KSalup - Winpopup for Linux

Searching popup messaging application for Linux is not hard. Kopete has the feature but the default installation fails in receiving message. Sending message works though. Due to this problem, I try to find another application that can send and receive winpopup message via SAMBA.

Enter KSalup. I couldn't find this package in major Fedora repositories. However, it can be downloaded from the project's download page. After installation, entering basic settings like WORKGROUP, HOSTNAME, ways to find other hosts in LAN, one can use it straight away. Sending and most importantly receiving are OK. However KSalup lacks of add-on feature like some of other winpopup-like applications have, that is sending files.

Put that feature aside, KSalup is a nice winpopup application for Linux. At least you can send and receive messages with your friends who using Windows in your LAN. By not connecting to IM servers outside like Yahoo!, Google Talk, IRC or MSN, one can save a little bit of bandwidth :P.

Some screenshots


Main view

Samba settings for name lookup


Sending message setup


About

Restoring grub

Recently, I installed RHEL first with 3 partitions(/, /boot and /home) and I also created one FAT partition for installing Windows XP. After installing RHEL, I installed MS Windows XP. This left grup being replaced by MS Windows boot loader in MBR. How to restore grub?

Restoring grub boot loader should be trivial if you have the installer CD. In case of RHEL (or Fedora or CentOS), what you have to do is by inserting disc 1 of RHEL disc sets and type linux rescue. After answering a few questions, you will be dropped to console. What next? Type grub-install /dev/hda. This command will install grub boot loader into MBR.

Before this I have been googling for about an hour. The answers I found always like this:

1. chroot /mnt/sysimage
2. /sbin/grub-install --recheck /dev/hda

I had error with those steps. Step 1 means to change your root dir to installed partition which is mounted under /mnt/sysimage directory. If you have no luck, skip step 1 and go straight to step 2. Good luck!.

RPM hung on me

Couple of days ago, I killed yumex because it hung. Afterthat, everything hung. I couldn't run rpm or yum in command line. I tried rebuilding the database with rpm --rebuild but to no avail. Found a solution after googling. The solution :

rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.*

The above command removes any locks left on the rpm database and now you should able to use rpm command. Make sure you run the above command as root for obvious reason.

Upgrading to latest clamav for impatient sysadmin :)

I've just upgraded clamav to the latest (at the time of writing is version 0.91.1) for my firewall (Mandrake 10.1). For impatient sysadmin like me, waiting for official packages to release might take longer than u might expect. So the best way to upgrade is by compiling from source. This was how I did it.

Stopping the service
It's advisable to stop clamav service before installing the new one.

service clamd stop

Downloading the package
wget http://freshmeat.net/redir/clamav/29355/url_tgz/clamav-0.91.1.tar.gz

Extracting the package
tar xzvf clamav-0.91.1.tar.gz

Configure...
cd clamav-0.91.1
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --enable-id-check --enable-dns-fix --enable-bigstack

Note: this configure arguments matching with the previous installation by rpm except for --enable-big-stack and --enable-dns-fix (I think).

Compile and install
make
make install (as root)

Restart the service
service clamd start

Updating the virus database definition
freshclam

Checking clamav version
clamav-config --version