Fedora, Linux and Stuff

I am currently in the process of installing a new hard drive on my laptop. The 100GB was not enough. I have not had time to install Fedora on it.

I found out I have some hardware failure on my desktop. This is where I did majority of my testing.

I have not had time to find a new UPS since my main one failed a few weeks ago. This is probably a priority since I run my server on it.

Other than the CentOS running on my server, I have not touched Linux or done any work on my Fedora setups for weeks now.

If you are using Xine from RPMFusion and experiencing crashing immediately after loading in Fedora 10, it is probably due to this bug.

Quick work-around is to use Alsa instead of PulseAudio. Open a shell and launch Xine as follows:

[mirandam@phoebe ~]$ xine -A alsa

To make this setting stick, do the following:

Right-Click in the Xine window > Settings > Setup….

In the gui tab, change the Configuration experience level to Advanced, then hit Apply at the bottom of the window.

Next go to the audio tab, change the audio driver to use to alsa, hit Apply, then close the window.

Restart Xine and the problem should no longer occur.

Cambridge has been launched.

After another round of hacking and coding the Fedora project just announced the release of Fedora 10. The Fedora team has been working overtime to make sure this release arrived in spite of the security issues they had earlier this year.

The highlights from the Release Summary:

Desktop

• GNOME 2.24 - Instant messaging, video, time tracking, and file management improvements
• KDE 4.1.2 - many needed updates to KDE4
• LXDE - Windows like lightweight desktop environment
• Sugar Desktop (XO) - Desktop provided on the OLPC project
• New ‘Plymouth’ graphical boot system
• Language support improvements

Administration/Hardware/System

• Printing improvements
• PulseAudio sound improvements now “glitch-free”
• Improved Webcam support
• Improved wireless network sharing
• Added/improved remote control (infrared) support
• Faster startup
• Bluetooth Improvements
• Support for EXT4 and XFS in installer

SoftwareUpdates

• New Empathy Instant Messenger
• Eclipse 3.4
• OpenOffice 3.0
• Kernel 2.6.27

You can download Fedora 10 using the standard mirrors or using the Torrent (recommended).

Please user the Fedora-List mailing list or any of the forums for help. I have published my Personal Fedora 10 Installation Guide which is currently only a draft. Lots more to do!

Fedora 10 seems less like a radical update as some past versions have been. A great deal of “under the hood” improvements have been made to improve the distribution for the desktop and its many uses. Hopefully people will find it useful! A more thorough examination to follow.

The availability of RPMFusion for Fedora was previously announced a few days ago. However I never got a chance to actually perform the update.

For those who are not familiar with Fedora’s third-party software repositories (repo’s), the two most popular repo’s: Freshrpm and Livna were typically the place to find software not permitted in Fedora. While I used Freshrpms in FC3 and earlier, I did eventually write most of my newer guides using Livna. It was announced well over a year ago that these repo’s would be merging. Finally the wait is over.

Much like Fedora’s repo migration earlier this year, the entire process is entirely transparent to Livna and Freshrpms users who regularly use yum to update their systems. No instructions are necessary, basically, just run:

# yum -y update
# yum -y update

The first will pull the rpmfusion-free and rpmfusion-nonfree release repo setup files. The second will update all software from Livna (or Freshrpms) to pull updates from RPMFusion.

This is a huge improvement for anyone who has had to deal with explaining differences in repo’s and potential conflicts. As I have received emails already, I will be rewriting my Fedora 9 Installation Guide to reflect these changes soon.

Update: Nov 19: I updated my F9 Install Guide

The admins running Wikipedia are almost complete in migrating their servers from a mix of RedHat and Fedora to Ubuntu. The primary reasons behind the switch, according to Brion Vibber (Wikimedia CTO), were personal preference, Ubuntu availability on the desktop and better support/stability compared to Fedora. As a server, one might think that an enterprise option like RHEL or CentOS might make for a better choice, however both of these lack the appeal of Ubuntu and the flexibility in support.

Regardless of the reasons for the switch, this is another opportunity for people to question Fedora’s fast moving development pace (i.e. “bleeding edge”). Fedora user know that Fedora requires constant updating/upgrading and Fedora developers are obviously quite accustomed this and welcome it. An interesting thread on the Fedora development mailing list raised this topic and spawned a great deal of discussion. Some users/developers think that if Fedora provided a LTS stable release then perhaps situations like Wikipedia’s could have been avoided. Jesse Keating, Fedora Release Engineer, chimed in with a very well worded point:

Given the amount of churn we allow maintainers to introduce into our
“stable” releases, I highly doubt Fedora would be suitable for any
situation where a “LTS” was desired. There is just too much major
version upgrading, behavioral changes, massive amounts of updates,
rapidly invalid documentation, and high chance of regression in the
“stable” updates. We should address *that* problem before ever thinking
about extending the life.

Even if Fedora could address that problem, big organizations most likely won’t change their opinions. However if those issues could be addressed, many users probably wouldn’t be migrating away, and more importantly they would just have a much better operating system!

(As a personal point, I no longer use Fedora as a server. I recommend CentOS.)

A fairly common question is: How do I determine which applications are making network connections?

While there are different ways to do this, a quick solution is with netstat. To see which applications are connecting to which network addresses, run the following as root (if you are not root certain output is limited):

# netstat -tuap

This will produce several columns of output the last column is PID/Program name. If you do not recognize the application name, use the PID number and use the ps command to find more information. For example (replace PID with the actual number):

# ps -p PID -F

For more information on the many other functions of either of these commands use the man utility:

# man netstat
# man ps

This is something I’ve always thought about looking up myself. Great tip for using pv command for seeing copy progress.

Example:

$ cat source/file.img | pv -s 100g -p -e -r > destination/file.img
[ 25MB/s] [==========> ] 13% ETA 0:54:35

Only problem: what package in CentOS includes pv?

It was announced in August that the Fedora Project suffered a security breach. As a result after a certain date, all software updates were disabled. As of recently, the updates were enabled with new signatures in place.

I recently updated my Fedora 9 32bit (i386) installation. The last time I updated my system was the last week of July, before the security announcement was made. The following are the steps I took to complete my update.

First I ran:

yum update

This listed very few updates, however I saw the following error:

--> Finished Dependency Resolution
kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 from livna has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: kernel-uname-r = 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 is needed by package kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 (livna)
xine-lib-extras-nonfree-1.1.15-1.lvn9.i386 from livna has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: xine-lib(plugin-abi) = 1.24 is needed by package xine-lib-extras-nonfree-1.1.15-1.lvn9.i386 (livna)
Error: Missing Dependency: kernel-uname-r = 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 is needed by package kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 (livna)
Error: Missing Dependency: xine-lib(plugin-abi) = 1.24 is needed by package xine-lib-extras-nonfree-1.1.15-1.lvn9.i386 (livna)

To resolve it, I just did:

yum remove kmod-nvidia xine-lib-extras-nonfree

This removed:

Removing:
 kmod-nvidia                      i686   173.14.05-4.lvn9  installed   0.0
 xine-lib-extras-nonfree          i386   1.1.12-1.lvn9     installed   1.2 M
Removing for dependencies:
 amarok-extras-nonfree            i386   1.4.8-1.lvn9      installed   376
 kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.4-30.fc9.i686 i686   173.14.05-3.lvn9  installed   7.5 M
 kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.6-55.fc9.i686 i686   173.14.05-4.lvn9  installed   7.5 M
 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia              i386   173.14.05-1.lvn9  installed   7.0 M
 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs         i386   173.14.05-1.lvn9  installed    17 M

I knew that a new repository would be configured, so instead of downloading any updates from the previous repository, I just ran the following:

yum update fedora-release

After that, I did the actual update (the “yes” option -y is recommended considering the amount of updates):

yum -y update

This listed, for me, 35 new packages, 443 updated packages and 2 packages to remove - for a total download size of: 991 MB !!!

After the download completed, and before the actual installation/update occurred, I saw the following (which is what is expected):

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6df2196f
Importing GPG key 0x6DF2196F \"Fedora (8 and 9) ” from /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-8-and-9-i386
Is this ok [y/N]: y

After all the updates were installed, I fixed the xine-lib-extra-nonfree update issue (basically adding what I had previously removed). The following ran with no problems:

yum install xine-lib-extras-nonfree amarok-extras-nonfree

NVIDIA Driver Issue

When trying to update/install the Nvidia binary driver using yum:

yum install kmod-nvidia

The same error from above persisted:

--> Finished Dependency Resolution
kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 from livna has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: kernel-uname-r = 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 is needed by package kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 (livna)
Error: Missing Dependency: kernel-uname-r = 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 is needed by package kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686-173.14.12-3.lvn9.i686 (livna)

Apparently, this problem is due to Livna build system being down. The following is the recommended alternate solution:

yum install akmod-nvidia

Then you just need to reboot and you are done!!! (This is already required due to the new kernel).

However I ran the following to test the akmod system. This is OPTIONAL as the following will automatically happen after rebooting:
First Identify the newest installed kernel:

[mirandam@charon ~]$ rpm -q kernel
kernel-2.6.25.6-55.fc9.i686
kernel-2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686

Create the proper matching kmod files for that kernel:

[mirandam@charon ~]$ sudo /usr/sbin/akmods --kernels 2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686
Checking kmods exist for 2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686              [WARNING]
Building and installing nvidia-kmod                        [  OK  ]

Then I was done. Every step worked for me to bring my Fedora 9 system up to date. I rebooted and the akmod detected I had already created the necessary kmod files.

I should have done all of this earlier. For more help and issues, please read:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Enabling_new_signing_key

I am glad that issue has been resolved.