Fedora on Evan Hoffman

Fedora Core 15 & Gnome 3

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:27:22 +0000

Shrinking partitions, installing/upgrading to FC15, and systemd/chkconfig.

64-bit Firefox 6 on CentOS 6 x86_64 (or Fedora) with Flash 11

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:15:14 +0000

So I’ve gone back to Linux from Mac, due to the SSD issues I had with my Macbook Pro basically making VMware unusable. A Win7 VM would grind the guest and host to a halt on the 7200 RPM SATA OEM drive, and the SSD wouldn’t work, so I put the SSD back in my HP and installed CentOS 6 x86_64. Not really ideal, but at least it works.

CentOS 6 ships with Firefox 3.6.9, which is really old by now. Fine for a server, but I wanted FF6. I grabbed the Firefox 6.0.1 bz2 from VoxCast, unzipped it and copied it to /usr/lib64/firefox-6. Then I ran yum remove firefox to remove 3.6.9 and avoid any issues. I tried the instructions from my older post on this subject but for whatever reason it didn’t work - I’m guessing because I’m not using the distro’s Firefox RPM.

Fedora 15 Beta Download

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:08:49 +0000

To aid the flood of visitors apparently looking for Fedora 15 Beta Download ISOs:

Fedora 15 Mirror list

Install DVDs:

i386- x86_64

Fedora Desktop LiveCDs:

i686- x86_64

Fedora KDE LiveCDs:

i686- x86_64

Source: http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

Can Fedora 14 users use Gnome 3?

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:34:34 +0000

Another influx of visitors searching for the answer to this question. I think this is probably coming from listing the referring keywords right on the page, and then Google indexing those. Anyway, to answer the question, apparently not, at least not via official RPMs:

Hi

GNOME 3 won’t be available as a update to Fedora 14. You can try the Fedora 15 Beta that is about to be released in a few days.

Clean install of FC14, regain Radeon X1600 support (!)

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 11:48:39 +0000

So I was complaining the other day about losing support for the Radeon X1600 when I upgraded my work laptop from FC12 to FC14. I was on the verge of ordering a new laptop (ThinkPad W510 with quadcore i7 and 1GB Quadro looks niiiice…) when I figured it was worth at least giving a true clean install a shot. I backed up all my stuff to an external USB drive, repartitioned my drive (finally done in a sane way), did a fresh FC14 install, and miraculously everything seemed to work. rsynced all my stuff back over and it was almost perfect. I still have a weird issue when trying to unlock my screen after it goes into screensaver - basically I can’t, it just stays locked and I’ve resorted to doing “init 3” and then “init 5” to make it work again. That’s a minor annoyance though at this point. So, yay again for Fedora! I wouldn’t go with ATi for a Linux machine again though.

Upgrading FC12 to FC14, lose support for Radeon X1600

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:23:06 +0000

I’d been running FC12 for quite a while and I noticed the past few weeks have been devoid of yum updates (except for Google Chrome). I figured FC15 is on the horizon; now’s a good time to upgrade to FC14.

I followed the basic procedure laid out here and went 12 -> 13 no problem. 13 -> 14: problem. The upgrade appeared to go well (loooong time to complete, downloading/installing 1+ gigs of packages, even over my 25 mbps home line) but X would not start no matter what. At this point I learned that system-config-display has been deprecated in FC14 and isn’t even there! I tried “Xorg –configure” but that configuration still didn’t work. I then tried doing a yum downgrade to FC13… let me save you the trouble: never try this.

Why is my laptop so freaking hot?

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:07:07 +0000

HP Compaq nc8430, Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0GHz. Fedora Core 12 x86_64, kernel 2.6.32.19-163.fc12.x86_64 (just updated via yum).

At idle, with nothing running in the foreground, the CPU is around 70-72° Celsius, and the other sensors are 80°+. Why is this? It seems like every time I run yum update the machine gets hotter. I wonder if there’s any way to figure out what’s causing this. In any case, it’s pretty annoying. It’s uncomfortable putting the thing on my lap for any length of time.

Ripping a DVD on Fedora Core 13

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:16:57 +0000

I thought this would be a pretty straightforward task. It was, though it took several minutes to track down the CSS library needed for decryption of the DVD. All I want to do is copy Talking Words Factory to my phone so my kid can watch it in the car if needed. It looked like Brasero was the tool for the job, but I got some error about needing a plugin for it to be able to decrypt it. I found libdvdcss here and after installing the RPM, everything worked. Now I just need to encode it with ffmpeg.

Flash plugin on Firefox on Fedora 12 x86_64

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:36:54 +0000

I know I’ve been through this before because I’ve setup Fedora before and it’s working. But I just installed FC12 on my desktop at home (since my Seagate drive bricked itself a few days ago and I had to reinstall anyway) and while I finally got the Adobe Flash plugin working, it didn’t have any audio, which made YouTube kind of suck. Anyway, this of course was a solved problem, I just forgot where the fix was located… but duh, it’s on the Fedora website. A simple

HOWTO: Install Flash plugin on Firefox on Fedora / CentOS / RedHat Linux

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:36:54 +0000

Updated 8/31/2011 See my newer post on this subject.

Upgraded to Fedora Core 12

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:24:14 +0000

I upgraded my work laptop from FC11 to FC12 yesterday using the “preupgrade” tool. It was pretty simple, though it took a lot longer than I expected. There was some funkiness with my screen going crazy after the upgrade - my external monitor and the laptop’s LCD both did this crazy wavy-line thing. I tried changing the refresh rate, running system-config-display, nothing worked. I found a post that suggested passing “nomodeset” to the kernel boot options - that solved it. Yay!

Everything works on my laptop except Bluetooth

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:36:23 +0000

This is pretty weird. Bluetooth worked fine under Win XP. The computer is an HP/Compaq nc8430. When I go to the Bluetooth control panel I get “Your computer does not have any Bluetooth adapters plugged in.” The weird thing is, sometimes I’ll see the bluetooth logo in the taskbar at the top, but then when I look again it’s gone and I have no idea how to get it back. When I booted it up this morning I noticed the icon was there so I ran some of the debugging tools for Bluetooth and checked dmesg and this time at least it looks like at least there’s proof that Linux CAN see the Bluetooth adapter, I just don’t get why it then stops recognizing it after just a minute or two, and a reboot doesn’t even consistently bring it back.

NILFS - A File system to make SSDs scream... in pain?

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:05:12 +0000

So I got this 128 gig Corsair SSD and put it in my laptop at work. After some fiddling I copied my old disk over to my new disk by booting to Knoppix and doing dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4k conv=notrunc,noerror. It’s a lot faster, but what’s really fast now is my Windows XP VM. Anyway, I was looking into other filesystems to try out on SSD to improve speed and I found this article claiming that NILFS is the best choice. So I decided to test it using the same ghetto test I always use for filesystem performance: dd!

How to install the 64-bit Sun Java plugin on 64-bit firefox on 64-bit Fedora Core 11 Linux (which happens to use 64 bits)

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:45:09 +0000

I’m giddy! I found this post on mozdev.org which was magical.

[evan@ehoffman ~]$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_17"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_17-b04)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.3-b01, mixed mode)

[root@ehoffman plugins]# uname -a
Linux ehoffman 2.6.30.8-64.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Sep 25 04:43:32 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@ehoffman plugins]# pwd
/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins
[root@ehoffman plugins]# ln -s /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_16/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so

The main thing I was missing was that the plugin isn’t libpluginjava_oji.so, or whatever I thought it was, but libnpjp2.so. Once I created the symlink into /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins it worked (as verified on http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml and http://www.java.com/en/download/installed.jsp).

I put Fedora Core 11 on my work laptop

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:25:19 +0000

My work laptop, which I got around the end of 2006, was starting to run like crap. Pretty sure it started around the time I put antivirus on it, which reinforces my theory that antivirus is a virus itself. Anyway, being bored with Windows XP and having already played with Windows 7 at home, I decided to install Linux. The last time I tried Linux desktop was around RedHat 7.3, which was a long time ago… pre-Fedora even. I’m pretty happy with CentOS on the server side and was set to try CentOS 5.3 on my laptop when someone suggested I go with FC due to more bleeding-edge driver support. Even though the hardware is pretty old at this point I figured it was worth a shot.