Category: Fedora

Fedora related posts

Enabling Cisco WebEx in Fedora 19/20

slaanesh 49 Comments

Enabling Cisco WebEx on a Fedora system is actually a lot easier than it looks by searching on Google. Pretty usual uh? Every time you look for something Linux related, a plethora of posts tell you that you need to compile, download, hack and modify.

This was probably true 10 years ago, but now setting up everything is much more easier than it sounds and usually involves a couple of settings and a couple of packages.

These are the steps required to setup Cisco WebEx on a Fedora 19 system; whether it be x86_64 or i686:

# yum install icedtea-web java-1.8.0-openjdk \
    pangox-compat.i686 libXmu.i686  libgcj.i686 mesa-libEGL.i686 \
    gtk2.i686 libpng2.i686
# setsebool -P unconfined_mozilla_plugin_transition=off mmap_low_allowed=on

The first packages are by good chance already installed on your system and should be the same of your system architecture; while the others need always to be the i686 variant as the WebEx program is compiled for 32 bit processors.

webex

30th October 2013:

Updated information with additional packages for latest WebEX update.

8th January 2014:

As reported in the comments, due to recent Mesa updates, if you don’t have Mesa’s libEGL installed you have to add it. Added to the list of packages required for installation.

No more secondary architectures

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I was notified I can not use Fedora Koji builders for doing personal builds of Fedora forbidden items. This means I have to drop the following architectures from the repositories:

  • CentOS/RHEL 5 – ppc
  • CentOS/RHEL 5 – ppc64
  • Fedora 20 – armv7hl

I don’t have any hardware (or access) to any system like those; so my only chance is to drop support for them. All those architectures are bound to disappear from the repositories with the next round of updates.

CDRtools repository updated

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New version 3.01a17 has been released. Starting from this version packages are built with all architectures enabled; this means that Fedora 20 has inherited armv7hl support and CentOS/RHEL 6 and CentOS/RHEL 5 have now respectively ppc64 and ppc support.

Along with the update, all Fedora 17 packages have been removed now that the distribution has gone EOL.

ARM builds available for Nvidia driver

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Nvidia repository has finally received the armv7hl builds and patches for kernel 3.10. I’ve added a new table that depicts the supported functionalities by distribution.

Operating systemCentOS / RHELFedorarawhide
Driver branchLong LivedShort Lived
Long Lived		Short Lived
Long Lived
Beta
Video Codec SDKYesYesYes
Architectures:

x86_64		YesYesYes
Basic nvidia driver:

nvidia-driver
nvidia-driver-libs
nvidia-libXNVCtrl
nvidia-kmod-common		YesYesYes
CUDA libraries and tools:

nvidia-driver-cuda
nvidia-driver-cuda-libs
nvidia-driver-NVML
nvidia-persistenced		YesYesYes
OpenGL Framebuffer Capture:

nvidia-driver-NvFBCOpenGL		YesYesYes
Nvidia tools:

nvidia-modprobe
nvidia-settings
nvidia-xconfig
YesYesYes
Binary kernel
modules (kABI):

kmod-nvidia		YesNoNo
DKMS kernel
modules:

dkms-nvidia		YesYesYes
aKMOD kernel
modules:

akmod-nvidia		NoYesYes
32 bit compatibility on x86_64:

nvidia-libXNVCtrl
nvidia-driver-libs
nvidia-driver-cuda-libs
nvidia-driver-NVML		YesYesYes
Development

nvidia-driver-devel
nvenc
nvenc-samples		YesYesYes
GLVND librariesYesYesYes
VDPAU librariesYesYesYes
EGLStream-based Wayland external platformYesYesYes
GBM EGL external platform libraryYesYesYes

Guacamole on Fedora and CentOS/RHEL 6

slaanesh 26 Comments

Guacamole is an HTML5 remote desktop gateway. Guacamole provides access to desktop environments using remote desktop protocols like VNC and RDP. A centralized server acts as a tunnel and proxy, allowing access to multiple desktops through a web browser.

No browser plugins are needed, and no client software needs to be installed. The client requires nothing more than a web browser supporting HTML5 and AJAX.

More information at the Guacamole homepage.

Components

There are two parts of which the Guacamole suite is made of; the native server components that should go on the system making the connections to the target machines and the client component (the web interface) that can reside on the same system of the server components or on a separate system.

The proxy required by the web application, guacd, is part of guacamole-server and built along with libguac and all protocol support by the guacamole-server package.

When a user connects to the Guacamole web application using their browser, they are served the JavaScript client for Guacamole.

Both guacamole-server and guacamole-client must be installed for Guacamole to work. No software needs to be installed on any client machine.

RHEL/CentOS and Fedora package status

All Guacamole components are already available in the main Fedora repositories and can be easily installed without any additional repository.

RHEL/CentOS needs the EPEL repository to be enabled and only contain the server components as the full Maven stack required to build the web application is not available in Fedora. For this reason, installing on RHEL/CentOS requires you to put the war package in the appropriate folder on the system.

Supported disitribution summary:

  • Proxy daemon (CentOS/RHEL 6 and Fedora)
  • SSH plugin (CentOS/RHEL 6 and Fedora)
  • RDP plugin with sound and printing support (CentOS/RHEL 6 and Fedora)
  • VNC plugin (CentOS/RHEL 6) with VNC repeater support (Fedora)
  • Web application (CentOS/RHEL 6 from the upstream provided war file, Fedora from the repositories)

All supported desktop protocols can be installed all together or separate from each other. Examples below assume you want to install all Guacamole software (client & server) on the same system with all the protocols available.

Installing the server components

This applies to both Fedora and CentOS/RHEL. Launch the following commands to install the server components; this will pull in all server components:

yum -y install guacd libguac-client-*

Do not forget to enable the services. On Fedora:

systemctl enable guacd

On CentOS/RHEL:

chkconfig guacd on

Installing the client components (web application)

Fedora

In Fedora, launch the following commands to install the main Guacamole web application. This will pull in Tomcat and all the required Java dependencies:

yum -y install guacamole

Enable it at boot:

systemctl enable tomcat

And then configure it. In Fedora, all configuration files are stored in the /etc/guacamole/ path. Just edit those files following the explanation in the configuring Guacamole manual section.

CentOS/RHEL

Launch the following commands to install Tomcat. This will pull in all the required Java dependencies:

yum -y install tomcat6

Enable it at boot:

chkconfig tomcat6 on

Then you need to download the main Guacamole web application archive from the Guacamole homepage. Place the downloaded war file in /var/libt/tomcat6/webapps for Tomcat consumption.

mv guacamole-0.8.3.war /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/guacamole.war

Then you need to find a place to put the configuration files according to the configuring Guacamole manual section. This can be time consuming and quite tricky until you get the configuration right; but after a while it’s very easy.

My personal preference would be to put the files guacamole.properties and user-mapping.xml in /etc/guacamole/ like in Fedora and make sure that the Tomcat service can find the files according to the manual. To do so; issue the following commands:

mkdir -p /etc/guacamole
echo "export GUACAMOLE_HOME=/etc/guacamole" > /etc/profile.d/guacamole.sh
echo "setenv GUACAMOLE_HOME /etc/guacamole" > /etc/profile.d/guacamole.csh
chcon system_u:object_r:bin_t:s0 /etc/profile.d/guacamole.*

Running Guacamole

Once all it’s configured, running it it’s pretty simple. First of all, start all the services.

In Fedora:

systemctl start guacd
systemctl start tomcat

In CentOS/RHEL:

service guacd start
service tomcat6 start

Then point your browser to the Tomcat deployed application. If you’ve not modified Tomcat default configuration the URL is:

http://localhost:8080/guacamole/

Try to login; if you get an “Invalid user” error just look at the Tomcat logs. From my experience it’s usually a configuration problem.

First repositories online!

slaanesh 1 Comment

Welcome to my new WordPress almost-default site!

Most of the repositories are now online, the nvidia-driver repository still needs to be published but it’s a starting point! Thjs website was born to host problematic/proprietary softwre that are forbidden in Fedora.

For now, cdrtools, HandBrake, Steam and the Flash plugin repositories have moved from fedorapeople.org to here. New things are on the way as time permits.

The chocolate brown Lamborghini is not mine, of course.