Fedora

by Kulbir Saini on Eclipse, Fedora, GNOME, Review, Screenshot, Themes, Virtualization

Review : Fedora 8 Test 3

Fedora 8 Test 3 aka Fedora 7.92 is out now and available for download from Fedora mirrors. I downloaded the Test 3 Live CD iso and just tested in Virtual Machine qemu. Believe me, Fedora 8 is going to be a huge improvement in basic graphics in Fedora. The graphical interface is far better than the previous release and it’ll be a delight to work on the new default Gnome theme called Nodoka especially designed for Fedora 8.The new release has got glassy/glossy looks everywhere from buttons to icons to menus.The login screen has come a long way. The electronics spin of Fedora 8 will definitely be a gift for people studying electronics at engineering level as they have introduced some packages related to circuit design and all.

I am happy to see that eclipse will be back in Fedora 8. Also, Fedora 8 comes with codecBuddy which will help to guide people to use free alternatives of audio/video codecs. A better network support is guaranteed for sure 🙂 Also, developes are trying to limit the use of desktop environment as root. In Test 3 if you try to login as root, the gdm will display a warning.

If you want to browse complete feature list for Fedora 8 Test 3, it is available here.

More about Fedora 8 Test 3 in pictures below or you can browse these pictures here.

Login Screen New Default GNOME Theme New Clear And Glassy Menus The Terminal

New Grouped Preferences Menu Advanced Network Configuration Network Works Here Root Disabled

PS1 : Waiting for 8th November eagerly.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Bug, Fedora, Hacks, Java, Tips - Tricks

Bug: Strange libstdc++.so.5 Problem in Fedora 7

After installing jdk-6u2 for Linux from Sun Microsystems’ site, when I ran javaws it gave strange error that libstdc++.so.5 not found and it aborted. I searched for libstdc++.so.5 and it was not there in /usr/lib/ as expected. That implied something is wrong. As I installed jdk-6u2 from rpms, it should have given dependency error for the particular library, bit it didn’t. After searching for sometime I found that libstdc++.so.5 is provided by compat-libstdc++-33 package, which was not installed on my system. After I installing the particular package, everything worked fine.

It worked fine for Fedora Core 6 because compat-libstdc++-33 is provided by default in Fedora Core 6.

But its kind of strange that if libstdc++.so.5 and hence compat-libstdc++-33 is required for jdk-6u2 then why ‘rpm -ivh’ didn’t give dependency error.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Drivers, Fedora, Hacks, Hardware, HowTo, Internet, Wireless

How To: Configure Wireless with Ralink (rt2500) Level One WNC 0301 in Fedora 7

If you are searching for wireless lan configuration in Fedora Core 6, a detailed description is available here. Though Fedora 7 – Moonshine detect the Ralink rt2500 Level One WNC-0301 wireless lan card, the network doesn’t work properly with default drivers. You may be able to connect sometime, but some other time it may not function properly. Because ralink drivers are not yet stable. See the discussions here. So, here is a step by step complete reference to how to make it work properly.

Step 1: Download the latest CVS release of Ralink rt2500 drivers from here.

Step 2: Unload the kernel module for rt2500 drivers

[root@bordeaux kulbirsaini] rmmod rt2500pci [Enter]

Step 3: Go to the directory /lib/modules/2.6.21-1.3194.fc7/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/mac80211/rt2x00 and take backup of the current rt2500pci driver module.

[root@bordeaux rt2x00] mv rt2500pci.ko back.rt2500pci.ko [Enter]

Step 4: Untar the download driver tar ball and change to the directory ./rt2500-cvs-XXXXXXXXXX/Module/

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[root@bordeaux Module] make [Enter]
[root@bordeaux Module] make install-fedora [Enter]

Step 5: Open /etc/modprobe.conf file and add a line

alias wlan0 rt2500

Save the file and load the rt2500 driver.

[root@bordeaux kulbirsaini] modprobe rt2500 [Enter]

Step 6: Go to the directory /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ and create a file named ifcfg-wmaster0. Copy the contents of ifcfg-wlan0 to the ifcfg-wmaster0. If you don’t have ifcfg-wlan0 file, then issue command ‘neat’ as root and add new wireless device with appropriate configurations and ifcfg-wlan0 will be created in the process.

Step 7: Activate the device, what else ???

PS1 : You can refer to my ifcfg-wlan0 and ifcfg-wmaster0 files.

PS2 : You can ask for more details on any issues in the any of the above steps.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Drivers, Fedora, Graphics, NVIDIA, Review, Screenshot, Tips - Tricks, Wireless, Xorg

Review: Fedora 7 – Moonshine

As expected, I upgraded to Fedora 7 – Moonshine yesterday. The coolest feature I noticed is that it automatically detected my Ralink WNC-0301 wireless lan card. Well, support for other wireless lan cards like ipw2100, ipw2200 and ipw3945 is also there which is I think the best feature. Because I see a lot of people around fighting with there wireless lan cards to work under Fedora Cores.

The gui is kind of improved but one more cool thing that you will notice is the theme “flying high”. The wallpapers, splash screen, login screen are improved a lot. Overall, the artwork part is worked out hardly. Default font is also nice.

A lot of media players are provided. amarok and kaffeine are included first time but amarok with no mp3 support. You have to install gstreamer and gstreamer08 plugins to make it work. The system preferences menu is totally different with similar tasks being grouped.

In addition to all that now Fedora also has some basic directories in the home directory like Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, Downloads.

Everything else is the same with upgraded versions.

Here is a Video of my current Fedora 7 desktop.

PS0 : There seems to be some problem after installing the nvidia driver for F7. Follow the procedure here replacing everything related to fc6 by f7 and at the end after configuring your xorg.conf file make these changes

The section “Files” should be like this

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Section "Files"
	ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules,/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/"
EndSection

now restart the xserver and the nvidia will work 😀 .

For more info refer my xorg.conf for F7.

PS1 : If you are a IIITian, I suggest you not upgrade to F7 because iyum is not yet configured to cache F7 rpms and you have to install updates for your OS from the internet and that really sux. So, wait for iyum repo for F7 to be up and then upgrade.

PS2 : Pidgin has some memory leaks … its consuming 2GB virtual memory … here’s the proof … I am back to kopete again 😉

Pidgin Memory Leak

Pidgin Memory Leak

Edit : If you are looking for wireless configuration in Fedora 7, here is a reference.