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.

Today’s project is to create a mock Guinness Stout label for a gluten-free stout I brewed for a friend. I soaked a label off a bottle, scanned it and brought up GIMP to change “Guinness” to “Glutenless”. There wasn’t a font on my system that looked close enough to the original, so I went looking for one on the web. I found a Guinness font and installed it on RedHat 9.

The editing consisted of copying a region of the yellow background and pasting it over the word Guinness. Then I created a new layer and put the word Glutenless on it with the new font. I used the “Rotation, Scaling, Shearing, Perspective” tool to scale the text to the right size. After a sample print, I saved it to TIFF. The original image is 1572×1920 at 600dpi. To save paper, I ran convert -size 4716x5760 tile:glutenless-stout-label.tif glutenless-stout-page.tif to make a printable sheet of nine labels.

I use Tripwire to verify my router host hasn’t been cracked. A cron job runs every night in which Tripwire checks important system files to make sure they haven’t been changed. When system updates are done (via yum or apt-get), these files are expected to change.

Before an update, I run a manual tripwire check with tripwire --check and verify it with tripwire --update -r <report name>. After the update is done, I do this again to approve the system changes. The big surprise is seeing the tripwire report the next day. It shows lots of modified files! The first time this happened, I feared the worst. So I verified the changed files with rpm -qf <changed file name> to get the changed packages, then rpm -V <package name>. The packages were fine.

What happened was the files were relinked. There’s another cron job that runs prelink every night. Prelink optimizes dynamically linked shared libraries and binaries so they load faster. You can see what prelink changed by looking at its log in /var/log/prelink.log.

I have a firewall box that doesn’t have a DVD burner on it. Its entire filesystem is about 3GB, making backup to a single DVD easy. This is how I get the backup to the host with the DVD burner. On the firewall, I run this:

tar czf - / 2>/var/log/backup-full.log | (ssh me@dvdhost "cat > /backupdir/remote-backup.tgz" )

Then I go to the DVD burner host and use the DVD writing commands to back it up:

dvd+rw-format /dev/dvd
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -R -J /backupdir/remote-backup.tgz

I have an old Thinkpad iSeries 1472 (2611-472) laptop. It’s a 1999 vintage Intel mobile Pentium II 366 MHz machine that has served me well with only a few problems along the way. It’s been running Redhat 9 for a while and I thought I should update it to Fedora Core 2 since RH9 is past its end of life.

Knowing an upgrade of RedHat is more trouble than it’s worth, I loaded Fedore Core 2 from scratch. It was OK except for the keyboard repeat rates being way too high. I fixed those with the control panel, then updated everything with Yum and that’s when the trouble started. On the next bootup, I got lots of errors from fsck. The hard disk flaked out on this machine only once before, so I thought maybe it had developed a bad sector. I booted the Knoppix live CD and ran a full check of the disk. No bad sectors. Next I suspected the old battery had a power fluctuation. I reloaded on AC with the battery out. Everything was fine until I did the Yum update. The first boot hung. The second got more fsck errors. I really didn’t think Fedora could cause this. I suspected heat-related problems due to an aging fan. I was about to give up on the machine as too expensive to fix. Luckily, I’m stubborn. I dropped back to RedHat 9 to eliminate the FC2 variable. There have been no problems since. I still don’t know what about FC2 could cause this. If it’s specific to this machine, I’m out of luck. This might be the last running i1472 on Linux in the world. 😉

This post is long overdue. I should have entered it when I solved the isapnp problem, as my memory is kinda fuzzy now. The issue was the Orinoco PCMCIA wireless ethernet card wasn’t being detected at startup. The Orinoco card is plugged into an ISA to PCMCIA bridge card.

As best I can recall, this kind of problem is no longer solved by using pnpdump and editing isapnp.conf. The Orinoco card couldn’t be found because the ISA to PCMICA card bridge wasn’t there. The i82365 and ds modules weren’t loaded because the Orinoco card wasn’t listed as a PCMCIA card. After mucking about manually inserting the modules, I stumbled upon the real answer, which was to get the card listed in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth2 as Wireless instead of Ethernet. After this the kernel loaded the modules properly.

Seems the card is detected by Fedora core 2 as an ethernet card instead of a wireless ethernet card. This causes PCMCIA to not load. Edit /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0 (or whichever is your Orinoco card) and change TYPE from Ethernet to Wireless.

Run system-config-networking and then the Wireless tab will come up and let you enter ESSID, WEP keys, etc.