Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf", line 9: reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated.

Installed some fonts the other night in the new Fedora 18 KDE, and today when I went to load kcharselect from terminal I got this message.

Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf", line 9: reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated.

I did a bit of Googling and it seems to be a common problem across many distros. I found this in an Ubuntu forum and it seemed to take the problem away.

mkdir .config/fontconfig

mv .fonts.conf .config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

When I ran the mkdir command, it said I already had the proper directory, so I ran the second command and everything seems to work fine since. I downloaded my favorite set of dingbats and they installed fine. Made this real quick to test them out.

Punk dingbats font downloaded at. http://fontzzz.com/font/13093_punk_dingbats.htm

Install Broadcom Driver Dell Inspiron 1750 Linux Laptop

So I had my first major Linux disaster yesterday. Completely crashed the system, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. More on that in a later post. For now , I had to reformat my computer and reinstall the dreaded Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g drivers. This was one of the reasons I was putting off deleting my Windows partition and making this Laptop a Linux only machine. Getting the wireless networking running on this machine was a complete nightmare the last time I tried to do this. I made notes the last time but what should of only took me a couple hours turned into a 5 or 6 hour affair because I had my notes all messed up with other information that confused me. Anyway, I thought I would post the process I used to get this wireless card working on a Dell Inspiron 1750 running Fedora 18.

O.K, This is what worked on my Dell Inspiron 1750 running Fedora 18 with KDE. When I run lspci from terminal this is what it shows as my Network Controller.

Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

After doing some research I decided I needed these drivers. Now I had earlier release drivers but this only worked with these specific drivers. You need the broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2 drivers. I found mine here, and am told it's a safe site to obtain these drivers from. Scroll through the list, find your drivers and download them to your home directory.

Then open up your terminal program and ls to make sure the file is there. Then type in the following commands. I originally found this the last time I had this problem , I did change it around a little, but the credit should be given to its originator, however, it was found long before I had this blog, and I didn't notate my notes with proper credit. Sorry.

Type exactly as shown in terminal. Make sure to su or sudo, you need to be root.

first type:
export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"
next type:
tar xjf broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2
then type:
b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" broadcom-wl-5.100.138/linux/wl_apsta.0


You're done. Reboot the system and on the restart you should now have working wireless. Hope this helped and good luck !

Youtube- Why Bloggers Don't Write About Linux

Thought this was an interesting POV. A quick discussion on why more bloggers don't write about Linux. The fact of the matter is , there just isn't enough of us using Linux yet. Contrary to this video though I think the numbers will be growing.

Although there are a ton of different distros right now to confuse a new user, it seems that with every new distro or even various releases, Linux becomes a little bit more user friendly. Not to mention brands like Fedora or Ubuntu who just seem to improve with every release (Well most releases) If you compare setting up a Linux box ten or fifteen years ago to now, it's night and day. I also think that the amount of software was limited for a long time for the average desktop user. Now, for every mainstream program like Photoshop, or Illustrator, someone creates a Gimp, or Inkscape. Linux has come a really long way over the years thanks to the multitude of programmers creating great open source software to share with the Linux community.

I just deleted my Windows partition and am using Linux full time now. There really aren't that many things I can't do with Linux that I could do with Windows. That certainly has changed over the last 15 years or so. If you're a gamer, I think Linux has a long way to go, but there seem to be a lot of developers working on that now, as well. We may be a small fraction of Desktop users, but I think once people really give Linux a fair try, it's kind of hard to return to Windows. If you're not a gamer I strongly suggest giving Linux a try. I think you'll be surprised at what a well configured Linux box can accomplish these days.

Finding Character Maps In Linux

I needed a character map today, and found this and thought it was worthy of a link here. Pertains to character maps found in Gnome and KDE. I needed a copyright symbol for another blog I've been working on and found this useful. http://fsymbols.com/character-maps/linux/

Happy Independence Day !

Happy Independence Day America !

Inkscape Tutorial Making Flourishes Youtube.

Doing some web graphics the other day I came across this Youtube video on creating flourishes and squiggly designs using Inkscape. I've used Gimp for awhile now, but I just can't seem to get the hang of Inkscape. If you're not familiar with Inkscape it's a great program to create svg graphics in. I followed this video and was very happy with the results using Inkscape.

Extract rar files with unrar CLI Command Line Interface

Today I came across some rar files. For the most part .rar files are just like compressed files comparable to a zip file. I didn't really know what to do with them in Linux, the file was associated with ark, but that didn't seem to work for them. I found a CLI that worked great called unrar.

Most Linux distros have this program available. Using Fedora with KDE I opened Konsole my terminal of choice, and did yum search unrar. Yum found the program and in my case I selected yum install unrar.x86_64 based on my system requirements. Yum installed the program for me with no problems. This is a very light program and I should of noted the file size for this post, but I didn't. It's a small program, that packs a great punch.

Using the program couldn't of been easier. In my terminal program I simply went to the directory where I downloaded the rar files, in my case it was cd Downloads/rar_files I then typed unrar x filename.rar and unrar uncompressed the files for me. The x option is for extracting the files. That's all there was to it. That will make the program work.

The man pages for the program are informative and have all the options and switches needed to operate the program successfully. Unrar is a really easy to use CLI command line interface for extracting rar files.