If you do not want to use the script, here is a step by step breakdown of what it actually does. The things that still need to be installed still are the following:

All the possible multimedia browser-plugins, some more software and some more repositories so the machine can update itself when necessary and the regular backup.

First you will need to run (as root) from the command line this:

wget http://macromedia.rediris.es/macromedia-i386.repo ; mv macromedia-i386.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

What it does, is it downloads and moves information about where to download the Flash plugin for the browser, to the appropriate location. Then you need to add another download repository (livna) with this command:

rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

This downloads and installs the information about a repository for the necessary multimedia parts to your system. Next up we install Adobe Acrobat Reader. I know that everyone now screams: NO!!! its not free. True but this is not a perfect world and some companies create PDF’s with Acrobat that can only be read with it. Believe me, I couldn’t open a gift certificate I was sent with my normal PDF viewer in Mac OS X (Preview).

rpm -ivh \
http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/7x/7.0.9/enu/AdobeReader_enu-7.0.9-1.i386.rpm

NOTE: This will install the English version of Adobe Reader. I can supply a list of direct links of other languages if needs be.

Good, so now we have the download information added and Adobe Reader installed. Only a couple of more things to do and you can hand the machine over to the user.
On the root command line type (or copy paste ) this:

echo -e "remove totem\n install totem-xine libdvdcss libdvdnav flash-plugin gstreamer-plugins-ugly \
gaim-libnotify f-spot\n run\n quit" | yum -y shell


Looks cryptic? Well here is the explanation:

You are feeding a set of options of what to remove and what to install then to yum, yum is the installer/updater for Fedora Core. You are first removing totem, this is the default movie player and we want to keep it , but the version included does not support many formats. We next tell it to install a version of totem, that has DVD support and pretty much any media format support there is, this will also install the plugins necessary for the web-browser. Next we get the flash plugin for the browser and all the possible audio codecs and instant messaging notification capabilities. Last but not least we install f-spot. F-Spot is a small but very good application to organize digital photos, very much like Apple’s iPhoto. It is small and extremely easy to use for anyone. When you hit enter at the end of the line all of this will be done while you sit back and watch it configure the capabilities for your machine.

Now everything is installed but one plugin is not working yet for the web-browser, Java. Instead of going through the process of downloading Suns Java, we will enable the plugin that is shipped with fedora. Why download something twice and then reconfigure everything when one line will make it work anyway. The line is this:

ln -s /usr/lib/gcj-4.1.1/libgcjwebplugin.so /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.7/plugins/

That’s it, if you open your web-browser now and type about:plugins in the address bar, you should see a nice list of everything (like in this shot):

Great so we are nearly done. All that is missing is the backup part. Everyone knows that teaching the average user to backup their files is pretty much a quest for life. So we add a simple script to the “cron” service which runs the script once every week. This script will backup all the home directories , so that any additional users are save too and puts it all into an archive on the disk. It then checks for archives older then 4 weeks and removes them. This way you have 4 weeks of backups and automatically get rid of the old ones. The script you need to copy to /etc/cron.weekly/, is HERE, but again you can just type:

wget http://blog.2blocksaway.com/files/backup-week.sh ; chmod a+x backup-week.sh; mv backup-week.sh /etc/cron.weekly/

which will do it all for you.

And that’s it, if you log out and log back in, you have a perfectly save system for anyone that wants to use it. They can run all the applications and multimedia files they want and not break anything major.Plus they are among the “less vulnerable” targets on the web. One less Windows Zombie and Spyware client.

//Flosse

Popularity: 5% [?]

Pages: 1 2 3 4