Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

Here are some instructions for setting up 3rd party repositories for mplayer, RealPlayer, FireFox plugins, etc:
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f9.html

Add/Remove Software (gpk-application) keeps complaining there’s no network connection even though there is. It seems this is a bug in version 0.1.0 that uses NetworkManager to get network status. Running yum update will update to 0.2.x which is supposed to fix the problem.

I’m now running 0.2.5 and it’s still broken. Is this a hint to run NetworkManager? I’m stubborn, so I tried getting rid of Network manager. In System, Administration, Services, I disabled NetworkManager in all runlevels and stopped the process. I enabled network in runlevels 3-5 and restarted the network. Now the installer is happy.

My system clock says 4:20am. It’s really 8:20am. Menu: System, Administration, Date & Time. NTP is turned off. Why would that be the default? Turning it on didn’t set the clock. More oddities… I’ll get back to this later.

It’s later and the clock has fixed itself.

Some funny stuff–networking in F9 is turned off this morning. Odd. ChkConfig has it off in all levels. Is this a new Network Manager thing in F9? I resisted my urge to fix it until I’m done the F9 upgrade. Running service network start is good enough for now.

To restore the home directories:

# cd /home
# cp -a /mnt/fedora8home/user .

I had to make some judgement calls about what to overwrite. If i hadn’t messed with the file in question, I didn’t overwrite it. Some files I wasn’t sure about and looked at the old and new ones to decide.

Back in my user account, the first thing missing is GKrellM. I can’t live without this, especially because Boon has no disk access light on the case. From the menu System, Administration, Add/Remove Software, I searched for krell, picked the package and chose Apply. It told me it couldn’t install sofware while offline. I also have a NetworkManager applet on my Gnome Panel with an “X” on it. But running yum install gkrellm works fine.

I wanted to try the newest version of Banshee to see if its MP3 player integration would be better than the combination of Sound Juicer, gPodder, RhythmBox and my homebrewed synchronization scripts for converting FLAC to MP3 for the Sansa Fuze. RPMs aren’t available for Fedora 8 and compilation of source wanted libraries that weren’t available for F8 either, such as gdk-x11-2.0. That and the NVidia driver issue were enough to push me to upgrade Fedora.

I continued my upgrade strategy, which is not to upgrade, really. I created new root and home volumes with the Logical Volume Manager, downloaded the Fedora 9 x64 DVD and started it up. Right away, I had a problem with the video driver. The NV driver loads in 800×600 and the rightmost part of the window is off the display. Switching to text mode sidestepped that problem. Once F9 booted, I logged in as root and created the users.

At this point it was getting late, so I checked that existing OSs were OK. Uh oh. GRUB only lists Fedora 9 and “other”. After panicking, I logged in as root and looked at grub.conf. I knew I had edited that file a few days ago to chose and older kernel, so the emacs backup file would still be there. But it didn’t have the right entries in it. Where did it go? It seems I chose the wrong boot partition in set-up and got my Fedora Core 6 directory. So I looked at the F8 /etc/fstab and found which one it was supposed to be, added that to my F9 fstab in the /mnt directory and moved the old entries to the new grub.conf. Now peace is restored. Or maybe I should say since my wife didn’t see her schoolwork in Vista was missing, disaster was averted.

About a month ago or so, I got a kernel update to 2.6.26.3. It complained that the kmod-nvidia package was required but not there. This has happened in the past, as the NVidia package lags behind kernel releases by a few days. Except this one never came. Running the new kernel without kmod-nvidia caused the NVidia X driver to fail to load and messed up my screen. The XOrg NV driver doesn’t work right either–my screen is about twice as tall as my monitor. So I went to the Vesa driver, which works, but doesn’t have as many features. This affects resizing the MPlayer window, but nothing else. I used to have kmod-nvidia-. It looks like now I might need kmod-nvidia-173.*

yum install kmod-nvidia.x86_64
installed
kmod-nvidia-2.6.25.14-69.fc8 x86_64 173.14.12-2.lvn8 livna 2.6 M
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia x86_64 173.14.12-1.lvn8 livna 3.2 M
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs x86_64 173.14.12-1.lvn8 livna 5.7 M

[update] Still haven’t resolved this–went back to the older kernel in the meantime.

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.