Hardware

by Kulbir Saini on Compiz, Drivers, Eclipse, Fedora, GNOME, Graphics, Hardware, NVIDIA, Remote Desktop, Review, Screenshot, Sound, Tips - Tricks, VNC Server, VNC Viewer, Wireless, Xorg

Review: Fedora 8 – Warewolf

I installed Fedora 8 32 bit from a leaky mirror on Nov 7th and I just had a very bad experience with it. Nothing seemed to be working. But I can’t accept that. As I am a hardcore fan of Fedora, I just can’t sit back and say “ah, Fedora 8 sucks, i am not gonna use that”. I fetched Fedora 8 x86_64 (64bit) from a mirror yesterday, after the release. I installed it and everything worked out of the box. I can’t believe that I wrote something wrong about Fedora. How could I do that ?

First of all, I would like to say that The artwork team at Fedora has done a very fantastic job. The graphics right from installation up to the desktop are just awesome. Especially the default background is very nice. Here is shot of the default Gnome Fedora 8 Desktop.

GNOME Fedora 8 Desktop

Right after the installation, I fetched the nVidia proprietary drivers from here and installed them. And those were installed successfully without giving any errors or problems. [ If you want a complete howto on installing nvidia drivers. Its here.] A reboot after the installation and compiz worked out of the box. Here is shot.

Compiz Fusion

Ok, graphics done. What now ? I just realized that there is no mp3 support. No worries. Codeina aka Codec Buddy is there. Just issue ‘codeina’ command from command line and a window like this will appear.

Codeina Audio Codec Fetcher

Check Fluendo MP3 Audio Decoder and click get selected, accept the license conditions and you’ll see that codeina is fetching the codecs. [If codeina does not fetch codecs or give error like timeout or some other network error. Try checking your proxy setting in System -> Preferences -> Internet And Network -> Network Proxy . It may help. ]

Codeina Installing MP3 Support

Ok. Now, codeina has done the job. Lets play some mp3. Note that amarok still can’t play mp3 files because it uses xine engine. So, you can choose either Totem or Rhythmbox to play your mp3 files. Here is a shot of Rhythmbox. So, Codeina also works out of the box.

Rhythmbox Playing MP3

Another major improvement in Fedora 8 in audio section is introduction or pulseaudio. Issue command ‘pulseaudio’ from command line and you will see a window like this.

Pulseaudio Device and Application Control

You can control the sound stream from different players or whatever. You can mute individual streams and can even set the default devices for certain streams through this fantastic gui.

Another good thing in Fedora 8 is Eclipse. Eclipse 3.3 is back in Fedora 8. They excluded it from Fedora 7. I am happy to see it back here in Fedora 8.

Eclipse In Fedora 8

Another utility that I found helpful is Remote Desktop utility. Launch System -> Preferences -> Internet And Network -> Remote Desktop and you’ll see a window like this.

Remote Desktop Utility

Set your preferences and now you can browse your desktop from anywhere using ‘vncviewer <yourIP>:0’. Though one call always configure vncserver to get that done. But for newbies it’ll be a great help.

Also, My wireless lan card, Ralink rt2500 WNC-0301 is detected successfully in Fedora 8. But I am not sure whether it works or not, because there is not wifi environment in my lab and I can’t check it without that. [ Anyway if your wifi card doesn’t work, here is a howto on installing Ralink rt2500 WNC-0301 using drivers from serailmonkey. ]

Another improvement is that cursor was never invisible. Up to Fedora 7, I suffered cursor invisible problem on first login. [ If you are facing the same problem, add line

Options "HWCursor" off

to “screens” section in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and issue ‘gdm-restart’ command. It’ll be fine afterwards. ]

The boot time has also improved significantly. My Fedora 8 boots in just 45 seconds.

These Fedora 8 Screenshots and other related to Fedora 8 can be reached here.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Hardware, Motherboard, News, Wireless

Info: Motherboard with Embedded Linux

A dull Sunday as usual. Woke up at 12:01pm and after finishing all startup jobs, came to lab at 1:00 pm. As usual, had nothing to do. Just went to slashdot to have some snacks. And what I saw over there was more than a surprise. OMG what the hell is going on. ASUS has come up with a new motherboard with embedded Linux. At first, I thought that guyz at slashdot has gone mad and just writing anything to have some news. But when I read the complete story and the review at Phoronix, it sounded something really geeky. They have embedded a Linux environment deep into the motherboard.

Asus is shipping this P5E3 deluxe motherboard with a feature called Asus Express Gate powered by SplashTop. The wonderful thing is that you can now boot into a basic Linux environment in just 7-8 seconds. Unbelievable !!! This basic Linux has a stripped down web-browser called FireFox 2.0 ( do we have any alternatives 😛 ) and skype. So, you can just go over the internet in a few seconds.

Much more surprising is onboard Asus WiFi-AP @n (802.11n wireless, undoubtedly the fastest wireless till date). So, you can browse at 300mbps on wireless ( of course if the infrastructure is 802.11n). And wifi card works with embedded Linux.

The BIOS browsing is no more keyboard based. It comes with a page which you can browse with your mouse. The embedded Linux is not so lame as it may sound. It has a variety of configuration utilities which includes network configuration, screen resolution, volume control, language selection and much more.

The only bad thing is the price. It is currently priced at US $360, which is very costly for having that stripped down Linux. But with time price will certainly go down and we will hopefully see new innovations for that embedded Linux. Hope to have a terminal over there soon 😀 and it’ll be fun if we can have beryl as well 😛

Wonderful innovation 😉

PS : No internet in my lab today 🙁

 
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.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Drivers, Games, Hard Disk, Hardware, Linux

Bye Bye Windows

A ruff day again … but a day I think I’ll remember for long or may be forever … the day of change … the day you grow up and take decision not to mess up your life anymore …

well, ORB posted some pics of a game here (intranet link) and I just asked about the minimum hardware configuration for running the game. His reply was “minimum requirements for u is first start using windows“. well, I use linux most of the times but I have windows xp as well, though sitting idle on my hdd. I didn’t a expect a comment like that.

As I am leaving for home on 10th of this month, I switched to windows. I started writing some data onto DVDs for taking them along with me. While writing the first DVD, it failed at 95%. Suddenly, I got an idea that I would take my hard disk instead of writing the DVDs this time. I’ll buy a SATA to USB converter and transfer the data through USB. So, started collecting the data. While downloading a movie from some ftp, a virus came over and attacked my pc. Strange virus!!! whenever I open any window with title having any of the words task manager, antivirus, virus, norton, symantec, mcaffee etc., it just minimize the window and kill the process immediately. ohh !!! I tried all the ways I know or I could have, but in vain.

So, thought of formatting my windows partition and reinstall the windows. Booted from the xp cd and …. and black screen …. ohh god … i have got this SATA-II hdd. shit!!! Technology is just to fool humans not to help in the real sense. The windows xp doesn’t install on sata hard disks.

To get through, I had two ways … either I go by the long, irritating way of patching the xp iso with sata drivers or format the entire hdd and create one single partition using Partition Magic and then install the xp. Tried patching first … long long process … gave up early … and there is not point in formatting the entire hdd for the crappy os. The best thing is that Fedora 7 is out with a great support for virtualization.

So, I have finally decided to kick windows out of my hdd forever or as long as possible and keep only Fedora. I will really miss AOE but I can’t live with the threats anymore.

I remember a line from one of our English books “Calamity will come and teach them by torture.”. I think this is going to happen to everyone sometime down the line.

So, from now on, I am totally free and secure.