What's on my computer, how it got there and how to use it
I found the script manager (menu/Tools/Script Manager) and installed Transcogg, which will convert from FLAC to OGG on transfer. The media player options still won’t let me select the transcoding option (it’s greyed out), but the “transferring files to media device” section is enabled and I’ve selected OGG as the format to convert to. Still no go.
I’m still trying different applications to manage the “rip CD to FLAC, update tags, download cover art, play in Linux and transcode to OGG and synchronize to my Fuze” process. There’s also a separate path for Podcasts, but that’s another story.
The latest victim is Amarok. I started with my CD collection in ~/Music. Most of it is in FLAC format in the standard ARTIST/ALBUM/SONGS directory structure. In each album directory is Cover.jpg, which is the full size album art. As we know from our reading, the Fuze’s screen is 220×176, so anything bigger than that is a waste of space and if it’s too big, the Fuze won’t show it at all. So scaling the images is required. The fuze will look for a file called folder.jpg to display, so the image file has to be renamed too.
Starting Amarok, I told it where the music was, then tried to tell it about the Fuze. It didn’t autodetect the player, despite it being mounted to /media/SANSA FUZE. Then I installed libmtp. That didn’t help either. So I manually added it as a generic audio player. Now synchronizing a directory of OGG files worked fine, but no cover art. Transferring a directory of FLAC files failed entirely, leaving them in the transfer queue with X icons next to them, but not telling me why they failed.
The mailto: links brought up Evolution from Firefox 3.0.2 on my new Fedora 9 installation. I use GMail. To change this, I found these Lifehacker instructions. Everything was already there for GMail except for the preference. On Linux, choose Edit/Preferences, then the Applications tab. Scroll down to content type “mailto”. Select “Use GMail” as the action. You can check out the details of the actions. In the address bar, enter about:config, then enter “mailto” in the filter.
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-
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.