June 4, 2007 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

1
2
3

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

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

June 2, 2007 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.

April 27, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Beryl, Compiz, Configuration, Drivers, Graphics, Hacks, Hardware, HowTo, Installation, Kernel, Linux, NVIDIA, Screenshot, Themes, Video, Xorg

How To: Install and Configure NVIDIA Drivers and Beryl

Well, finally I realized the power of my onboard graphics card … too lazy to realize even this (it took me a year to realize this obvious fact). I downloaded the latest nVidia drivers from here and also upgrade to the kernel-2.6.20-1.2944.fc6. You can get it from any site which provides rpms or you can install is using yum. Not to forget I did it on Fedora Core 6 – Zod. So, here goes the exact procedure.

Warning: Take a backup of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file before experimenting with 3D desktop. It help in case of X server crashes.

1. Download the latest nVidia drivers from here.

2. Upgrade to kernel-2.6.20-1.2944.fc6

(a)Download rpms kernel-2.6.20-1.2944.fc6.i686.rpm and kernel-devel-2.6.20-1.2944.fc6.i686.rpm and install using

[root@zod saini] rpm -ivh kernel* [Enter]

OR
(b)

[root@zod saini] yum install kernel-2.6.20-1.2944.fc6 [Enter]

3. Reboot and switch to the newly installed kernel.

4. Login as root and delete the temp file for xserver

[root@zod saini] rm -f /tmp/.X0.lock [Enter]

5. Install the nVidia drivers

[root@zod saini] bash NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9755-pkg1.run --kernel-source-path=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.20-1.2944.fc6-i686/ [Enter]

A user interface(I don’t know what to call it, graphical user interface on command line) will appear, answer the basic questions and you are done.

6. run this command

[root@zod saini] nvidia-xconfig [Enter]

7. Open your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in you favourite(Vim) editor and edit it as follows …

Add these lines to the “screen” section

1 2	Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True" Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"

and Add this line to the “Device Section”

Option         "TripleBuffer" "true"

or you can use my xorg.conf with appropriate modifications.

8. Now install Beryl + emerald or compiz

(a) Get rpms from any site which supplies rpms for packages in fedora and install

[root@zod saini] rpm -ivh beryl-* emerald-* [Enter]

[root@zod saini]  rpm -ivh compiz-* [Enter]

(b) There is always a short cut

[root@zod saini]  yum install beryl* emerald* [Enter]

[root@zod saini]  yum install compiz* [Enter]

9. Now logout and login again and run command beryl-manager or compiz and you are done with installing beryl/compiz with latest nVidia drivers. Enjoy the 3D desktop.

10. If in the above process your X-server crashes, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and login as root, replace your existing /etc/X11/xorg.conf file with the backup you took in the beginning and do startx.

I installed the above packages on Fedora Core 6, the Hardware is Nvidia Ge Force 6100 onboard.

Here are some screenshot of my 3D Desktop ( They can also be seen here ).

March 27, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on KDE, Linux, Programming, Tips - Tricks

QuadKonsole – Programme Better

Well, the era of Quad Core computing is approaching fast. But everybody can’t just enjoy the computing powers of those high end processors due to very high cost and maintenance(power supply and heat) problems. If you are a programmer and and use linux, then you can at least have a Quad Core Konsole. I found a small application here which can change the way you program and can make programming very easy and fast. It has four konsoles tiled in one single window and comes with very easy navigation controls. You may want to give it a try. Below is a screenshot of QuadKonsole.

Quad Core Konsole

September 26, 2006 by Kulbir Saini on Drivers, Fedora, Hacks, Hardware, HowTo, Internet, Kernel, Ndiswrapper, Wireless

How To: Configure Wireless with Ralink (rt2500) Level One WNC-0301 in Fedora Core 6

Well … Yesterday I switched from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 6. The main problem was the wireless lan. As I was using ndiswrapper for wlan in FC4, I tried compiling it for FC6. But FC6 doesn’t have build packages so it didn’t work out. Then I installed the kernel-devel packages from here. Now the build packages were not a problem. I installed ndiswrapper from here. Now while installing ndiswrapper it gave an error that your kernel is using 4k stack, while for windows driver you need to have a kernel with 16k stack. I googled and searched the 16k stack version for my kernel but didnt get one. I used to download 16k stack kernel from here. But 16k stack kernel is not yet out for FC6. So its almost impossible for me to get ndiswrapper to work if I dont want to mess up with the patched and all.

Then I thought of using the native drivers for rt2500 (Level One wnc-0301). I downloaded the drivers from here.
The step by step installation is here ….

Step 0

Install the kernel-devel package from the above specified site.

[root@localhost ~]# rpm -ivh kernel-devel-yourkernel.rpm

Step 1

Untar the drivers.

[root@localhost ~]# tar -xvzf rt2500-1.1.0-b4.tar.gz

Step 2

Change the directory to Module

[root@localhost ~]# cd rt2500-1.1.0-b4/Module/

Step 3

compile the modules

[root@localhost ~]# make

If this gives error like this

make[1]: Entering directory '/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-xen-i686'
CC [M]  /home2/Softwares/Drivers/rt2500-1.1.0-b4/Module/rtmp_main.o
In file included from /home2/Softwares/Drivers/rt2500-1.1.0-b4/Module/rtmp_main.c:50:
/home2/Softwares/Drivers/rt2500-1.1.0-b4/Module/rt_config.h:58:40: error: linux/config.h: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [/home2/Softwares/Drivers/rt2500-1.1.0-b4/Module/rtmp_main.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/home2/Softwares/Drivers/rt2500-1.1.0-b4/Module] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-xen-i686'
rt2500.ko failed to build!
make: *** [module] Error 1

Then open the file rt_config.h and comment the line #include<linux/config.h> and again compile by issuing make.
If you get a different error try to debug if you know c-programming a bit.
Step 4. [Do as root]
Install the module

[root@localhost ~]# make install-fedora

Step 5 [Do as root]

Configure the wlan card.

[root@localhost ~]# neat

Now select a new connection and wireless and the the Ralink driver. Thats it. Activate the wlan0.

Hope this help a bit.
More suggestions are welcome.