linuxsysconfig

Many of us are using US keyboards in EU countries and the keyboard layout only includes the $ (dollar) key. In order to use other currencies such as the Euro, you need to map the Euro symbol to a certain key combination.

On a Fedora system navigate to the System menu –> Preferences –> Keyboard then go to the Layouts tab, select the default layout (e.g. USA) then go to the Options box under Keyboard Model. Here, depending on your Fedora version, you’ll see a line “Adding EuroSign to certain keys” (Fedora 13) or “Adding currency signs to certain keys” (Fedora 14). Select a key that you want to use in combination with a so-called 3rd level key (I use the E key).
Then scroll down a bit and you’ll find the “Key to choose 3rd level” line which allows you to select a key or key combination to use with the E key above to create the Euro symbol (I use Left-CTRL).

That’s it. Now you’ll be able to type the Euro sign (€) by simply pressing Left-CTRL+E.

Kernel failures, crashes, panics and oopses? Do these sound familiar to you? If not you may want to read dedoimedo’s Linux Kernel Crash Book. It is a step-by-step guide to introduce you to kernel crashes and crash analysis, written with simplicity in mind, accessible even to Linux beginners.

You’ll learn about two kernel crash tools:

LKCD (Linux Kernel Crash Dump)

• limitations: unable to save memory dumps to local md RAID devices, netdump server must be on the same subnet

Kdump

• advantages: ia64, ppc64 arch support, sends dumps to a wide range of devices and network shares (NFS, CIFS, FTP, SSH)

The next two chapters describe the crash data collection process and the actual data analysis that is performed to investigate the cause of the crash:

Crash Collection

• crash setup and running the crash utility

Crash Analysis

• analyzing the crash reports (backtrace)

You’ll also learn how to:

• trigger a kernel dump by forcing a kernel panic
echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq ; echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger

• send memory dumps to a remote machine (netdump server)

• compile a kernel module and use it to create a kernel panic.

Enjoy your reading and don’t forget that submitting kernel crash reports is very important for the developers, as the author points out:

When your kernel crashes, you may want to take the initiative and submit the report to the vendor, so that they may examine it and possibly fix a bug. This is a very important thing. You will not only be helping yourself but possibly everyone using Linux anywhere. What more, kernel crashes are valuable. If there’s a bug somewhere, the developers will find it and fix it.

You can get the book from dedoimedo.com.

VirtualBox received a major update a few weeks ago. The latest version 4.0 adds changes to the interface (now called VirtualBox Manager), new virtual hardware and a number of fixes which you can see in the changelog.

Here’s how you can update your existing Vbox 3.x installation on Fedora 14:

The above commands will remove the old package, install the new one and compile the kernel modules. If you want to use USB 2.0 devices on your guests, you’ll also have to install the extension pack (available on the Downloads page).

Oracle OpenOffice 3.3.0 Beta has been released. I gave it a try on my OpenSolaris machine. The installation is pretty basic — download the tarball from download.openoffice.org/all_beta.html, unpack it, then run the setup shell script to install. This new development version can co-exist with older OpenOffice instances on your machine. It is installed in /opt/ooo-dev3 and you can launch it with

Additional links:

• release announcement
• release notes
• download page