Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

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Although mplayer worked fine, I couldn't click on videos or music files in Nautilus because it runs gmplayer and gmplayer flashed a dialog box over and over too fast to see. I ran gmplayer on an MP3 file at the command line and got this message over and over:
[AO_ALSA] Unable to find simple control 'PCM',0.
A google of this turned up a solution:

Change Preferences/Audio driver to Pulse (from Alsa)

Sometime within the last few Fedora upgrades, Emacs changed. Before, the file you asked for was the file you got. Then, someone got the bright idea to put a help screen up first, forcing you to enter Ctrl-L before you could get to work. Being a long-time Emacs user, I hated this. But I couldn't find out how to get rid of it. Until I found this page that has the magic incantation to add to ~/.emacs

(setq inhibit-startup-message t) ; Don't want any startup message

Yay!

The GDM greeter in Fedora 8 has an option to suspend to RAM, but not one for hibernate (suspend to disk). I edited /etc/gdm/custom.conf to add a custom command that runs /usr/bin/pm-hibernate. To see the custom commands from the GDM greeter, you have to press F10. Selecting the command didn't work--the greeter screen started again. The fix is to set CustomCommandNoRestart0=true.

Setting up printers is a lot easier than it used to be. On the Fedora Gnome menu, System->Administration->Printing is all that was needed. The printer attached to the local parallel port was automatically detected. The networked HP Photosmart 8450 was easy too, provided I knew it was connected with AppSocket/HP JetDirect. All I had to enter was its host name, manufacturer and model.

Preparation
Downloaded the Fedora 8 x86_64 ISO DVD from Fedora Project and burned it. When I booted it I got isolinux Disk error 32 AX=42B5, drive 9F.
The cause was the ISO file didn't download completely. It was 2GB (seems suspicious, eh?) when it should have been 3.6GB. Then I downloaded it via Bittorrent with Azureus and checked SHASUM with ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/binary/sha1sum.exe
C:> shasum Fedora-8-dvd-x86_64. Then it was OK.

Since this is a new machine, from the Fedora 8 install disk boot menu, I ran Memory test for an entire cycle.

Installation video was screwed up. The screen was too big for the monitor and I couldn't see the right side. Switching from the auto-selected NVidia driver to the standard vesa driver fixed that. For installation, at the initial prompt to install or upgrade, press Tab and add "resolution=1280x1024 vesa" to the end of the line.

Partition Allocation
Vista on sda2 was originally the entire disk. I booted Vista and used Disk Management to shrink the partition.


Logical group LogGroup00 is composed of the two physical volumes on sda5 and sdb8. Within the logical group are two logical volumes:
/ 10GB on LogGroup00-LogVol00
/home 50GB on LogGroup00-LogVol01

Installation Settings
System clock not set to UTC since this machine dual boots with Vista. Turned on NTP and set "sync before service start".

I had network delays using IPv6 with Fedora Core 6 (see earlier post). I don't use any IPv6 so I turned it off in system-config-network General tab, uncheck "Enable IPv6 configuration for this interface". Alternately, I could have used boot option noipv6, e.g. "linux noipv6"

SE linux policy set to enforcing (Targeted)

Gnome is the window manager by default.

Install software
From fedorafaq.org: install mplayer, flash, ntfs-3g, evince, alacarte, 64 bit flash and java, nvidia driver.

To Do
ssh from known IPs only
KDE: Settings -> Desktop Effects -> Compiz Fusion (vice kwin)

Automatic updates had not been applied for a while on my desktop machine due to package incompatibilities. (Why isn't this listed in the Logwatch email?) After manually installing most of them, BackupPC started failing with the subject error. Tried advice to install these Perl packages:

• perl-IO-String
• perl-IO-Zlib
• perl-Archive-Zip
• perl-Archive-Tar
• perl-Compress-Zlib

This didn't work.

Tried yum install perl-Compress-Bzip2 and setting $Conf{CompressLevel} = 0; (no compression) in /etc/BackupPC/config.pl. It worked, but since I broke the rule of testing one variable at a time, I didn't know which one fixed the error. So I put the compress level back to three and retarted backuppc. It failed.

I failed to get BackupPC 3.0 working last time I tried with the TAR install. Found it's available as an RPM.

# yum install BackupPC
# service httpd start

Browsing http://localhost/BackupPC popped up a prompt for username and password for "BackupPC" at http://localhost. Neither BackupPC's password nor root's worked.
File /etc/httpd/conf.d/BackupPC.conf says:
AuthUserFile /etc/BackupPC/apache.users
So I created apache.users file with my user name (not backuppc) in it.
Now can see the BackupPC page, but it says it's unable to connect to the BackupPC server.

# service backuppc start

Started full backup from web interface. It failed:
Read EOF: Connection reset by peer
Tried again: got 0 bytes
Done: 0 files, 0 bytes
Got fatal error during xfer (Unable to read 4 bytes)
Backup aborted (Unable to read 4 bytes)

The problem is that BackupPC is trying to SSH to root, but there's no key to allow backuppc to log in without a password.
See http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/ssh.html#how_do_i_setup_openssh or:

$ su -
# su -s /bin/bash backuppc
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
At password prompts, press enter.
$ exit
Edit ~root/.ssh/authorized_keys and add ~backuppc/.ssh/id_dsa.pub
Optionally append from="localhost.localdomain" if you only want backuppc to ssh to root from the local host.
# chmod u=rw,go= ~root/.ssh/authorized_keys

To test, su to backuppc as above and run ssh root@localhost. You should be logged in without having to enter a password.

The card reader on the HP PhotoSmart 8450 can be read in Linux using hp-toolbox. hp-toolbox comes in the hplip RPM.

When I ran hp-toolbox, it didn't list any printers even though they are set up in CUPS (visible in a browser in http://localhost:631).
So I did a set up in hp-toolbox:

• Device/Set up new device


• Enter root password


• Select network connection--printer appears in list


• Select driver

Only three drivers showed up: HP Laserjet 8000 and 8100 series and Mopier 240. So I chose "Select Other".

• Select the 8400 printer driver. Mine is in /usr/share/cups/model/HP-PhotoSmart_8400-hpijs.ppd.

I left "send test page to printer" selected. The page printed but the printer didn't show up in list. Then I selected Device/refresh all and the printer appeared.
Put an SD card in card reader (lower right slot). Select Functions tab. Press "Photo Card" button. The pictures appear in a window to be selected. Note uploading pictures this way is really slow. My transfer rate is about 850K per minute.

My aging HP ScanJet 6200C has a yellow line in everything it scans. So when I was given the subject scanner, I was excited to try it out. Below are my scribblings in getting this working in Linux. Or should I say not getting it to work. Turns out it's unsupported and works only in Windows.
http://www.freecolormanagement.com/sane/usb_scanner.html
cat /proc/bus/usb/devices
T: Bus=01 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#= 3 Spd=12 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 1.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS= 8 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=04a7 ProdID=0331 Rev= 0.01
S: Manufacturer=Visioneer
S: Product=OneTouch 8600 EPP/USB
C:* #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=40 MxPwr= 48mA
I: If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=10(unk. ) Sub=01 Prot=00 Driver=(none)
E: Ad=81(I) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 64 Ivl=0ms
E: Ad=02(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 64 Ivl=0ms

$ modprobe scanner vendor=04a7 product=0331
FATAL: Module scanner not found.

http://viceo.orcon.net.nz/
Download OneTouch8600 SANE backend
mkdir /usr/local/src/onetouch-scanner
cd /usr/local/src/onetouch-scanner
tar xzf ot.tar.gz
edit Makefile and fix path of libtool (/usr/bin on mine)
edit calibrat.cpp and add #include before /* LOCAL DEFINITION */
edit scan.cpp and add #include after #include "windows.h"
make

# posted by Zymurgeek @ 10/19/2007 05:41:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post