Setting up my home linux box
28 Aug 2000
Ok, you can now buy a Desktop Linux system for home use from a mainstream vendor, Dell. (If you look on Dell's website you may have trouble finding the exact system you want with Linux. I have learned that if you pretend you are a large business, then you can get pretty much anything. There is no problem ordering it, just call them up. In my case, I got a Precision 420 workstation with RedHat 6.2).

There are a few things you will want to do immediately to start having some fun with it. Here is a guide to setting it up with some of the more necessary features, including security for an always-on internet connection, playing cds, playing mpegs, playing mp3s, etc.


Networking

RedHat defaults to DHCP where it tries to find a DHCP server on the network to assign it an IP address and provide routing information. To give it my own IP address I had to run ... 
    /usr/sbin/netconfig
To change hostname, edit the following two files. You may have to reboot to see the change take effect. There is probably some simpler way, but that will certainly do it. 
    /etc/hosts
    /etc/HOSTNAME
Sound Card
To get audio working, plugged speakers into PCI sound card Creative Live 2000 (not motherboard) and then ran the following from a non-X based terminal. To get a non-X session, press ctrl-alt f1, or ctrl-alt f[2-6]. To get back to the X windows session, ctrl-alt f7. 
    /usr/sbin/sndconfig
Security
For security, in addition to setting the root password and giving all user accounts passwords (or removing them) I stopped the following services in /etc/inetd.conf Some of these (as well as others) may have already been off. To stop them, comment them out and reboot. Note: I am by no means a security expert. This is just a bare minimum kind of security for a home box permanently connected to the internet. I intend to get a home firewall appliance in addition to this. Some come with 4 port hubs, I've heard. 
	ftp 
	telnet
	shell
	login
	exec
	comsat
	talk
	ntalk
	dtalk
	finger 
	cfinger
I also stopped the apache web server by issuing the following command 
    cd /etc/rc.d/init.d
    ./httpd stop
And then made this permanent by adding the following comments to the file /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd. There are probably other ways to do this, such as moving httpd out of the init.d directory. 
   
    start) 
    #       echo -n "Starting httpd: "
    #       daemon httpd
    #       echo
    #       touch /var/lock/subsys/httpd
            ;;
    stop)
    #       echo -n "Shutting down http: "
    #       killproc httpd
    #       echo
    #       rm -f /var/lock/subsys/httpd
    #       rm -f /var/run/httpd.pid
            ;;
Software Installed
To be able to play mp3's mpg movie files, vcd's.
  Real Player
for mp3's and stuff		 realplay 7 www.realnetworks.com
  X Multimedia System
(This may have been installed already, I can't remember)		 xmms 1.2.2 www.xmms.org
Simple DirectMedia Layer.
(This was required to create the smpeg plugins below. 		SDL 1.1.4 http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.1.html/a>
smpeg plugins for xmms smpeg-xmms 0.3.1 ftp.xmms.org/xmms/plugins/
MpegTV
to play vcd's, also does mpegs, cost $10. built on the SDL library above.		 mtv1 http://www.mpegtv.com/
MpegTV full-screen extension
to play vcd's, also does mpegs, cost $10. built on the SDL library above. A little less buggy than xmms.		 mtv1 http://www.mpegtv.com/
Other software installed.
  installed mozilla milestone 17 mozzila m17 www.mozilla.org added mozilla to gnome desktop as a new "launcher" had to set run command as cd /usr/local/mozilla; ./run-mozilla.sh

Setting Clock

To set the time on both the system (operating system) and the actual hardware clock, do the following as root. 
/usr/sbin/timeconfig        to set timezone
date                        to see current system time
/sbin/clock		    to see current hardware time
date --set='8/27/00 16:10'  to set system time
/sbin/clock --systohc       to copy system time to hardware clock
Aethestic Tolerability
I couldn't stand not having most of the great TrueType fonts that I was used to seeing on Windows or the Macintosh. The good news is that Red Hat has done 99% of the work for you. All you have to do is download the fonts and install them. I think the only reason that they didn't do this themselves is that it is probably illegal for them to ship the fonts with the system, despite the fact that Microsoft is making them freely available.

First, let us pay homage to those who have done the real work by at least by listing two great references.

As I researched this, I was pretty impressed with the amount of work these people did to get true type fonts to work. They are skirting several patents and have done some great reverse engineering.

I obtained a good set of True Type fonts from Microsoft's website. TrueType core fonts for the Web. From Microsoft, you will get each font in a .exe file that is designed to install the fonts on your windows system. If you want to use them on Linux, I recommend using WinZip (on windows) to open the .exe files and extract just the .TTF files. (or you can benefit from my work and just grab this tar)

Once you have the fonts (all the .TTF files) do the following. Note, this only works on new RedHat (6.2 maybe 6.1) releases. See the above references for other distributions. 


cp *.TTF /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType/
ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale  makes a fonts.scale file
mkfontdir                makes a fonts.dir file

diff fonts.scale fonts.dir  i was surprised to see they are identical
Then, reboot computer or at least do 
   /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart
and then restart your X-session

Test if it worked.

Setting Key Repeat Rate
Lastly, the key rate at which a key will repeat if you hold it down is intolerably slow on the RedHat distribution. It is easy to change. Click on the Toolbox icon on the task bar in the Gnome desktop. Scroll down to Peripherals and then click "Keyboard".

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