Category: Linux

I ran into a rather obscure problem a few weeks ago with the KDE-Live Version of Fedora14. I was unable to connect to WPA-Enterprise systems (PEAP and all of that jazz). According to our IT wizards and from everything I could tell by checking the logs, I was connecting to the corporate network just fine but my machine was automagically deauthenticating for reason=23 (802.1i failed) or reason=3 (random local choice).

I finally figured out the root cause of it this morning: Fedora14 needs some libraries from GNOME for this type of Network. No idea why. I ran into this problem a few years ago and had an inkling that it may be the case now. I was convinced after I found a post on some website at the end of the Internet through Google. So, if you need to install GNOME on the KDE-Live Version of Fedora14, just run:

yum groupinstall “GNOME Desktop Environment”

Hopefully in the future I will take my own advice and never install from the Live disk!

Installing the IBM Installation Manager on the KDE Live Version of Fedora 14 requires a lot of extra packages that are not installed by default. I installed both 32 and 64bit versions of the following packages to get the Installation Manager to install and run properly:

• gcc (all of it)
• gtk2 and gtk3
• libXtst

Note that installing the first two will make it possible to do a silent install of the IBM Installation Manager, but to actually run it or do a regular install, you will have to install libXtst. Also, the IBM Installation Manager creates a folder called var/ibm/InstallationManager if you do a user install and the log file can be found in var/ibm/InstallationManager/pluginState/.log .

The Problem

Unzipping a file in Linux is pretty straight-forward with the unzip command. However, if you find that the command

$ unzip ReallyHugeFile

returns an error about the file size being too big, then you will have to use another tool.

The Solution

The 7za utility from the p7zip package can handle really huge files. You can download and install this utility on Fedora by using yum as root:

$ yum install p7zip p7zip-plugins

To extract a file, use the command

$ 7za e <zip file>

where <zip file> is the name of the file.

Notes

7za was a quick an easy solution to my problem. I was trying to unzip a 4.8GB file and unzip couldn’t handle it. 7za can theoretically handle a file of size 16 exabytes. The tool printed some diagnostic information on execution and was able to detect both the large size of the file and the correct number of cores of my desktop. It was very fast compared to unzip and it put my machine under a moderate load (LA ~ 4.0).