Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

For users sharing a computer, it's nice to allow two people to be logged in to their X desktop at the same time. You can change to the first session with Ctrl-Alt-F7 and the second with Ctrl-Alt-F8. I had this set up in Red Hat 9 but the upgrade to Fedora Core disabled it. The setting is in file /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf. The upgrade renamed this file gdm.conf.rpmsave and created a new one with default settings. All you have to do is find the [servers] section and uncomment the line
# 1=Standard
Then kick GDM (as root) with
kill -USR1 `cat /var/run/gdm.pid`
After you log out, GDM will restart with two sessions.

The sound card problem is fixed. It was fine under Red Hat 9, but very staticy under Fedora Core 4, both a fresh install and an upgrade. I found a reference to the problem via Google. Using KMix (on the Sound & Video menu), go to the Switches tab and disable IEC958.

Finally installed Fedora Core 4 on Hoover, my desktop system. It was running RedHat 9. I did both a fresh install and an upgrade. For the upgrade, I copied the exiting Red Hat 9 partitions and upgraded the copies, leaving a running Red Hat 9 as a back up. The only problem was the upgrade removed the Red Hat 2.4 kernel and modules from /boot. I suppose they figure if I upgraded them, I wouldn't need the old ones. Except I have a shared /boot partion and those files were still needed by my original Red Hat 9 install.

One other problem was that my SCSI scanner stopped working. sane-find-scanner saw nothing, though the attached SCSI devices were shown by the Adaptec BIOS and listed in /var/log/messages. I fixed the problem, which I think was related to the upgrade taking lines wholesale from /etc/modules.conf (which is used by the 2.4 kernel) and putting them in /etc/modprobe.conf (which is used by the 2.6 kernel). Some of the lines had embedded comments, so the modprobe configuration line ended up looking like this:
install sg { modprobe ide-scsi # load ide-scsi before sg; } ; /sbin/modprobe --first-time --ignore-install sg
Removing the comments and rebooting seems to work. Note, by default the sg0 device is only accessible to root. You'll have to run sane-find-scanner as root or chmod o+rw /dev/sg0 to allow other accounts to use it.

The last item I'm aware isn't working is the sound card. The sound card detection sample sound is staticy. This will have to wait for another day.