of my resolv.conf has this comment:
; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script

...each time you restart the network it's possible this file will be 
overwritten if you use a dhcp protocol...I'm not sure what parameters 
can be set in your /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, possibly 
static protocols allow setting name servers too. Well, end result, see 
"man resolv.conf" to see how to manually adjust this, and expect it to 
be overwritten if dhcp is used.

> (3) Neither my man or info pages work. I get an error message about
> "Warning: old character encodings and/or character set". Hmmm... I wonder
> hat the difference between a character set and a character encode is? Well
> anyway, I can anyone tell me how to fix this?

Oops...guess you can't see man resolv.conf then. I'm sure if I explain 
someone will correct me, so instead of elaborating, consider that each 
character has a face that you see, sometimes called a glyph. Different 
glyphs are used in different languages, though sometimes they have a lot 
in common. Your computer needs to index and look up which glyph to use 
for a given character depending on your language settings. The total mix 
of encodings and sets is a list of glyphs and how to find them...both 
can be set separately. This is one of those files in /etc/sysconfig/, 
"i18n", short for internationalization, an 18 character word. Mine has this:
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

Note that to some extent this setting is part of a filesystem, and to 
another extent it is a feature in the kernel...that is you can set what 
the kernel understands, and a filesystem can change how it shows things 
like file names based on the set the kernel makes available. You also 
have system fonts which can determine what the actual glyph looks like. 
If your kernel does not support a character set or encoding, likely you 
can't use it (at least not correctly); some filesystems fake certain 
features and make assumptions based on settings, other filesystems 
actually store more exact data and don't have to make as many 
assumptions, so results will vary with filesystem as well. In X11 font 
selection is further complicated.

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net