Peregrine

In dealing with nVidia and ATI drivers for Linux (both a kernel and X driver are needed), I’ve been using the Livna YUM repositories for Fedora to easily install them as RPMs using YUM.

I’ve run into trouble here and there as the Livna folks keep pulling RPMs from their repos for older versions of the kernels. At the very least, they should leave the kmod-* packages in there for the original kernels that shipped with each release. Then, people can install a release and get a good driver. I had to wait for about 3 weeks after I first put F7 on my home workstation (dual AMD Opteron) before I could get the nVidia driver from Livna because they didn’t have one for the older kernel packages and the newer kernels weren’t booting (turned out to be malformed initrd files, which I later fixed).

Yes, I understand that they take up some disk space, but it’s not really that much perhaps 100M per release to keep all kmod-* packages and their dependencies around.

Livna, if you’re listening, please, give us all the driver packages and don’t remove them. You don’t know which kernels are working for people and which aren’t, so you could really be making things pretty difficult for people.

A few minutes ago, I installed the kdebluetooth package. I was already logged in, so I had to launch the kbluetooth applet myself. I then clicked K Menu -> System -> KInputWizard, pressed the “reset” button on the bottom of my mouse and clicked “Add” in the Input Devices dialog. My mouse was discovered and I connected to it. Simple as that.

I have a Logitech bluetooth mouse that travels with me. I use it with my notebook computer, as I’m very, very not fond of trackpads. My favorite is the “TrackPoint” or “Eraser-head” mouse built into the keyboard, but this notebook didn’t come with one. Supposedly, I can buy a replacement keyboard from HP that includes the eraser-head pointer, but I have not yet done so.

When I wrote about installing Fedora 7 on this notebook (and now installing Fedora 8), one thing which I never documented was how I got the bluetooth mouse working with Linux (under F7). Now that I installed F8 from scratch, I need to set it up again.

When I installed F7, I spent hours dog-paddling through Google searches and horrible documentation and still hadn’t figured it out. Then, my friend and co-worker, Clint Savage (a.k.a. Herlo) popped into the office. It was him! He’s the one who has the exact same mouse as I do; I knew I’d seen it somewhere before I had bought mine. So, I asked him. He smiled and laughed, saying, “Not finding much useful documentation out there, eh?” He’d been through the same thing as me. He was impressed with how far I’d gotten through that process and estimated that I was probably 1-3 hours away from finding it myself, if I continued to follow the pattern he had. Well, he shared the information with me.

The good news was that it was pretty easy to get my bluetooth mouse talking with my bluetooth equipped notebook, just not really documented anywhere that one could point to just one thing (boy, I wish I’d documented those commands in a blog post; I’ll see if I can do just that next week, when I’m back at the office). The bad news was that one of them had to be run every time he started his computer. So, I put that command into a /root/bin/connect-to-my-bluetooth-mouse (or something like that) script. Then, a week later, I forgot to run that when I booted up and logged in, once, but was using the mouse anyway. I had discovered that it wasn’t necessary to run that all the time.

One of the reasons that it had been so difficult to setup bluetooth on Fedora 7 was that I was using GNOME on that installation. I stuck with entirely GNOME apps (except for Kdevelop) the entire time I had F7 on this notebook. Now that I have F8, I’ve gone back to KDE, which makes life so much better for me. GNOME still doesn’t have much bluetooth support and what is there is still very early half-baked and non-usable, for the most part. KDE’s bluetooth tools, on the other hand, seem much more comprehensive and “just work” for me.

The fact that Fedora (and by extension, RHEL, CentOS, etc.), supports bi-arch platforms is a great thing. However, it does get to be very irritating when YUM decides that it should just pull in 32bit versions on a system with no other 32 bit packages. I’ve experienced this problem during installations, as anaconda now uses YUM to process package selections (since FC5).

It doesn’t stop with just anaconda installation and yum update commands, either. Almost every yum install command that I run decides to install both 64-bit and 32-bit packages. That is, unless I explicitly specify that I only want the 64-bit for each and every package. For example:

# yum install foo.x86_64 bar.x86_64

Why is yum doing this? It didn’t used to. I started experiencing this a little bit on FC6, but F7 and F8 both have horrific troubles with it. I need to do some more digging through Red Hat’s Bugzilla bug/issue tracking system, however, my first pass didn’t find anything to help explain the changes. After a little more research, I’ll file this as a bug.

In the meantime, here’s a quick-n-dirty hack I put together to run updates. The first step is to capture the output of yum update to a file (be patient, this command can take for-freakin-ever to run). Step two is to run the update itself. Here it is as a shell script:

#/bin/bash
# Get a temporary file to use.
TO_UPDATE="$(mktemp)"

# Populate the temporary file with the list of available updates.
yes n | yum update > ${TO_UPDATE}

# Composite an update command that does not include any 32-bit stuff.
yum update $(for i in $(sed '/i[3456]86/d' ${TO_UPDATE} |
         sed '/^Updating/d' |
         sed '/^Installing/d' |
         grep -v "^$" |
         grep -v replacing |
         cut -d" " -f2); do
      rpm -q --qf "%{name}.%{arch}\n" $i; done |
   grep -v "is not installed$")

# Optional cleanup.
if [ "${1}" = "-k" ]; then
   mv ${TO_UPDATE} /root/$(date --iso-8601)-$(basename ${TO_UPDATE})
else
   rm ${TO_UPDATE}
fi

You will have to run a separate yum update command for any 32-bit stuff you really do have installed and want to update.

I know this could be streamlined (especially the part that constructs the yum update command), but as I’m not planing on making this a permanent fix, I’m just not going to bother with it right now. Still, feel free to comment or trackback with other solutions or optimizations of mine.

So, is anyone else experiencing troubles with the proprietary ATI driver on Fedora 8? How about on an updated F7 system?

My HP Compaq 6715b notebook comes with ATI Radeon X1270 video 128MB RAM dedicated plus 192MB RAM shared) and a 1680×1050 resolution 15.4 inch LCD (at 61Hz, it would seem). I’ve installed the proprietary ATI driver in order to get it working, as Fedora’s tools get really confused about widescreen setups, it would seem.

Here are the relevent package versions:

# rpm -qa | egrep ‘(fglrx|kernel)’
kmod-fglrx-8.42.3-8.lvn8
kmod-fglrx-2.6.23.1-49.fc8-8.42.3-8.lvn8
xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-8.42.3-7.lvn8.1
kernel-devel-2.6.23.1-49.fc8
kernel-devel-2.6.23.1-42.fc8
kernel-2.6.23.1-42.fc8
kernel-2.6.23.1-49.fc8
kernel-headers-2.6.23.1-49.fc8
xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-libs-32bit-8.42.3-7.lvn8.1

(As you can see, I haven’t removed the original kernel, yet. Maybe I’ll go do that now.)

However, I seem to be getting some fairly odd artifacts on-screen with this driver under F8, including some odd extra sprite garbage with the mouse cursor. I had experienced some oddities under F7, but they were confined to GNOME applications (no others exhibited any issues). It doesn’t matter if I enable or disable “Desktop Effects” either (they won’t successfully enable, anyway). A RAM test (memtest86+) shows that there’s nothing wrong with the system memory, but that doesn’t test the video card. There are ATI tools for testing the video card more fully, but I haven’t had time to try them out, yet.

Since FC6, Fedora systems rely on the X server detecting proper monitor and other configuration parameters every time it starts. This has been far less than reliable on a wide variety of machines that I’ve been running into over the past year. I’d like to get some more information about other people’s experiences with this, before I file a “bug” report about this. It’s really becoming an embarrassing problem as things worked much better when we would get a finished configuration file by default in FC5 and earlier.

Last night, while flying from Salt Lake (SLC) to Kansas City (MCI), I used a Fedora 8 x86_64 DVD I had burned earlier in the day to reinstall my notebook. Probably not the smartest way (that is, on an airplane without an Internet connection available) to do such an installation.

First, I tried to do an “Upgrade Install”, which didn’t surprise me by not working. Upgrading from 32-bit F7 to 64-bit F8 isn’t something that anaconda knows how to do, and I didn’t expect it would. Still, I tried it and know we know for sure. So, I did a fresh installation. I removed the root Logical Volume (I’ve been using LVM for my notebooks and workstations since long before Fedora started to default to it) and created new LVs for / and /usr/ LVs. Previously, under F7, /usr/ was on the root LV.

The install phase itself went just fine. 1478 packages were installed, including 389 32-bit (i.e. i386, i486, i586 and/or i686 RPMs). I ran a simple command to find and then remove all of them:

# rpm -qa –qf “%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n” | grep “\.i[3456]86$” | xargs rpm -e

If I need any 32-bit stuff later, I’ll just reinstall as few such packages as are required.

My next issue was the same video problem as I had when I installed Fedora 7. The graphical installer couldn’t run and the resulting system had no working X server configuration. This was very easy to fix:

# wget http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
# rpm -qp –qf “%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n” livna-release-8.rpm
livna-release-8-1.noarch
# mv livna-release-8.rpm livna-release-8-1.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh livna-release-8-1.noarch.rpm

(NOTE: I renamed the package file back to what it should have been in the first place. Though rare, if they update it, I’d like to notice the difference and be sure I’m using the latest one on some other machine in the future.)

After setting up the Livna repository for Fedora 8, I was able to install and activate the ATI driver:

# yum install kmod-fglrx x11-xorg-drv-fglrx
. . . output omitted . . .
# fglrx-config-display enable

Notice that the command name changed from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8; it used to be ati-fglrx-config-display.

The next thing I need to fix is to re-associate my Logitech Bluetooth mouse with the notebook. I had a script in /root/bin/ that would have taken care of that very easily. Unfortunately, I forgot about that until after I had installed Fedora 8, thus obliterating that file. Oh, well. This time, I’ll also document it elsewhere (perhaps here?) once I get it figured out again. I hope that will be tonight.

One last thing; with Fedora 7, I did my very best to stick with an all GNOME system. It was very irritating using applications that just couldn’t handle lots of basic things that I take for granted using other apps (mostly KDE). For Fedora 8, I’m going back to KDE, where things work much better.

I’ve been playing Eve Online, a space MMO for many months now. Today, they released their Linux and MacOS X clients as part of the version 2.3 update.

Though I haven’t had a chance to try it out, yet, this is exciting news. It’s wonderful to see a game like this take the step to providing Linux, and Mac clients. Given that Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Vista is such a horrible platform and provides terrible performance for games, it would be a very good for many game makers to put more effort into both Mac and Linux support. In case you hadn’t heard, Apple (AAPL) sold 2 million iMac systems in 2007Q3 alone. There is talk that they could top that number in Q4 with ease.

Blizzard, are you listening? How about providing a LInux version of World of WarCraft and StafCraft II (whenever it lands)? That would be awesome.

On the last day of the Utah Open Source Conference 2007 (UTOSC), there was a PGP/GPG key signing party, hosted by Scott Paul Robertson. It was good to be able to get set up to properly sign so many keys, but it did give me a little problem; I needed to sign everyones’ keys with each of my 4 active keys. That would have been over 100 times running the gpg command. Sounds like something begging to be scripted, so I did.

I’m posting the script, which is still very rough, as I didn’t both taking any time when I whipped it up last night to take care of everything that it really should be doing. Still, I’ll work on it here and there, I’m sure. You can download it from http://www.openbrainstem.net/download/sign-lots-o-keys. If you feel like makeing some fixes, either post your patches (please, create them as a unified diff file, if you wouldn’t mind) and put a link in the comments here and/or on your own blog.

Enjoy!

Last week, some IBM ThinkPad T61p notebooks showed up at Guru Labs offices. There were 2 of them on Monday and another on Tuesday. I also know that there are 2 more coming and perhaps a couple of other co-workers will be ordering them, too.

I’ve been needing to get a new notebook for the past two years, but I kept putting it off because of time, money and that one more feature that’s coming out in a couple of months. With the arrival of so many new notebooks in the office, I decided to look again and dream about a new one of my own, so I made the rounds looking at systems of interest, including a couple of HP notebooks, the ThinkPad and Apple’s MacBook Pro.

When I hit HP’s Small & Medium Business website, I noticed the one category of notebooks which I had always left unexplored (as they didn’t fit some of the criteria I look for) listed that there were models which had up to 16 hours of battery life. I was curious to see what they had in this “Balanced Mobility” category, so I took a look. Boy, am I glad I did.

I found the HP Compaq 6715b. They had (at this writing, I think it’s still on) a pre-packaged deal going for US$1,129 (Ed: The price is lower, now) with:

• AMD Turion64 X2 (dual core) at 2.0GHz
• 1GB RAM
• 160GB SATA hard drive
• ATI Radeon Mobility X1270 video chip (with 128MB dedicated RAM and using 192MB shared RAM)
• 15.4 inch WSXGA+ (1680×1050) LCD
• Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet NIC
• Broadcom 4321 802.11 a/b/g/draft-n wireless NIC & integrated bluetooth
• Fingerprint reader
• 4 USB 2.0, 1 IEEE1394 (firewire), 6-in-1 card reader (actually, all SD type form factors), 1 Type I/II PC-card slot

That’s a lot of notebook for the money. So I put in an order. HP estimated that it would ship on the 30th of August, but it arrived on Thursday morning (2007/08/23).

In fact, I believe it’s around half the price of what any of the other guys have paid for their ThinkPad notebooks and it’s almost the same. They got a wireless USB 2.0 capability which I don’t have, but they only have 3 USB 2.0 ports (I have 4). Most (if not all) of their screens are 15.4 inch WUXGA (1920×1200) with nVidia graphics (256MB), an Intel Core 2 Duo (2.0GHz or 2.2GHz, I’m not sure which in all cases) and they have a nice “eraser-head” mouse which I don’t have, but really love. I hate trackpads, so I just picked up a Logitech bluetooth mouse, Saturday.

Overall, I think I got a better deal. My processor is as good or even a little faster than the ThinkPads’, and otherwise there’s very little difference in the equipment between the two, but they paid quite a bit more than I did for the HP. Thanks to that savings, I also picked up a 12-cell “Ultra Capacity” battery for my new notebook, which attaches to the underside at the back, causing the system to sit at a slight incline. The Ultra Capacity battery mounts in addition to the standard battery that came with the notebook and gives this machine up to 16 hours of battery life, with only a small increase in weight but a little more comfort and room for airflow underneath. We’ll have to wait and see just how much life I really get out of this setup, but I shan’t fear attempting to watch 3-4 movies on an international flight.

I’ve installed Fedora 7 on it. When I booted up the box to do the install, anaconda couldn’t get X to run, so it offered me the choice of using the text-mode installer or of starting VNC for me. I went with a VNC install. The resulting system had a couple of things to fix up. I checked on http://linux-laptops.net/ but this model isn’t listed, yet.

I believe there must have been a bug (I didn’t bother to go looking in Red Hat’s Bugzilla for it) in the version of YUM that shipped with F7 (32-bit) as yum update kept corrupting the RPM db and then deleting the errata RPM files as it thought it had installed packages but actually hadn’t. I simply edited /etc/yum.conf and set keepcache=1 before re-running yum again. That way, the packages stuck around and then I installed as many as I could using rpm instead (including an updated YUM package), which required me to fix the RPM DB, first. This was easy to do by simply running rm /var/lib/rpm/__*; rpm --rebuilddb and waiting for just 1 minute for it to finish. After installing the updated YUM package, all yum commands have worked perfectly for me.

To “fix” the X server configuration, I simply added the livna YUM repo to my new system and ran yum install kmod-fglrx followed by ati-fglrx-display enable as root (that’s not the command mentioned in the Unofficial Fedora FAQ for FC6, but the F7 version of the UFAQ wasn’t up yet) and the X server worked perfectly, even running the screen at it’s full, native resolution by default. I’ll have to see about running Cedega for a couple of games.

Next, I tried to get the fingerprint reader working, but so far, I’ve had no luck. Honestly, I haven’t really tried all that hard, yet. Some quick Google searches have only found references to people who haven’t gotten other HP notebooks’ fingerprint readers to work, but I also found some “hints” that others have. The output of the lsusb command showed Bus 003 Device 003: ID 08ff:2580 AuthenTec, Inc., which is the fingerprint reader.

I haven’t gotten the Broadcom 4321 802.11a/b/g/draft-n working yet. Linux does come with a driver that supposedly covers the chip in this Mini-PCI card, but I do not have the firmware for the driver to load. The tools for these cards come with a program called fw-cutter, but I haven’t found a file for this card that it will work on, yet. I suspect that I will have to wait for an update to fw-cutter to be able to get this working under the Linuxdriver . Perhaps I can find time to try to help patch it. In the meantime, my good old Cisco airo 350 card works fine, but I could also use NDIS Wrapper to run it with a Windows driver.

I’ve only been using this notebook for less than a day (and only a small part of the day, at that). Even so, I’m very happy with it already.

I’m thinking of installing Ubuntu (or Kubuntu, probably) on here alongside of Fedora. I’ve been wanting to learn more about that distro and now I have a hard drive that’s more than large enough for me to play with such things.

I also added vga=0x31a to the kernel line in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file (yeah, yeah, I know how Red Hat/Fedora only folks are going to say the file is “supposed” to be /boot/grub/grub.conf, but it really isn’t so; so, please, don’t add comments telling me about that). That sets up a framebuffer mode for text that’s 1280×1024. I don’t know if the kernel can support a 1680×1050 mode or not (so far, I’m not finding anything that would make thik it does). If so, I’d sure like to find out the right code for it. If not, I’d like to figure out how to add wide-screen friendly modes to the kernel framebuffer driver(s), as more and more systems are going that way.

I’m going to post this system on the http://linux-laptops.net/ website. If anyone else figures out how to get the fingerprint reader working under Linux on this or any other notebook that uses the same fingerprint reader chip/device, please, either TrackBack to this post or leave me a comment.

For those who might balk at the configuration work found in Christer’s recent post, Turning Off The System (hardware) Beep : Linux Tutorial, I have a solution for you. You can order this simple device and reuse again and again after modifying that pesky, noise-making computer speaker. Simply go to any Radio Shack store and ask for Radio Shack part #64-2951.

Yesterday, I decided to burn the openSUSE 10.2 DVD for x86-64 so that I can install it on the new system. Fedora Core 6 is having lots of trouble getting the graphics working correctly on the new box (we’ll have to see if it’s any better after I update the BIOS).

So, I used KTorrent to download the DVD ISO for the x86-64 version of openSUSE 10.2, which I let run overnight (3.7GB takes a little while on a T1 line). I verified the MD5SUM on the ISO file and tried to use cdrecord to burn the image to a blank DVD. 865MB in, ka-blooey. A write error meant I had a Frisbee (or coaster, if you prefer). “OK, well that could just be one bad disc,” so I tried again. Same thing. “OK, perhaps if I turn the burn speed down,” but I now have 3 discs with ~865MB burned on them.

So, I installed k3b and tried to burn from the DVD image with that. It worked like a charm.

I’m not sure what switches k3b used, but it did run growisofs before starting the burn process. I’m not sure whether that was important or not. The cool thing is, this is an example of a frontend that is done right. With k3b, all sorts of burning situations are just handled. It will work with all sorts of disc burning and image related tools, can use transcode when creating audio or “MP3″ CDs, has DVD aware support and so much more.