Randell's Blog » Django

Fedora 15 pre/post-installation setup

Randell — Sat, 28 May 2011 18:16:38 +0000

I have mentioned in my previous post containing GNOME 3 screenshots (which I should say is a thing of beauty) that I’ve installed Fedora 15.

During the pre-installation customization page, I clicked some of the familiar items that I would normally install eventually:

Applications

Design Suite (contains GIMP and OptiPNG, plus more)
Office/Productivity (contains LibreOffice)
Sound & Video (checked Amarok)

Development

Development Tools (checked cmake and PyLint)
Fedora Eclipse
Java Development
Web Development (checked Django)

Servers

Mail Server (SendMail)
MySQL Database (checked php-mysql)
PostgreSQL Database
Printing Support
Server Configuration Tools
Web Server (mod_python, mod_ssl, php, php-ldap)

Here’s my post-installation setup:

Update

Updating for the first time also installs the GPG keys, which are needed so you won’t get errors regarding unsigned packages when you use the “fedora” and “updates” repositories of Fedora. In our terminal, as root, type:

yum update

RPM Fusion

From the RPM Fusion website site:

RPM Fusion provides software that the Fedora Project or Red Hat doesn’t want to ship. That software is provided as precompiled RPMs for all current Fedora versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5; you can use the RPM Fusion repositories with tools like yum and PackageKit.

RPM Fusion is a merger of Dribble, Freshrpms, and Livna; our goal is to simplify end-user experience by grouping as much add-on software as possible in a single location.

To install both the free and non-free repositories, simply download and double-click the RPM Fusion free for Fedora Rawhide and what will become Fedora 15 (Alpha, Beta and snapshots) and RPM Fusion nonfree for Fedora Rawhide and what will become Fedora 15 (Alpha, Beta and snapshots) from the RPM Fusion Configuration page.

Google Chrome

Download the rpm file from the Chrome download page. Installing it is as easy as double-clicking the file.

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox add-ons that use.

Azureus

This is what I use to download torrents.

yum install azureus

p7zip

For operating with the 7z file archiving format.

yum install p7zip

Filezilla

For transfering files between machines.

yum install filezilla

pgadmin3

For PostgreSQL database administration.

yum install pgadmin3

VLC

For watching videos without worrying about the file formats:

yum install vlc

Unrar

For extracting RAR file archives.

yum install unrar

Grip

CD-ripper with database lookup/submission to share track information over the net, supports OGG and FLAC and adding ID3v1/v2 to MP3s.

yum install grip

Skype

They now have Skype 2.2 Beta for Linux. Simply download and double-click the RPM installer.

PulseCaster

This is what I use for recording Skype calls.

yum install pulsecaster

vsftpd

Secure, fast FTP server

yum install vsftpd

Alacarte

To create custom application launchers.

yum install alacarte

Tomcat 6

yum install tomcat6

PHP

Some PHP modules that I need for web development.

yum install php-xml

Sun JDK

Download Java SE SDK RPM Installer from the Java SE Downloads page and execute the similar commands as root:

Run the Java JDK binary:

chmod +x /home/randell/Downloads/jdk-6u25-linux-i586-rpm.bin
sh /home/randell/Downloads/jdk-6u25-linux-i586-rpm.bin

Install Java JDK java, javaws, libjavaplugin.so (for Firefox) and javac using alternatives –install:

alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_25/jre/bin/java 20000
alternatives --install /usr/bin/javaws javaws /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_25/jre/bin/javaws 20000
alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so  libjavaplugin.so /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_25/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so 20000
alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac javac /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_25/bin/javac 20000
alternatives --install /usr/bin/jar jar /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_25/bin/jar 20000

Add the following JAVA_HOME environment variable to /etc/profile:

export JAVA_HOME="/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_25"

MySQL Workbench

For designing databases visually.

yum install mysql-workbench

Calibre

For converting e-books to different formats and for managing your e-book collection.

yum install calibre

bash auto-completion

yum install bash-completion

chmsee

HTML Help viewer for Unix/Linux (for viewing .chm files).

yum install chmsee

Development files for Qt toolkit

To develop applications using the Qt toolkit. And include the graphical configuration tool as well.

yum install qt-devel qt-config

GStreamer non-free plugins

From the Fedora Unity Project:

GStreamer is a multimedia framework used by many media players including rhythmbox, banshee, totem, listen, exaile and others. Due to legal issues support for various non-free formats , including mp3 files, aren’t included with GStreamer by default. You can add support for mp3 and other formats by installing an add-on package from the third party repository rpm.livna.org

yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg phonon-backend-gstreamer

FFMpeg

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-libs

DVD playback

yum install libdvdread libdvdnav lsdvd

Aptana

Downloaded Aptana 3 from http://www.aptana.com/.

GnomeTweakTool

One of the things that weren’t immediately obvious when I was setting-up Fedora 15 was the ability to easily change the font sizes for applications, documents and windows. Googling led me to GnomeTweakTool, which allows us to customize “advanced” GNOME 3 options.

yum install gnome-tweak-tool

After installing TweakTool, I customized my fonts as follows:

Document font: Sans 10
Monospace font: Monospace 10

File Management Preferences

From a Nautilus window, go to Edit > Preferences. I modified mine to reflect the following changes:

Default View > View new folders using: List View
Icon View Defaults > Default zoom level: 66%
List View Defaults > Default zoom level: 33%

Favorites

I customized my Favorites to include these frequently used applications:

Chrome
Firefox (added by default)
Terminal
Files (added by default)
Amarok
Eclipse
Empathy
Take Screenshot

Terminal

Edit > Profile Preferences > Colors > Foreground and Background

Use colors from system theme: Unchecked
Built-in schemes: Green on black

Text Editor

Edit > Preferences

View
- Line Numbers > Display line numbers: Checked
- Current Line > Highlight current line: Checked
- Right Margin > Display right margin: Checked
- Bracket Matching > Highlight matching bracket: Checked
Editor
- Tab Stops
  - Tab width: 4
  - Insert spaces instead of tabs: Checked
- Automatic Indentation > Enable automatic indentation: Checked
- File Saving
  - Create a backup of files before saving: Unchecked
  - Autosave files every: 5 minutes
- Font & Colors > Color Scheme: Oblivion

* I’ll simply update this post if ever I come across software I use that I forgot to list here.

UnacceptableVersionError: django 1.1 was requested, but 1.2.1.final.0 is already in use

Randell — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 02:00:01 +0000

The Django version I have in my machine is 1.2.1, while one of my apps running on Google App Engine utilizes use_library to use Django 1.1. Apparently, Django versions later than 1.1 is not included in the Google App Engine SDK. So everytime I try to access my app on my dev machine, I get this error:

UnacceptableVersionError: django 1.1 was requested, but 1.2.1.final.0 is already in use

I can probably downgrade the version of Django in my machine, but that would mean all my other apps will have to use the downgraded Django version as well. And I don’t want that, since I want to use the latest version whenever possible. So one possible solution is to use virtualenv for my Google App Engine app. Virtualenv allows the creation of isolated Python environment, which is exactly what I need.

First, we need to install virtualenv. In Fedora, we can install virtualenv by executing the following command as root:

yum install python-virtualenv

Next, we use virtualenv to create an environment that has its own installation directories, that doesn’t share libraries with other virtualenv environments. We can even choose to not use other globally installed libraries. To do that, execute the following command:

virtualenv --no-site-packages ENV

ENV here is the directory of our new environment. This also creates ENV/lib/python2.6/site-packages on Python 2.6, where any libraries that will be installed will go. This also creates ENV/bin/python, which is a Python interpreter that uses this environment. Anytime this interpreter is used, the libraries in this environment will be used. The command also installs Setuptools for the environment, and if ENV/bin/easy_install is used the packages will be installed into the environment.

The --no-packages option during the build causes the environment to not inherit any packages from /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages. This is useful if we don’t want to depend on the packages there or simply want more isolation from the global system.

Next, we’ll use pip to install the necessary packages in our virtualenv environment. Of course, we need to have pip installed in our system first. In Fedora, we can install pip by executing the following command as root:

yum install python-pip

And then installed the Django version we need into the environment:

pip install -E ENV Django==1.1

To use our new environment, we need to activate it with the following command:

source ENV/bin/activate

Copy the Google App Engine SDK to our new environment and then run our Google App Engine app from that environment like

~/ENV/google_appengine/dev_appserver.py ~/path/to/app

You can follow the same steps to create isolated environments for each of your Python projects.

How to find Django version

Randell — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:12:52 +0000

There are cases when you would want to know the version of Django that is being used in your Python installation. To do that, go to your Python console and execute the following commands:

>>> import django
>>> django.VERSION

In my machine, it showed the following:

(1, 2, 1, 'final', 0)

UnacceptableVersionError: django 1.1 was requested, but 1.2.1.final.0 is already in use