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.
Workplace
Once you've installed the workstation and it is up and
running, you need to create the user name you'll use for your
everyday's work. 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 your
everyday's work inside your working copy of &TCAR;. This is
dangerous and might provoke unreversable damages to your
workstation.
When user names are created inside the workstation, it doesn't
create only a user identifier for you to login, but a place
for you to store your information, as well. This place is
known as your home directory and is unique for each user
inside the workstation. At this point, it is necessary to
decide where the working copy tree will be stored in the
workstation filesystem.
Case 1: Different Home Directories
— Assuming you store your working copy under /home/john/artwork/ and I store
mine under /home/al/artwork/, we'll end up
refering the same files inside our working copies through
different absolute paths. This generates a contradiction when
files, holding path information inside, are committed up to
the central repository. 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.)
Case 2: One Unique Home Directory —
Another case would be that where you and I ourselves use one
unique home directory (e.g., /home/centos/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 configuration might be not so good for
situations where you and I have to share the same workstation.
In such case, 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.
Case 3: Different Home Directories Through Dynamic
Expansion — Most of the absolute paths we use
inside the working copy are made of two parts, one dynamic and
one 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 organization matter. What we need here is to find a
way to expand variables inside files that don't support
variable expansion. So far we've been doing this through
creation template instances which are temporal files with
translation markers expanded inside. This work rather fine
with template files that are one-time-pass (e.g., 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).
From the three cases discussed above, the second one (i.e.,
One unique home directory) seems to be the best candidate. It
limits us from using more than one working copy in the same
workstation, but gives us the chance of standardizing the use
of absolute paths inside all the working copies of &TCAR;.
Using absolute paths is very convenient because it is possible
to reuse information from different locations inside the
working copy, something that would be almost imposible to
maintain if relative paths were used instead. Thus, lets
assume the second case of handling home directories as default
solution to relatively solve the problem of where to store
working copies of &TCAR; until a better one shows itself up.
The action of providing working copies of &TCAR; that permit
to reuse files inside them unifies the way content is produced
inside the working copy and provides a convenction for people
working on different areas to get attached to in order to
syncronize their works and still keep doing it decentralized
one another.
Environment Variables
Once you've created the centos user name
for your everyday's work and you had done login with it, 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.
Administrative Tasks
Sometimes it is necessary that you perform administrative
tasks inside the workstation the working copy of &TCAR; is
stored in. These tasks might demand you to type many commands
(e.g., for configuring a third party repository) or just a
one-line command (e.g., for installing a new package). In
both cases this kind of tasks require permissions that your
user for everyday's work must not have under no mean.
To perform administrative tasks in your workstation, you need
to login as root or configure the
sudo program to temporarily granting the
permissions your regular user needs to perform the
administrative tasks. The configuration of
sudo program is at
/etc/sudoers file and you need to add the
centos user to the list of privileged
user as described in the section below:
## Next comes the main part: which users can run what software on
## which machines (the sudoers file can be shared between multiple
## systems).
## Syntax:
##
## user MACHINE=COMMANDS
##
## The COMMANDS section may have other options added to it.
##
## Allow root to run any commands anywhere
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
centos ALL=(ALL) ALL
This configuration is required in order for automation scripts
to realize administrative tasks that otherwise you would need
to type one by one. It is worth to mention that all these
tasks are organized in the prepare
functionality of the centos-art.sh script
in the sake of reducing work and standardize the procedure of
performing them. It is also worth to mention that, the
centos-art.sh script is available for you
to run, study, improve and share your changes as described in
.
Working Copy
Once you've installed and configured the workstation, it is
ready to receive the working copy of &TCAR;. In this step, you
use Subversion's client to communicate the source repository
of &TCAR; and download all the files that make a working copy
of it.
To download the working copy of &TCAR; you need to login as
your everyday's work user (i.e., the
centos user) and use the Subversion
client installed in your workstation to bring all the files
you need to work with from the source repository down to your
workstation, just as the following command describes:
svn co https://projects.centos.org/svn/artwork ~/
This command will create your working copy of &TCAR; in your
workstation, specifically in the /home/centos/artwork directory.
If the Subversion's client wasn't installed by default, you
need to install it using the following command:
sudo yum install subversion
Once your working copy of &TCAR; has been downloaded, you
should notice that there is 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;.
Another consideration to be aware of at this point, is the
need of verifying the software installed in the workstation,
as well as the creation of symbolic links to connect the
content produced inside the working copy to applications
outside it (e.g., to make available patterns, brushes, and
palettes produced inside the working copy in GIMP, the
application used to manipulate images).
This final preparation stuff is automated by the
prepare functionality of the
centos-art.sh script, as described in . Execute it right now,
to be sure your workstation and your working copy are both
ready to be used.