So I've been bound to windows desktops for so long, that it's been my second nature for workstations. My de facto preference for most server environments are Linux, so I've been between both worlds for quite some time.
My Windows7 machine suffered an OS failure a couple months ago, after almost 4 years of constant everyday use. I installed Windows 8 and was relatively happy with it until it just decided to screw over my WIFI. Nobody messes with my WIFI.
I finally decided to chuck the 15 year Redmond tether and go for broke. I'm gonna run Fedora 20 as a desktop environment, and I'm never looking back. Or so I hope.
Anyhow, FC20 is nice, but to make the environment a bit more aesthetic and a bit more intuitive for use by longtime Windows users I've compiled a "Sanity list". These make everyday use a bit less complicated and quite easy to forget that you're running Linux, traditionally seen as a big, bad, complex beast.
I'll explain why in line, followed by the instructions to accomplish on Fedora 20. This assumes a base Fedora 20 installation has been completed, with a default Gnome desktop.
- install cinnamon, a pretty good looking desktop environment.
This can be selected from the settings icon on the default login screen and it will be the future default afterwards.
- install infinality, some font eyecandy.
You have to admit that MS ships with some solid fonts. If you want to avoid formatting issues with opening MS Office docs with LibreOffice, this is a pretty good idea.
As much as I didn't want to, there are still several sites that I use that are flash based. A necessary evil.
Chrome is a great addition to Fedora, compliments the use of Firefox, which I personally find to be a bit bloated now.
Skype, almost a universal tool for free webcalling. I installed it because I use it a lot for international calling to the US for free.
I've been using dropbox on all my boxes, it's a great way to keep some personal docs on the cloud and have multiple versions for backup.
I consider this an optional item. You may or may not actually need this.
TeamViewer is an excellent desktop sharing/control tool that comes in handy to access my laptop remotely if needed.
These control some suspend/hibernate options when the lid is closed. You can decide if you need these.
That's it for now. I'll add to this post and drop a datestamp with any new additions!
I recently delivered a free 5 (half) day workshop on an Introduction to Linux Systems Administration. The information was culled from a range of web sources, classes and personal notes, so all credit to the respective sources. All practicals were tested on a vanilla CentOS 6.5 Virtual Machine on VMWare Player, which is free for personal use.
I'd like to share the PDF version of the presentation and if you have any feedback, drop me a line. It's very much a work in progress and I welcome your contributions!
Turns out that it's caused due to the automatic yum update to version 2.1.x of the xtrabackup application, which uses the MySQL 5.1+ plugins and fortunately, it's a very quick fix, even though I nearly pulled out what little hair I have to figure it out. Thankfully percona includes the last version with their repo, so it's just to specify the version and it's gonna work again.
1. Remove existing xtrabackup package.
It's as simple as that! No need to pull out your hair just yet or try to build from source, which is it's own piece of work thanks to cryptic documentation.
To avoid this from happening again, I'd suggest disabling the percona repo when doing a yum update for the entire server, or manually patching the version by calling yum update percona-xtrabackup-20.