K desktop environment

This month’s CD includes the final release of KDE–K desktop environment

version 1.1. This version comes with a new installation program called install-kde-1.1,

which makes KDE easy to install or upgrade.

We assume you’ve installed Red Hat 5.2 Linux from the March PCQ CD. Those who are

using Red Hat 5.0 will need to upgrade to 5.2 before installing this package. Further, the

X-Window system should be up and running.

To install, first log in as root (the super user) and shutdown the X-Window system. If

you’re in run-level 5, come down to run-level 3. To do this, type telinit 3 at

the shell prompt.

Run-level 3 puts Linux into multi-user console mode.

Next create a temporary directory wherever you wish, to open the KDE rpm packages. A

good choice would be in root’s home directory.

The "mkdir /root/tmp ; cd /root/tmp " command should do it. You should

now be in the /root/tmp directory. Insert the April PCQ CD and mount it in /mnt/cdrom by

typing the following command:

mount /mnt/cdrom

Now untar the KDE packages by typing:

Tar fx

/mnt/cdrom/cdrom/linux/kde/kde-1.1-rh5x-i386-rpms-complete-set.tar

A huge bunch of rpms should open up in the /root/tmp directory. Do take a look at them

using the ls command.

Install the kde-installer package by typing rpm -Uvh

/root/tmp/kde-installer-1.1-1.i386.rpm

Fire up the KDE installation program, type install-kde-1.1

KDE installer will ask you a lot of questions. An important one is "Give the

location of the KDE-1.1 RPM packages: ". Give the full path of the

directory into which you untarred the KDE packages. In this case, give /root/tmp.

Toward the end of the installation, kde-installer should prompt you for users

who’ll want to use the KDE desktop. Enter the login names of all such users.

If more users want to switch to this desktop later, log in as the user and run the

usekde shell script.

If you want X-Window system to start up every time Linux boots, open up the

/etc/inittab file and look for the following line:

id:3:initdefault:

Replace this with:

id:5:initdefault:

Next time you start Linux, the X-Window system should come up immediately. That’s

it! KDE for Linux should be up and running on your system.

Growth

susceptibility of system information

"dmesg" is a file that

contains boot-up messages and is perhaps the smallest of the log files.

"maillog", as is obvious, contains a log of all incoming and outgoing e-mail.

These are created by the message transfer agent (MTA) on the system. Sendmail is the

default MTA on Linux, and logs generated by it are logged in maillog. The amount of log

information in this file depends on the log level setting in the sendmail configuration

file sendmail.cf.

"messages" is a good storehouse

of information. The kernel and many other applications that you use are programmed to log

their information to this file. The log information in this file is coordinated by a

mechanism called syslog (short for system log), with the syslog daemon (syslogd) providing

the mechanism on the system. "named" logs its messages in this file, and so does

"pppd" when you use it in debug mode. I have a small script, "nuke"

that I wrote to kill processes on my system, and this uses syslog to log information in

the messages file about the processes it killed. The "secure" file logs connect

and login attempts into your ftp server, as well as failed remote login attempts into your

machine. The "wtmp" file provides a record of user logins and their session

times, and "last" is a utility that uses this file to provide the data in a

readable format. last is typically used to examine the chronological sequence of logins to

the system.

Now that you’ve some idea of how

system information uses up disk storage, it’s important to prune these files and

release disk space. logrotate can be used very effectively to do this. But, it isn’t

enough to rotate and throw away the system information. It’s essential to scan the

system information at least on a daily basis, to ensure that the system and all

applications are working fine. From the system security perspective, it’s an

invaluable practice to scan this information. Hence, there is a need to backup these

important log files. (Refer to the article Backups and Disaster Recovery in PC

Quest, March 1999, page 83)

I’ve touched upon a very small but

essential part of system administration here. The amount of system log information

generated is proportional to usage, the number of users as well as the applications

running. For example, if it’s a personal machine and you use e-mail heavily,

you’ll probably have to pay attention to the size of /var/log/maillog.

If as a systems administrator, I were to be

granted a wish, I’d wish that future releases of Linux include in them an automated

report generator that would give me a report periodically—a summary of the valuable

information in all these log files. In my next article, we’ll take a closer look at

logrotate.