DaDaDom und die Welt

Endlich, nach nur einigen kleinen Verzögerungen, ist es endlich erschienen: Fedora 11, genannt “Leonidas”!

Was alles neu ist, das lässt sich den Release Notes entnehmen. Technischere Details zu einigen der Neuigkeiten kann man auch auf der “Feature List”-Seite im Wiki nachlesen.

Wem jetzt schon das Wasser im Munde zusammenläuft, oder wer Fedora oder Linux allgemein einfach mal ausprobieren möchte, der sollte nicht zögern, sich dieses Meisterstück herunterzuladen, am Besten per BitTorrent (ja, das ist auch in Deutschland legal …): http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

Damit tut ihr gleichzeitig auch was gutes und helft, Fedora zu verteilen, ohne dass die Download-Server überlastet werden.

Viel Spaß!

Und ich kümmer mich mal weiter um meine Diplomarbeit …

Acting Globally – that usually means, that a company acts everywhere, right? Well, what about they act for everybody? Shouldn’t that be a part of calling oneself “global”? If so, at least one big, German company doesn’t get it:

PS: The site does not really work with Firefox, either. That’s why I tried Opera in the first place.

I have already mentioned earlier, that my new laptop and Fedora (back then in version work quite flawlessly together. Things are always on a move, and since that other post, Fedora has been moving forward and it was released in version 9, codename Sulphur.

The change delivered several improvements. For me particularily useful are the new error-message-system of evolution (no annoying pop-ups anymore), Firefox 3 (still in beta/rc, though) and the better suspend/resume stuff. There is no more need for any quirks and the overall suspend/hibernate/resume-feeling is way better than it was ever before. In addition with another new Sulphur-feature, namely packageKit, it gave me an absolute astonishing, albeit small experience:

I usually only use the hibernate or suspend functionality and do not shut down the computer. This works without any problems – except when you install a new kernel and put the laptop to sleep afterwards. While rebooting, the latest kernel is chosen. The laptop tries to boot and sees, that there is a suspend-image which it tries to load. As the suspend image was created by the old kernel, the boot process might (and for me it did) fail. This messup may result in an undefined state and destroy data (well, again, that is what happened to me).

Say hello to PackageKit. After installing a new kernel, the suspend will fail. Although there is no notice of why it fails, it must be due to the new kernel. Small detail, but this little feature protects the user and its data because the inconsistency I described above can not happen (so easily)!

Linux on the desktop, way to go!

It’s joke time.

This came on the fedora-devel list this morning:

Subject: rawhide special report: 20080401 changes

Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 12:08:17 +0000 (UTC) (14:08 CEST)

New package apt
Advanced front-end for dpkg

New package dpkg
Package maintenance system for Debian

Removed package rpm

Removed package yum

Updated Packages:

[...]

Funny

This:

--- google.com ping statistics ---
49 packets transmitted, 30 received, 38% packet loss, time 54259ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1288.705/2175.903/3347.027/364.736 ms, pipe 4

really makes me want back my internet at home.

But a good reason to finally install and configure presto. For the sake of all the poor Linux users, who do not have a fast internet connection I really hope, that it will make it into Fedora 9.

Ich bin jetzt hochoffiziell Übersetzer in Fedoras German Translation Team. Was mache ich da? Übersetzen natürlich. Damit wird versucht, Linux, hier Fedora im Speziellen, für möglichst viele Sprecher nicht-Englischer Sprachen zugänglich zu machen. Weil Deutsch mit über 100 Millionen Sprechern eine große Zielgruppe ist, sind hier Helfer immer gerne gesehen.

Aber natürlich gibt es auch andere Möglichkeiten, bei Fedora mitzuhelfen. Diese Seite zeigt diese Möglichkeiten auf.

Schaut euch also meine Seite über mich an und meldet Fehler oder schlechte Übersetzungen! Dann können wir die verbessern!

As some of you may have read or somehow learnt, I do own a new laptop now. Well, actually it’s only used-new, but as good as new and still with warranty. Anyway, first thing I did: Put in the Fedora 8 Live-CD, booted, enjoyed. Almost everything worked out of the box. Exceptions were the graphics (ATI Mobility Radeon x1300) and the webcam, at least everything else I checked worked, including wireless (most important!) and the CPU-throttling, which cools the laptop quite down a lot. So, next logical step: Install Fedora. After doing so, I activated the additional repositories, livna, freshrpms and atrpms. Following the guidelines from this tutorial, I got almost my previous installation. Only one really bothering thing was still there: Graphics not working!

The laptop does have the already mentioned ATI Mobility x1300 graphics chipset and there is the proprietary fglrx driver for it.  BUT: the version available until some time ago (7.12) did not support the native resolution of the screen, which is 1680×1050. I want that resolution, badly, that’s what I spent the money for! So, what are the alternatives? I don’t use the 3D-effects of the desktop, so any driver would be fine. That’s how I found out about the radeonhd driver. It’s a free, though yet incomplete driver for ATI graphic cards. At least, with it I got my 1680×1050 resolution. Too bad though, that it doesn’t allow me to use my webcam, at least it’s not working within skype and cheese but it worked when I used the fglrx driver for testing. Lately, a new version of that driver was released and it promises to fix my resolution problem. I will give it a try, as soon as it is in the livna-repo. And yes, I am too lazy to circumvent my package manager!

What would be the overall conclusion, regarding the Acer Travelmate 8204 and Fedora? Well, it is a pleasure. I barely, if ever reboot, as Suspend and Hibernate are working as well and I can say for sure, that this is the most productive and fastest laptop I’ve ever worked with. Well done, Acer! Not so well done, ATI!

Yesterday I somehow managed to screw up my home partition. It was a cryptsetup-luks encrypted partition and it seems like I wrote over the beginning of the partition when updating grub, which I had to do due to some re-partitioning… Today was consequently mostly spent on fixing that mess. At home I usually keep a copy of the most current Fedora Rescue CD. Or several copies. Well – I am not at home. And the Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD does not support LVM… Quite a hazzle with a not-so-happy ending.

Anyway, my “new” /home is now bigger (who would not like that) and my last backup is luckily less than two weeks old. Rdiff-backup is doing its thing and restoring (almost) all data.

Lessons learned:

• backup, backup, backup
• never screw with a system if you don’t have a rescue cd at hands
• backup, backup, backup
• rdiff-backup works really well *

Next time, I just won’t resize but delete stuff instead…

* somehow one directory within my ~/.evolution can not be restored. rdiff-backup hangs at 100% cpu and seems to do nothing on that 4 MB directory with ~20 files in it. I didn’t find anything on that, but if anyone knows something…

Yesterday Evening I had an idea.

Inspired by the changing background in Fedora 8 (which rocks, by the way!!!), I had the idea about some “mood-applet” for GNOME (or any desktop, for that matter). What’s the idea?

Well, think of it as a global setting applet, where you can somehow “change” your mood, kind of like you do with the volume of your speakers. Depending on the mood, the desktop could change its appearance, the music selection could be influenced, your instant messenger will change your status, maybe something else?

It’s just an idea and I am not a programmer, who could implement it, but if there are some, feel free

Maybe this also concerns others, despite me.
I have Fedora running on my Acer Laptop, which is a Travelmate 661 LCi (now running flawlessly for almost four years!). Since I upgraded to Fedora 7 with its Kernel 2.6.21 I had problems with the fan of the laptop: When it started spinning, the laptop froze. Under X, it froze the whole computer, the num lock led was blinking. When using the console solely, the computer just froze and sometimes threw some acpi error messages on the console.

Well, after a while I found out, that it is a regression in the Linux kernel, bug #8385 in kernel’s bugzilla, to be more precise.

So, what to do about that? I want to use Fedora 7 and its kernels. Just patch them with the patch supplied in Comment #50 of the above mentioned bugzilla report. And for those new to building kernels, here is a short howto on how to do so (hence the name “howto”…)

1. Install the fedora-devtools package: yum install fedora-rpmdevtools unifdef
2. Create your rpmbuild-directory: fedora-buildrpmtree
3. cd ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS
4. wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/7/SRPMS/kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7.src.rpm (or whatever kernel you would like to install)
5. rpm -ivh ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7.src.rpm
6. cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS; rpmbuild -bp kernel-2.6.spec
7. cd ~/rpmbuild/BUILD/kernel-2.6.21/linux-2.6.21.i386 ; vi Makefile (your actual directory may differ)
8. Change the string behing EXTRAVERSION to something sensible, let’s say -own.kernel
9. Download the patch:
   wget -O p1.patch “http://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=11684″
   
10. Apply the patch:
    patch -p1 < p1.patch
    
11. make oldconfig (we will not customize the kernel in any way, so no make menuconfig or similar done now)
12. make; su -c “make modules_install && make install”
13. reboot
14. When rebooting make sure to chose the new kernel in grub. The default choice can be selected by editing /etc/grub.conf

I hope, this mini-howto helps anyone out there to get Fedora 7 turned back into a usable system again.

Update: edited to include the recent development / updates / better patches