Peregrine

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.

I have known Marc Christiensen for years and have a lot of respect for him. He does a great job of keeping on top of things, which is why I was surprised that he didn’t catch the problems found in the Oracle press release he quotes in his recent post.

I’ll quote the part he quoted and intersperse it with my comments.

Today Oracle announced that it would provide the same enterprise class support for Linux as it provides for its database, middleware and applications products. Oracle starts with Red Hat Linux, removes Red Hat trademarks, and then adds Linux bug fixes.

Sound like what CentOS and White Box Enterprise Linux (WBEL) do. OK, that’s fine.

Currently, Red Hat only provides bug fixes for the latest version of its software.

Wrong.

Red Hat provides seven (7) years of support from the release date of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) release (since RHEL3, only 5 years for RHEL2.1), including the production of errata packages for both security and bug fixes. This means that support, including updates, will not be terminated until after October 2010 for RHEL3 and February 2012 for RHEL4.

This often requires customers to upgrade to a new version of Linux software to get a bug fixed.

Wrong.

However, it is true that Red Hat does not backport drivers or other new feature support to released versions.

Oracle’s new Unbreakable Linux program …

Oracle’s “Unbreakable Linux” program has been around for years. Perhaps, they meant to convey that this new incarnation of the (existing) Unbreakable Linux program, which now includes an Oracle branded Linux distribution.

… will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux. In other words, Oracle will provide the same level of enterprise support for Linux as is available for other operating systems.

Thus implying that Linux is backwater, until Oracle steps in and makes it acceptable. Sounds like big software company marketting people to me :) .

Oracle is offering its Unbreakable Linux program for substantially less than Red Hat currently charges for its best support.

Given that Red Hat has support option from nothing (no support contract is required) or pay-per-incident phone support up to 24×7 on-site Red Hat employees managing your systems with a couple dozen options in between, “best support” could mean a lot of things.

Of course, tons of people get confused easily by Red Hat’s “licensing” costs. No! They are not charging you for a license. Everything in RHEL is free and open. You can buy both a support contract and/or (a) subscription(s) to Red Hat Network (RHN).

“We believe that better support and lower support prices will speed the adoption of Linux,

Well, duh!

… and we are working closely with our partners to make that happen,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Intel is a development partner. Dell and HP are resellers and support partners. Many others are signed up to help us move Linux up to mission critical status in the data center.

I’ve got news for you Oracle, Linux is already mission critical in lots of data centers, including yours. That’s right, Oracle has been using Linux as the platform for delivery of their hosted applications services for years. I am also personally familiar with enough Fortune 500 companies data centers to say that they all have at least one of their mission-critical applications running on Linux. But don’t take my word for it; almost all of them have made public statements in some form or another which indicate that this is the case.

Please, will you folks stop treating Linux like something you are coming along to save from “certain self doom”. You’re not. Most of you are, on the other had, making wonderful contributions, but all of our Linux are not belong to you.

Although this last one isn’t really that big of a deal, it’s yet another example of how marketing people in companies that should know better keep implying that Linux isn’t ready for “real world” workloads.

BTW: I’m sitting in a lousy hotel room in Austin, Texas with NyQuil in my system, feeling sick and extremely drowsy. Maybe I should post while in this state, but I’m doing it anyway (isn’t that one of the corollary definitions of “stupid”?). So, if I messed up a detail or a link, please, let me know, but bear with me. Also, I only have Internet access in the evenings, if it’s working (took a couple of hours to get a stable connection tonight). I’ve gotta go sleep now. I sure hope I don’t feel this crappy, tomorrow. Goodnight.

It hasn’t been very long since I upgraded the storage on my home file server. One evening last week while I was in Los Angeles, my wife told me that there was a “funny” sound coming from the “server room”. Her description made me think it was a fan. Oh, how I wish that had been the case.

Saturday, after I was home I had tried to access some files on the file server and couldn’t. I tried to log into it via SSH and that hung. I logged in as root on it’s console without problems. A df worked fine, but trying to access anything mounted from the new drive’s LVs failed, hanging the command indefinitely. Trying to shutdown the box also failed as it hung on trying to unmount those volumes. I used the good-ol-power-switch to kill it, waited for everything to stop spinning and tried to start it up. The drive controller can’t even make sense of the drive. I simply powered the box down and left it that way for the weekend.

Tonight, I’ll be pulling the new drive out. I’ll hook it up to my home workstation (only other SATA box I currently have) and see if the drive will run. If so, I’m still not putting it back in the server. Instead, I’ll verify everything, wipe it and run it hard to try to fail it again. Even if I can’t get it to fail again, I’m still going to get an RMA and have it replaced. I think I’ll grab 1 or 2 more while I’m at it and set up either RAID 1 or RAID 5.

Let the hard drive games begin, I guess.

Recently, Migueal de Icazza wrote this as part of a blog post:

X applications do not open sometimes: this is caused because DHCP is set to “change hostname on DHCP” requests. For some reason X applications are not happy with changes in the hostname. I have no idea why. I personally have not experienced this, but I guessed that it was DHCP changing the host name.

Solution: Make sure that your network setting does not change the hostname. I have no idea why this happens, but this is what happens. Just do not let DHCP change your hostname.

He was right. The X server uses the machine name of the box it’s running on as part of the filename for some socket files (in /tmp/) that allow local apps to connect to the X server. If you change the systems hostname during a running X session, any X apps you launch thereafter will use the new hostname to look for an appropriate socket and not find one.

The fix for getting into this situation is easy; just kill the X session and log in again. Trying to “gracefully” log out of such an X session will probably fail, as the logout dialog box applet can’t be launched. Press <ctrl>+<alt>+<backspace> (all together) to kill your current X session. A new display manager should be started in it’s place.