Linux/Unix/BSD

Information And Reviews On Linux, Unix And Bsd Operating Systems

Unix is a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system that was initially developed by Bell Labs in the 1970s. Various similar operating systems that are POSIX compliant (ie compatible with Unix) have since been developed (POSIX is an abbreviation for Portable Operating System Interface for UNIX). These include the following: the BSD family (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS/X), Solaris, IRIX, AIX, SunOS, UnixWare, OpenServer and Linux.

Software written for POSIX compliant operating systems is generally able to be compiled for all POSIX platforms with little or no platform-specific changes. This makes the commands and utilities available for this extended family of operating systems very similar, and there are few differences between administering them.

The articles in this section are about useful command line utilities and commonly used application software on POSIX compliant operating systems. For Mac OSX specific articles see my OSX section.

Public key not installed error when installing from Dag RPM Repository

The Dag RPM Repository contains a collection of RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora and others which are not included in the base installation/libraries for those Linux distributions. If you get an error message similar to the one shown below when attempting to install an RPM package from the Dag RPM Repository, then you need to install the Dag GPG keys:

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6
 Public key for jigdo-0.7.3-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm is not installed

Update June 29th 2009: I received an email today from someone having issues following the instructions below because the URL in the example is no longer valid. I’ve updated the URL and made it a little clearer it’s an example.

One thing I’ve noticed from re-reading this post and the Dag RPM Repoistory page, is that the instructions here are for adding the Dag RPM Repository and not just the GPG key. I’m not sure if something’s changed since I wrote this post originally but in any case following the instructions here will both add the repository and add the GPG keys, so if you are experiencing the above error it should fix it.

Update ends.

Installation of the GPG keys is simple. Go to the Dag RPM Repository FAQ page and look at the section titled “How to configure to use RPMforge”. This contains a list of the GPG keys by Linux distribution, version and platform, and the commands you need to run to install them.

To install, running the command

rpm -Uhv [appropriate file goes here]

For example, if you had a CentOS 5 x86_64 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 x86_64 install that you wanted to install the GPG keys to, you would use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 / x86_64 GPG key like so:

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS//rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

And that’s all there is to it. You will now be able to install from the Dag RPM Repository, and will no longer receive the error message at the top of this post.

Clear the bash history

When entering commands in a bash shell each command is stored in the history which is written to the .bash_history file when logging out. This post shows how to clear the history for the current session, and how to clear all commands completely from the history.