Configuring Your Workstation
Once your worstation is installed, it is time for you to
configure it. At this point you create a user for everyday's
work, configure third party repositories, fix environment
variables to fit your personal needs, download the working
copy of &TCAR; and prepare it for start using it.
Define Your Workplace
Once you've installed the workstation and it is up and
running, you need to register the user name you'll use for
working. In this task you need to use the commands
useradd and passwd to
create the user name and set a password for it, respectively.
These commands require administrative privileges to be
executed, so you need to login as root
superuser for doing so.
Do not use the root username for regular
tasks inside your working copy of &TCAR;. This is dangerous
and might provoke unreversable damages to your workstation.
When you've registered your user name in the workstation, it
provides an identifier for you to open a user's session in the
workstation and a place to store the information you produce,
as well. This place is known as your home directory and is
unique for each user registered in the workstation. For
example, if you register the user name john in your
workstation, your home directory would be located at /home/john/.
At this point you need to decide where to download the working
copy of &TCAR; inside your home directory. This desition
deserves special attention and should be implemented carefully
in order to grant a standardized distributed environment.
Let's see some alternatives.
Different Absolute Paths
Consider that you store your working copy under /home/john/Projects/artwork/ and
I store mine under /home/al/Projects/artwork/, we'll
end up refering the same files inside our working copies
through different absolute paths.
This alternative generates a contradiction when files which
hold path information inside are committed up to the central
repository from different working copies. The contradiction
comes from the question: which is the correct absolute path to
use inside such files, yours or mine? (None of them is, of
course.)
One Unique Absolute Path
Another case would be that where you and I ourselves use one
unique home directory (e.g., /home/centos/Projects/artwork/)
to store the working copy of &TCAR; in our own workstations,
but configure the subversion client to use different user
names to commit changes up from the working copy to the
central repository.
This alternative might be not so good in situations where you
and I have to share the same workstation. In such cases, it
would be required that we both share the password information
of the same system user (the centos user
in our example) which, in addition, gives access to that
user's subversion client configuration and this way provokes
the whole sense of using different subversion credentials for
committing changes to be lost.
Different Absolute Paths Through Dynamic Expansion
Most of the absolute paths we use inside the working copy are
made of two parts, one dynamic and one relative fixed. The
dynamic part is the home directory of the current user and its
value can be retrived from the $HOME
environment variable. The fixed part of the path is the one
we set inside the repositroy structure itself as a matter of
organization. What we need here is to find a way to expand
variables inside files that don't support variable expansion.
This alternative had worked rather fine when we produce
produce PNG files from SVG files and XTHML from DocBook
files, but the same is not true for absolute paths inside
files that are used as in their permanent state inside the
repository (e.g., CSS files and other files similar in
purpose).
Download Your Working Copy
As convenction, to use the &TCAR;, you must register the user
name centos in your workstation, do login
with it, and download the working copy from the central
repository using the following command:
svn co https://projects.centos.org/svn/artwork /home/centos/Projects/artwork
The first time you download the working copy it contains no
image files, nor documentation, or localized content inside
it. This is because all the files provided in the working copy
are source files (e.g., the files needed to produce other
files) and it is up to you the action of render them to
produce the final files (e.g., images and documentation) used
to implement &TCPCVI;.
In order to complete the instalation of your working copy, use
the prepare functionality of the
centos-art.sh script, as described in .
Set Your Environment Variables
There are some environment variables that you can customize to
fit your personal needs (e.g., default text editor, default
locale information, default time zone representation, etc.).
To customize these variables you need to edit your personal
profile (i.e., ~/.bash_profile) and set the
redefinition there. Notice that you may need to logout and
then do login again in order for the new variable values to
take effect.
Default text editor
The default text editor information is controlled by the
EDITOR environment variable. The
centos-art.sh script uses the default text
editor to edit subversion pre-commit messages, translation
files, documentation files, script files, and similar
text-based files.
If EDITOR environment variable is not set,
centos-art.sh script uses /usr/bin/vim as default text
editor. Otherwise, the following values are recognized by
centos-art.sh script:
/usr/bin/vim
/usr/bin/emacs
/usr/bin/nano
If no one of these values is set in the EDITOR
environment variable, the centos-art.sh
script uses /usr/bin/vim text editor, the one
installed by default in &TCD;.
Default locale information
The default locale information is controlled by the
LANG environment variable. This variable is
initially set in the installation process of &TCD;,
specifically in the Language step.
Generally, there is no need to customize this variable in your
personal profile. If you need to change the value of this
environment variable do it through the login screen of GNOME
Desktop Environment or the
system-config-language command.
The centos-art.sh script uses the
LANG environment variable to determine what
language to use for printing output messages from the script
itself, as well as the portable objects locations that need to
be updated or edited when you localize directory structures
inside the working copy of &TCAR;.
Default time zone representation
The time zone representation is a time correction applied to
the system time (stored in the BIOS clock) based on your
country location. This correction is specially useful to
distributed computers around the world that work together and
need to be syncronized in time to know when things happened.
&TCAR; is made of one server and several workstations spread
around the world. In order for all these workstations to know
when changes in the server took place, it is required that
they all set their system clocks to use the same time
information (e.g., through UTC (Coordinated Universal Time))
and set the time correction for their specific countries in
the operating system. Otherwise, it would be difficult to
know when something exactly happened.
Generally, setting the time information is a straight-forward
task and configuration tools provided by &TCD; do cover time
correction for most of the countries around the world.
However, if you need a time precision not provided by any of
the date and time configuration tools provided by &TCD; then,
you need to customize the TZ environment
variable in your personal profile to correct the time
information by yourself. The format of TZ
environment variable is described in tzset(3)
manual page.
Be Prepared For Administrative Tasks
Administrative tasks inside &TCAR; are standardized through
the centos-art.sh script which must be run
as centos user. The
centos user is a regular user and doesn't
have administrative rights. Therefore, it is required to give
some administrative rights to the centos
user in order for centos-art.sh to perform
the administrative tasks (e.g., installing packages through
yum).
To give some administrative rights to a regular user like
centos you should execute the
visudo command as
root and set the rights you want to give
accordingly. In case you don't configure the sudoers file,
centos-art.sh won't be able to perform
administrative task and you will need to do so yourself by
hand as the root supeuser.
The /etc/sudoers configuration.
The /etc/sudoers configuration.
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