Installing TrueCrypt in Fedora 9

Posted on July 4th, 2008 in Fedora, Security by admin

TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) is a popular free on-the-fly disk encryption software that can encrypt files, partitions, whole disks and even a windows installation. It is an extremely useful and important tool if you wish to keep personal and confidential data from being accessed by unauthorized people. TrueCrypt even supports plausible deniability, allowing you to hide an encrypted volume inside another volume. TrueCrypt volumes are indistinguishable from random data, so an adversary cannot prove that you have a TrueCrypt volume hidden inside a dummy encrypted volume.
Unfortunately, the TrueCrypt website only provides binaries for Ubuntu and OpenSuSE, so for those of us running other distros, the only option is to compile from source. The steps below outline the installation procedure on a Fedora 9 machine.

A step-by-step guide to building a new SELinux policy module

Posted on May 12th, 2008 in Fedora, Redhat by admin

by DanWalsh

Who’s afraid of SELinux? Well, if you are, you shouldn’t be! Thanks to the introduction of new GUI tools, customizing your system’s protection by creating new policy modules is easier than ever. In this article, Dan Walsh gently walks you through the policy module creation process.

A lot of people think that building a new SELinux policy is magic, but magic tricks never seem quite as difficult once you know how they’re done. This article explains how I build a policy module and gives you the step-by-step process for using the tools to build your own.

How to build a rpm file from a source file

Posted on March 11th, 2008 in Commandline Tools, Fedora, OpenSuse by admin

This is for the Redhat, Suse, Fedora, and CentOS users. Sometimes when you try to search for rpm packages, the only thing that you find is the source file. You can create a rpm file using this tar.gz or tar.bz2 file:

  1. save the source file(usually in tar.gz or tar.bz2 format)
  2. extract the files: tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz or tar -xvjf filename.tar.bz2
  3. open the folder of the extracted file and find .spec file
  4. type: rpmbuild -bb filename.spec
  5. see the error and continue according to the error until you finish creating rpm files
  6. type: rpm -Uvh filename.rpm to install

Get the best out of yum with yum-fastestmirror, yumex, & yum-utils

Posted on March 10th, 2008 in Fedora by admin

With yum, “Dependency Hell” is pretty much a thing of the past. Yum acts as a front end to rpm by automatically downloading all necessary dependencies for you (assuming it can find them) and then installs each of the dependencies in the correct order, followed by your desired program. yum does this by looking for programs and dependencies within central repositories (or through repository mirrors) such as the Fedora and Livna repositores. Secondary repository sources can also be added from other locations by creating an appropriate .repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d/.

But even though yum is a powerful application there are applications we can add onto it to make it even more powerful.

The basics of yum

Posted on March 6th, 2008 in Fedora by admin

yum’s commands are very easy and intuitive. These commands will be very useful in managing software in Fedora  (based) systems.
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Video to Come

RPM Cheat Sheet

Posted on March 5th, 2008 in Basics, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse, Redhat by admin

The following will help many navigate through the RPM system:

Video Coming Soon.

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