CentOS 7: QEMU

Posted on July 30, 2014 by ehurst

Install a Windows VM on CentOS/RHEL 7 using QEMU — this is the hard way.

VMware won’t build properly on CentOS 7 and all of the suggest fixes failed. The simplest answer is using the included virtual machine, QEMU.

See this quickstart guide first. Sadly, they don’t tell you to install libvirt:

yum install libvirt

Then, turn on the libvirt service:

systemctl enable libvirtd.service
systemctl start libvirtd.service

It still won’t run properly, so reboot!

Whatever OS you wish to install, extract an ISO image from CD/DVD. This way you won’t have to fight permissions. This is true of everything you want to use with your VM. There are various ways to pull off the CD/DVD into an ISO.

Sine I’m running KDE, it’s simplest to use K3B. Select the option to copy your CD/DVD and on the “Options” tab, check the box for “Only create image.” Also, click the “Image” tab because you may want to move the image from the default location up in the /tmp/ directory. Click the folder icon button and select someplace like your home folder.

When you open the Qemu manager (in the main menu under “System > Virtual Machine Manager”) you’ll be prompted for root credentials. It won’t run in user mode.

I didn’t have much luck installing XP; it kept hanging and entering a race condition. Win2K worked fine for this experiment.

Click the button for a new machine. Give it a name like “win2k”. Select to install from “Local install media” then on the next tab choose “ISO image” and navigate to where you had K3B save it. Select OS type and version. I had to tell Qemu to show me all the options for Windows before it listed “Windows 2000”.

The defaults for RAM and CPU are okay, but you can double the CPU if your machine actually has two or more cores and you think you’ll need it. The defaults for storage are probably fine unless you know you need a big storage space.

The rest is a matter of having installed Windows a time or two. There may be some errors flash on the screen at times, but unless they persist, they don’t mean anything. Play with the settings; I found the Cirrus display gave me a lot more screen real estate.

Qemu is downright cranky and sometimes cryptic. I had to manually tell it to add a USB passthrough option so I could connect a jump drive to the VM. Unlike other VMs, Qemu will not make it easy to link the VM to your host file system. You’d have to run a file server (Samba for Windows VMs) and connect through the virtual network link. Worst of all, it takes lots of system resources to run any 32-bit VM and it’s quite laggy, so if you intend to use it a lot, you’ll have to be ready for that. I don’t recommend Qemu for Windows VMs.

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EH&D 4

Posted on July 30, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)

It’s People

People cannot give you objective truth, only their own experience of it. That was inherent in my caveat at the beginning of this book. I’m inviting you to share some part of my experience and I make no pretense of objectivity. Instead, I openly confess to characterizing things.

We can characterize our experience of other humans in this world in the sense that we react to others on three basic levels. Some people are significant to us, demanding a sizable chunk of our attention. It won’t matter whether the interactions are negative or positive, only that it consumes our attention. Others are useful but not really a part of our lives. Again, there may be fondness or dislike, but their individual significance in our existence isn’t that great because they are interchangeable on some level. Beyond that, most of humanity is just that — humanity at large and of no personal significance.

This is entirely normal. It’s not a moral valuation of other folks, but a simple matter of our own personal limits. We don’t have the energy and resources to address more than a certain amount of humanity at any given time. We can’t invest deep personal value in every human, so we should not try. Otherwise, we end up feeling guilty about things that we cannot possibly change.

It also has nothing to do with objective facts. We cannot usefully address anything until we shed the chains of our mythology. Don’t confuse a genuine capacity for empathy with some false moral burden of valuing every human life. The latter leads only to a frantic chase to sacrifice our very selves for nothing. We come to the point we must use the language of not caring again, because despite the richness of our tongue, we have allowed manipulators to hijack the narrative. Let’s break that spell and tell ourselves first quite bluntly: Human life has no intrinsic worth.

Let’s replace it with something better: Every human you encounter has potential value. Not for the fact they exist, but their value arises from the encounter. God becomes the ultimate Real Person for us and we adopt His viewpoint of humanity. Lacking His divine insight into individuals, we simply wait until He reveals to us how we should interact with each one. We can even extend this into the virtual world, though any virtual encounter must shed many of the cues we use to guide how we engage them. Note: If the encounter is one-sided, with no real interaction, that other cannot be for us more than merely useful. They cannot be a real person for us unless we are for them.

That is, unless we want to invest that person with a broad authority in our lives. It’s too easy to turn a one-way commitment into a religion, making the other an object of idolatry. That way lies madness. Humans aren’t deities, nor are imaginary constructs that serve as objects of devotion. Still, there is a sane way to recognize authority.

Everyone serves someone. Most of us serve a lot of someones, which tends to dilute our loyalty and confuse things greatly. We aren’t wired to answer simultaneously to a dozen chiefs with functionally equivalent authority. We can give each one a limited and somewhat distinct dominion within the whole, but we can’t even split our genuine loyalty between two without suffering serious internal damage.

The sane approach is conditional loyalty, contextual obedience with an assurance we must endure the ire of folks who imagine they own more of us than we can give. You probably realize that such problems arise when other folks perceive us as less than fully human. There is a broad evil in our society which cripples the meaning of human significance and perverts human relations by encouraging people to elevate themselves to something they are not.

Inherent in Western Civilization is the elevation of some imaginary standard of reason and logic which serves only as a proxy for the self. In other words, we are taught to make ourselves gods with no equals in humanity, using the excuse that our logic is pure and objective, in theory at least.

We end up with the false notion that things people say are either truth or lies, when virtually all we see and experience is some mixture of both. Even that is misleading, since objective truth does not exist in any useful meaning of the concept. Rather, everyone is sharing their narratives.

While we will surely encounter folks who are consistent only in getting us into trouble, it’s totally wrong and unnatural to classify people simply as liars or truth tellers. That’s unfair to our own human existence, never mind unfair to other humans in general. Lumping people together as the opposition in some particular conflict is where we surrender to unjustified hatred. Thus, we are easily polarized because we insist some communication is either true or false. Even if we discern the difference between fact and falsehood within a statement, that someone would offer a mixed bag like that makes them a liar and an enemy to our Western minds.

It’s not a sane way to operate, in that it ensures we are easily enslaved by those who are talented manipulators. We end up leaving the decision of commitment and service to folks who consider us cattle at best.

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EH&D 3

Posted on July 29, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)

Labels

Most people who know English agree that our language offers a very wide range of subtle flavorings. Our words can be used to paint exquisite images with both artistry and precision. Yet, most people prefer to use that flexibility for deception.

The only reason deception is possible on such a grand scale and with such depth is because of a basic deception about language itself. A primary expectation in the West is that language is meant to convey facts. It can be done to some degree, but this is not the default in our human wiring. Without conscious consideration, we assume that language is supposed to convey an honest report of the speaker’s mind. It’s not that we are unaware of lying, but that we tend to think of accuracy and deception both on the same level in the most simplistic terms.

That is not how we are wired. The fundamental purpose of human communication is conveying meaning in far more subtle and imprecise terms. The default use of language is to tell a story, not factually, but in terms of the impact it had on the narrator. Humans are generally incapable of factual accuracy. We can approach it only when we don’t have any real interest beyond truth itself. Bringing ourselves to that point requires far more than any book, or even a whole shelf of books, can convey.

The problem goes to the very fundamental core programming of our thoughts and assumptions about reality. I contend that this can be fixed, but that it is a task far larger than most people would imagine. Not only are we burdened with a wealth of false assumptions about reality, but we are burdened with a mythology about how marvelous and perfect is our mythology.

Because we believe language is meant to convey facts, and that we are wired to rise to a pure rational response to those facts, we are unable to notice what is actually going on in our subconscious processing. Whether or not our abusers are consciously aware of the process, they are at least well-trained monkeys performing according to what their owners reward, however imperfectly. They feed us carefully disguised lies knowing that we will react as if they had shared a narrative filled with personal meaning.

As social creatures, we are predisposed to merge our lives with others in a given context. We don’t enjoy protracted isolation, so we look for something familiar in others. If you feel what I feel, you are likely to act somewhat as I act. If I can persuade you by narrative to feel a particular way, you’ll tend to act on those feelings. Labeling does not convey facts, but a wealth of totally non-factual information. That is how it is supposed to work. That’s how we are wired and it really makes a big difference if this is what we learn to expect. It’s not a question of believing the person or their words, per se, but of granting a measure of personal loyalty regardless of facts.

In the first place, none of us can possibly obtain a pure and undefiled experience with reality. One writer described our memory as a tape recording with multiple parallel tracks. We experience reality as the passing of time in a particular sequence. Our five senses compose a record of varying width depending on how developed our sensory perception is. But however much of the space on that memory tape is dedicated to the sensory data, our feelings about that experience is geometrically larger in our memories. We humans are incapable of disconnecting that huge experiential factor of emotional evaluation no matter how hard we try.

More, what we might imagine as the proper approach to minimizing the emotional connection of our sensory experiences is based on totally flawed assumptions. We believe we can teach ourselves to be objective, but that effort is diluted by the degree to which we are interested in the experience in the first place. It’s not possible to be objective about something that consumes much of your time and energy.

So, no two of us experience reality in precisely the same way. If you and I were best friends and we passed through life in each other’s back pockets, as it were, we would find ourselves pulled in two directions. On the one hand, to the degree we feel it’s in our best interest to do so, we will tend to merge our personalities and experiences. But in the full tilt of our human natures, we will also make note on some level of things that simply cannot be shared. In the most guttural terms, we cannot both have the same orgasm at the same time. The human state forcibly individualizes us, something we desperately try to ignore at times.

What should scare us is how thoroughly a false experience can be implanted in folks who aren’t aware it is happening. For with that false experience comes all the attendant feelings and commitments. Thus, we come to know things we cannot possibly have experienced, but it seems to us subjectively as all too real. It actually requires some talent and training to avoid this in our Western world.

Meanwhile, we cannot see how this conditioning is actually a normal result of Western mythology. If we had built an intellectual tradition that assumed conditional perception and narrative, we would be much more free to evaluate things differently. We would be less likely to respond with such depth of passion to labels people throw at us in an attempt to manipulate our behavior.

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EH&D 2

Posted on July 28, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)

Grabbing You by the Throat

“Oh my God!”

Her eyes weeping, she put her hand against her lips, knuckles folded. On the screen just across the small room from her was a scene of horrific human suffering. Bombs falling and debris flying, bodies stumbling and falling, blood gushing — all crying out that she must do something!

The propagandists had succeeded. It mattered not which side she took from their point of view; the neighbors next door were weeping at the same sort of scene viewed from the other side in the conflict as they watched on their own screen a broadcast from other propagandists. While each side in this conflict had their respective propagandists pushing their agenda, what lay behind their partisan efforts was another rank of manipulators hoping very much that people would care deeply one way or another.

Not that anyone in the background actually gave a damn about the human suffering on either side, because you can be sure there was enough hatred to go around. That was the whole point: stirring up strife to keep the masses distracted. Those not directly involved should be made to feel it vicariously.

I’m not suggesting that we should stop caring. The problem is the structure and the packaging in which that caring comes wrapped. It’s entirely natural in our context that any reminder of human mortality should shake us. The problem comes in how we allow others to steer the energy that arises from it.

Keeping you tied emotionally to one side or the other will make you a slave. Even keeping you worried about warfare itself, as if we could somehow wish it away, makes you a slave. As long as you are emotionally committed to something that you cannot possibly control, you cannot be free to think and act realistically.

They have stolen your EH&D by suckering you into investing that energy in something you cannot possibly own. For those of us who begin to escape, we often use the language of not caring as a means of contrast. The language of caring has been so thoroughly hijacked that we struggle to find the means to express sanity.

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EH&D 1

Posted on July 27, 2014 by ehurst

(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)

Caveat

This is a pastoral book. Some of my previous works explain my religious point of view: The Mind of Christ, A Course in Biblical Mysticism and The Practice of Christian Mysticism. To summarize for those unfamiliar with my work and my religion, I follow Christ and read the Bible from an Ancient Near Eastern intellectual position. I am not affiliated with any organized religion. I reject Western Civilization and want to teach believers how to live with a foot in two worlds. The focus of this book is helping people disengage from Western mythology, particularly in regard to their expectations, hopes and dreams.

Virtually everyone talking and writing is lying about something. Some do so knowingly. Some could and should know, but may be lying to themselves. Most of us simply don’t know any better, and pass on our lies as the best we think we know.

How does the reader and listener discern the difference? Either he knows the facts for himself and can filter out the junk or he can learn to be skeptical and cynical. Sometimes you can learn an awful lot just from noting what kinds of things people lie about, how and where they tell those lies, and so forth. One of my favorite filters is attempting to assess who gains from the story being told and maybe what they gain.

I have intentionally put myself in the position of having virtually nothing to gain, in the typical sense, in writing this. Aside from some internal sense of peace, writing this stuff won’t likely result in any measurable change in my worldly circumstances. It’s free, as are all my books, and the copyright encourages you to make copies and distribute in any language you like. In fact, the copyright is basically an attempt to prevent anyone changing my words. Otherwise, it’s just making sure readers know whom to blame.

By the time you read much of this, you’ll realize I’m not aiming to build any empires, real or virtual. It would be nice to make new friends, but I’m not particularly interested in them sending money or hanging on my every word. I don’t expect there is any way possible to stir up a major influence in human thought and change behavior in any particular way. I’d much rather readers take off in all directions; otherwise there is no point at all in writing.

To be more precise, my focus is otherworldly. It’s not that I have no use for this world and things belonging to it, but that my use is steered from outside of this world. Should this book have the desired effect, some portion of my readers will embrace a similar orientation and come up with their own answers to everything they encounter. If anything, you should be slightly better equipped at recognizing the right questions.

I want you to build your own expectations, hopes and dreams — hereafter abbreviated in this book as EH&D. Naturally, I’ll have to talk about my own EH&D along with the concept so that you’ll get some idea how I got them. You aren’t supposed to buy mine for yourself, but maybe get a clue to possibilities in pursuit of your own that had not previously occurred to you.

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Psalm 8

Posted on July 26, 2014 by ehurst

Not only do we have several modern songs taken from this, but it stands as a prophetic message. Not prophetic in the popular Western notion of literal meanings hidden in the words as if by magic, this hymn asserts fundamental moral precepts that manifest again and again throughout the ages. This is a revelation of God’s character in the sense of how He does things here in His Creation.

It begins with a winsome assertion of God’s worthiness using His covenant name and title: Jehovah Our Lord. It’s hard to miss, since He has made His glory greater than the beauty of twinkling stars of night, or the blinding power of the sun in daylight.

Indeed, glory and power are inseparable. In the Hebrew symbolism, we see the power of a child’s lungs in a cry that no one can ignore. Such power to compel adults to act! Just so, the power of His glory plucks the heartstrings that only the truly dead can ignore. This was inherent in the Savior’s satirical comment to those who complained that kids were running around acting like Jesus was the Messiah, calling Him the heir to David’s throne. The religious leaders were unable to ignore children calling for their attention to the glory of God manifested in this troublemaker rabbi. Jesus was hinting that the leaders were God’s enemies for opposing any opportunity to glorify the Father.

And it was in that beauty of the clear night sky that David saw a reflection of God’s glory. Compared to that humbling sight, what concern could God have with mere people? How is that God has placed man one step below heavenly beings for their short time on this earth? In the Covenant of Noah God reaffirmed that humans would dominate this world, even though they so thoroughly failed to give Him His proper due. By comparison, the writer of Hebrews notes that of all humans, Jesus alone most assuredly held His high place over the Universe as master and Lord, the obedient agent of His Father’s revelation. Indeed, whatever Jesus taught was as close to God’s character as any human could come. So it was Creation in its limited time of existence was waiting for the full revelation of Christ’s lordship in how His followers conquered life by His teaching.

Perhaps David saw none of that, yet we are assured he would have understood it. That is, he would hardly reject what the writer of Hebrews made of his words any more than he would argue with how Jesus used them. David could not fail to recognize the truth of God however it was manifested, regardless of his penitent recognition of his own mortality and inability to live up to that glory. Thus, he closes this song back where he started, declaring the ineffable glory of his God.

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EH&D: Rumblings

Posted on July 26, 2014 by ehurst

Before I can actually start writing, I have to chase some threads of thought that aren’t going to end up in the book. What follows reflects some of what will surely be in the book, but it does not match the tone and focus of the book. It’s an example of how my mind works while chewing on what seems to me a very large problem.

************

We humans suffer serious limitations. We can imagine pushing the envelope of human capabilities, but most of the time that comes at the cost of other things most humans do. You can’t be the best at everything. Indeed, most of us capable of honest self-appraisal aren’t much good at anything so far as we know.

As a writer, I make no pretense of competing with other writers in the market place. It’s not that no one wants to read my stuff, but that most of the folks who do aren’t all that willing or able to pay for it. You probably already have some idea that the writers who make really big money are pretty talented, but that’s only part of it. These successful writers know how to reach their target audience with their writing, but they also have help from certain gate keepers in the publishing business. If every talented writer got published, there would be such a vast overload of books that almost no one would be famous or get rich enough to keep doing it for pay.

Like everything else in the world, it’s as much politics as anything else. Economies of scale only work when the scale is big, and that means keeping a lot of competition outside the market. Yes, that model is breaking down, but what eventually replaces it is unlikely to be all that different fundamentally unless there is a broad shift in civilization to go along with it. The civilization we live in right now — commonly referred to as Western Civilization — is built on a range of ideas and values that demand we always go for the biggest and best. We are supposed to seek out that one thing at which we can excel and make it pay. We are supposed to seek dominance of scale so that we can luxuriate in the perquisites of winning.

It’s hard to break out of that system when everyone you encounter seems intent on that goal, even if in their own unique way. It seems everyone is looking for that one angle that grants them an advantage in competition for the various things people tend to value.

Even when folks give lip service to “just getting by,” they still refer to the same value system that seems ubiquitous in our world. It always seems to boil down to three things: fleshly comforts, absorbing entertainment or pride at achievement. They tend to come in all sorts of combinations and flavors, but those three elements of human desire do seem to dominate our Western world. We never get enough. Indeed, most of us can’t even get a reasonable share. Whatever it takes to be in the upper tier of those three things we value, most of us never get there. We just aren’t that talented or driven or whatever it takes. Yet we remain prisoners of the system that uses us as mere cattle for the use of those who do make it.

Even when people claim they are opting out of the Rat Race, they still cling to one or more peculiar call from the trio of Western values. The computer geek in his mother’s basement? It’s the entertainment of computers. The serious artiste who only answers the call of his art? It’s a weird combination of pride and entertainment. The Puritan work ethic, rags-to-riches boy? Just a peculiar expression of pride and creature comfort. On and on it goes as we realize it boils down to those three things in every case.

As long as we believe in it, we who can’t compete are the cattle for everyone else to herd around. Every so-called “opt out” path is yet one more expression of that same basic value system. It’s not for nothing a nickname for that value system is “materialism” — an obsession with this material world.

It’s not as if this world has no use or we should all be committing suicide right now. I don’t recommend that at all. Rather, I recommend two things. First, we should get used to being in many ways just one of the herd. That is, insofar as we have any connection to this world, for the most part we deal with averages and commons and all the various peculiar expressions of ordinariness. Embrace it and learn to love it, because the vast majority of what we can accomplish in this world is there. Second is that we must learn to measure value and accomplishment from outside this world. If you have no hopes for something beyond, there’s no point in staying here.

If all your expectations, hopes and dreams are sourced from this world, not only will you be likely forced to endure being ordinary at best, but you’ll never find any sense of peace. You will be doomed to a life of frustration on multiple levels. While many can accept that as the norm, it still does not bring the one shot at peace that is most certainly available. You have to step outside this world to really understand it.

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Another Book Aborning

Posted on July 25, 2014 by ehurst

He said, “I think you are all about bringing order out of chaos.”

I can’t promise that it will be big enough to publish at Smashwords, but there’s a book coalescing in my head. It’s the kind of book I need to serialize here on this blog.

Readers who have been around awhile will recognize how it works: The book writes itself. I don’t sit around trying to think these things up just so I can have something to occupy my mind. My mind is busy all the time, but most of it is unworthy of you fine folks. I’m a man on a mission and what I post here or express in other ways has to pass through the filter of that mission first. A critical element in the whole process is when I succeed at integrating some stuff and discovering a frame of reference that ties that stuff together.

That’s what my perceptive friend meant when he made that comment about “order from chaos.” The first thing I want you to realize is that my writing is not aimed at persuading you to agree with me. Instead, I write to give people a look at the process. Don’t seize upon the results of my philosophizing, but catch a glimpse of how I got there. I’ve never claimed that what I wrote was a word from God in the sense that you need to buy into my answers. I’ve always tried to portray it as an indicator of how God deals with us, so that you’ll be encouraged to find your own answers, your own peace with God.

I do try to link my answers back to divine revelation. I want you to see how “it’s alive and active and sharper than a two-edged sword.” I don’t hide the scars where it has cut from my life something God didn’t want me to have. We are broken in this world and the ideal is fundamentally impossible, even as it remains the ideal. What I hope and dream is that you’ll be captured by your own burning vision and mission to embrace that ground between where we are, broken and dying, and where we could have been theoretically. I find it the most fascinating exploration and I think you’ll like it, too.

It’s easy to get lost chasing all the wrong questions. The ground between us and God’s perfect ideal for humanity is alive, not static and not always self-evident. No two of us can possibly find the exact same thing. Uniformity is not even possible, but the hardest part is helping folks understand that it’s also not desirable. That misunderstanding is a very big part of what I complain about when I discuss epistemology and Western versus other intellectual traditions. Our world intentionally confuses unity with uniformity, and demands the latter. I’m trying to point out how the former is what God offers, and the latter is more a product of Satan perverting God’s offer.

So the working title for now is Expectations, Hopes and Dreams (EH&D). It pulls in a bit more of my assertion that Christian Mysticism is often far more practical than the common Western approach to things. If you eliminate from your EH&D things you could not have and shouldn’t want, you’ll have a much clearer field of view in seeking your own entrance into God’s great offer.

I’ll explain that the trigger was the recent disturbances in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. There’s already an awful lot of facts and ideas floating in my head about that part of the world in regards to history and revelation. I’ve been mulling over how so very many people are distracted by these events and in places like the Ukraine in the sense that they hold EH&D for those places. That’s about as silly as it gets. It’s highly impractical. But in order to point that out, I have to work a bit at exposing all the false EH&D and where they come from. In case you are wondering, this post over on Old Jules’ blog serves as a proximate trigger, the point at which a shadow was scraped off the side of all that stuff in my head and I realized it was something I should address. You’ll note it’s a reblog of something posted elsewhere, but that’s not the point. That post helps rip the cover off some big lies, but that in itself reflects a much bigger problem I feel needs addressing.

So get ready for another book. If you don’t want to read it, stay away from my blog, because I’m going to disgorge the contents of my mind on this stuff for the next few days, at least.

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CentOS 7 and 64-bit Mozilla Stuff

Posted on July 24, 2014 by ehurst

CentOS 7 comes with the ERS (Extended Release Support) version of Mozilla software. This is typical of the basic concept behind RHEL/CentOS and other clones, that you probably only have to install the OS once in the lifetime of the hardware. It will be supported in some fashion for a very long time, so if it runs okay when you first install it, chances are you are done with that.

For example, a default install gives you Firefox 24.x, which is the current ERS version. If you want to install Thunderbird from the standard repositories, you’ll get the same thing. For now, Seamonkey is not available from the repositories I know about. Should you decide you really want the newest version, you’ll need to be careful to find the latest in 64-bit. The typical route through the Mozilla.org websites will not get you there easily. In fact, 64-bit Thunderbird is hidden completely. It’s there, but not easily found.

The proper route is simply start from the FTP folders in the first place: go here. From that starting point, you can drill down into each of the various folders until you find what you seek. For example, the latest and greatest 64-bit Thunderbird as of this posting date is in this folder. Notice where that takes you and observe how it is structured. It’s similar for the other Mozilla projects. You may not want the various releases with lower case letters like “b” as they are beta software.

Once you download what you seek, you’ll find a big, fat b-zipped tar file. Decompress it unwrap it. I do it the old way from the CLI:

bunzip2 thunderbird-31.0.tar.bz2
tar -xvf thunderbird-31.0.tar

I like to watch stuff one step at a time, but if you want to know the shortcuts, you can try other hints you find by searching on the Net or in the manpages (i.e., man bzip2).

You’ll end up with a “thunderbird” folder wherever you performed this operation. Simply move that over into your basic “home” folder. Since I’m using the KDE4 desktop on CentOS 7, I need only right-click on the desktop and chase the context menu listings to create a link to application. Change the name to something meaningful to you, say “Thunderbird” and then on the “Application” tab go down to the “command” line and click “Browse”. The window that opens will allow you to select your own home folder (tagged by your username), then you can drop down into the “thunderbird” folder and find the only file there simply named “thunderbird”. Click that and create the desktop link. The icon will be generic, but for some reason you can’t change that until the thing exists. Right-click on this icon and select “Properties” and you’ll get a slightly different window with that generic icon prominently displayed. Click that and select “Other icons” and “Browse”. Chase back down through the “thunderbird” folder this way: thunderbird/chrome/icons/default/ and select the largest one there. Finish up and you now have your latest and greatest version installed in your own home folder.

The advantage here is updating. You don’t need root credentials to update an executable in your own files. While the application is open, click in the menu line “Help” and select “About Thunderbird” and it will open a smaller window and check for updates. If it needs to update, it should download for you the update of the exact same 64-bit version and tell you to restart once it’s finished. Thus be it ever from now on, we hope.

If you chose to do this with Seamonkey, it’s pretty much the same deal. However, for Firefox we have a complication, because there is already a Firefox installed by default. You either have to log in as root and remove it, or teach them to coexist and run side-by-side. That’s not easy with stuff from Mozilla. They like to use the same profile by default and argue about which version of your add-ons will work. On top of that, even with two profiles, the one already running will simply respawn a new instance of the same version. It’s tricky. We’ll fix this by using the commandline switches that come with Firefox.

First, open any terminal application (I prefer KDE’s Konsole for most things) and launch Firefox there, but with a switch to create a new profile:

firefox -ProfileManager

This opens a little window that lists what you have — likely “default” — and allows you to create another. Pick a simple name, perhaps your system username, and create a new profile. Now, decide which one will use which version of Firefox. Simplicity suggests you would leave default for the ERS version and your new profile for the latest version of Firefox. Now, right-click on your main menu button on the panel and select “Edit Applications”. You’ll find a window with the menu system outlined. Find and open the item for launching the pre-installed version of Firefox (under “Internet”). Find the “command” and change it to something like this:

firefox -P default -new-instance %u

What we do here is add some switches. The “-P” means use a particular profile, followed by the name — “default” in this case. The “-new-instance” tells Firefox not to connect this launch with any already running Firefox instance. That “%u” is used by KDE in case you have Firefox set as your default browser. When you create the launcher for your newly installed Firefox running from your home folder, use a similar command for that launcher, but change the profile name to whatever you created for that.

Enjoy!

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CentOS 7 Desktop: Unneeded Services

Posted on July 23, 2014 by ehurst

If you run Windows, you can find some really great advice from Black Viper about which services you need or don’t need and under what circumstances. Scroll down and check the page links he has. For quite some years his has been the most reliable voice on such matters.

So far, I haven’t found anything equivalent for RHEL/CentOS 7. You can learn about how to check and turn on/off and enable/disable them on this page but there is nothing us mere mortals can read to discern what we need and what we don’t for our home or SOHO desktop use.

In this new release, RHEL has designed lots of things differently. Used to there would be a lot of services you just didn’t need and could easily turn them off using a GUI tool. That tool is gone, but so is the long list of services to kill. It’s pretty simple these days:

bluetooth
rpcbind
ssh

In each case I run both the commands for stopping and for disabling. I suppose you realize that if you are doing this on a machine where you plan to connect Bluetooth devices, you leave that one alone. That rpcbind is for NFS file server systems, and ssh is for use by technicians who need to log in remotely. That’s also a security risk for those of us who aren’t running these machines remotely, but right in front of us with a keyboard and all that stuff.

Please note that if you aren’t at all using my trick for connecting to a Windows machine that is sharing your home Internet connection, you also don’t need nfs-lock. If you need to run a Samba client, then you need nfs-lock. So far as I can tell, just about everything else in that list is pretty important to keep running.

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