Advanced Yum

Yum History

Sometimes after an update you may want to revert to an older version of a package.

Following command shows you summary of last few yum transactions:

yum history

If you want to see more details, use the command:

yum history info 26

where 26 is to be replaced with the ID of the particular transaction you are interested in.

Search for a particular package

 Try
yum search libXss


Happy yumming!

Making Gome 3 Usable ( 11 Tips and a Confession)

After installing the latest version of Gnome 3 if you were shocked by the lack of usability and wondered how hard or impossible it was to configure small things, say, window font size then I have to confess that this is exactly what I also felt when I installed a fresh copy of Gnome 3 flavored Fedora.

Still, I'm a fan of Gnome 3 and after relevant customization I find it more usable than Windows 7 or OS X 10.8.

Here's a list of important changes I make. You may have to change the values of parameters so that they work well on your hardware.

1. Install custom fonts:

mkdir ~/.local/share/fonts

  Dump your favorite fonts in this folder. My favorite are Verdana and Arial.

2. Improve the interface:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor '1.7'

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences titlebar-font 'Arial Narrow Bold 0'

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Arial Narrow 11'

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings close "['<Alt>Q']"

You might have noticed that now I have no way of closing a window with mouse. Only way to do is to press Alt-Q.

3. In mouse and touchpad settings enable "two finger scroll" and "tap to click"

4. Resize Gnome panel

http://useful-linux-tips.blogspot.in/2013/02/resize-gnome-panel.html

5. Remove unwanted entries from Nautilus

http://useful-linux-tips.blogspot.in/2013/02/modify-places-menu-in-nautilus-file.html

6. Remove all favorite apps from gnome panel except firefox, nautilus and one or two other apps that you frequently use.

7. I generally clear my home folder and tell browsers to directly download in my home folder from where I transfer important data (if any) to a different partition which is fully organized.

  rmdir Public/ Documents/ Music/ Pictures/ Videos/ Templates/ Desktop/ Downloads/

8. Disable recent documents:

  rm .local/share/recently-used.xbel; mkdir .local/share/recently-used.xbel

9. Remove all default bookmarks by erasing all contents of

    vi .config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks

   Rather, manually bookmark folders that you frequently visit.

10. Disable auto update from all accounts by command

 gpk-prefs

11. Make fonts smooth if needed:

http://useful-linux-tips.blogspot.in/2013/01/smooth-font-rendering-on-fedora-18.html

That should make it usable enough.

Convert mp3 to wav format using mpg123

Audacity that comes from Fedora's repository, by default, does not support loading and saving mp3 files.

Using mpg123 (you may need to install mpg123), mp3 files can be easily converted to wav files for further editing.

mpg123 -w music.wav music.mp3

I recommend saving your work in lossless compressed format like flac rather than mp3.

Temporarily disable built-in camera

To disable:

# modprobe -r uvcvideo

To enable:

# modprobe uvcvideo

Fedora Wallpaper

Got the original image from http://blog.desdelinux.net/23-excelentes-wallpapers-de-y-para-fedora/ and a bit tweaking on GIMP resulted in this.