Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

Firefox version 3 hasn’t shown up for Fedora 8 using my current Yum configuration. I did some digging and it’s available from Remi’s archives. I set up the Yum repository, which is disabled by default. Then installed Firefox: yum --enable remi update firefox. Now /usr/bin/firefox points to Firefox 3 and /usr/bin/firefox2 points to Firefox 2.

I’m late to the MP3 player game. I have a Sandisk Sansa Fuze. Podcasts are downloaded and synchronized with gPodder. The player is set in the File/Preferences menu selection under the Player tab. The type of device is Filesystem-based MP3 player and sync to folder is set to /media/SANSA FUZE/PODCASTS. The player mounts to /media/SANSA FUZE automatically. Under Synchronization Options, Custom filename is set to {episode.title}-{episode.basename}-{episode.published} and Create a subfolder for each channel is checked.

The ID3 tabs in the MP3 files downloaded vary pretty widely. Any file missing the album tag gets shown in the unknown folder on the player. I’m currently editing them with EasyTag, Audio Tag Tool and Kid3, but I’d like to have gPodder run a script after download that let’s me fix the tags myself. Yet another project.

The fuze will show album art if it’s named folder.jpg. This works in both the MUSIC and PODCASTS folders. The art will be shown from the same directory as the MP3 being played. The JPEG can’t be too large or the Fuze will show it as a black box. The Fuze’s screen is 220×176 pixels, so making a the image larger than that is a waste. Roughly larger than 300×300 won’t show at all.

Boon croaked a few weeks ago. Turned out the motherboard went bad. (Note to self: don’t buy refurbished electronics on eBay.) Replacing it was surprisingly easy once I figured out which one to buy–the original isn’t made anymore and Gateway doesn’t stock replacements. I got wrapped around the axle about the ports on the back of the PC. I tried to find a micro-ATX board that had the same ports in the same places so they’d line up with the cut-outs on my PC case. When the motherboard arrived, it had a new cut-out panel. I just popped out the old one and popped in the new one. Live and learn.

Once the board was installed, everything worked except the fan was really loud. In BIOS, there’s a setting for smart fan control, which means the hotter the computer, the faster the fan goes. This quieted things down.

Then my BackupPC machine, Mothball, failed to make a backup. The first problem was, even though the motherboard is almost the same, the MAC of the built-in ethernet is necessarily different. Linux renamed the old configuration eth0.bak and assigned the new NIC eth2. This caused two problems. The first was, the configuration for the NIC was now set to defaults, so the manually assigned IP address was now a dynamically assigned address. I reset that, then BackupPC could ping the host using the IP I had given it. Then the backup failed with the message unable to read 4 bytes. I’d seen this before and remembered I wrote about the fix in this blog. Or so I thought. But the SSH key for Mothball didn’t change. So I tried to SSH into Boon from Mothball as BackupPC would. It just sat there. Then I realized it was a firewall issue. My firewall script on Boon had rules for eth0, but not eth2. Updating the script and running service iptables save took care of the problem.

I have an MP3 that I want to put on CD. K3B has a plug-in to do this called k3b-mp3, but it’s not in the standard distribution for Fedora 8. A poster said it’s available from the Livna Repository. I download the repository RPM only to find out I already had it installed. Now I wonder why it’s not showing up in the package manager. Browse RPM Find to look at package contents and see that k3b-mp3 is in the k3b-extras-nonfree package. Installing this package will also install K3B if it’s not already there.

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=1280×1024 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.