Fedora "Werewolf" 8 is a good release. I've been running it on my Pioneer laptop since Test 1 and I think it's enough of an advance to be worthy of a new version number. I much prefer the new theme to the F7 theme - it has the cool clean but still attractive look that I like in Gnome.
I still need to have another play with it, but the Online Desktop feature looks interesting.The X1600 graphics card in the laptop isn't supported for its native resolution of 1280x800, but I can get the Free RadeonHD driver which compiles and works very nicely. Last I heard from Phoronix, there was a problem with the ATI driver and 2.6.23 kernels, so no Desktop Effects for me anytime soon it seems. Hopefully the RadeonHD crew will build in 3D and AIGLX support before the 8.43 ATI driver is released, so I'm not tempted to add any closed source junk to my build. I think that's asking a lot, though. ;-)
Another hardware feature that I'm looking to have supported soon is the Atheros Wireless card. Currently, the ath5k drivers, in the 2.6.23 kernel, recognise the card and its capabilites. Unfortunately, trying to scan for APs or trying any other configuration typically results in a lock-up. I've blacklisted the driver for now and am using the Madwifi drivers from ATrpms until the fully Free drivers work properly.
I'll probably migrate my desktop to F8 this weekend using the two old SATA disks that were my F6 install. Once I'm happy that it's solid, I'll push it onto the 250GB disks that I'm using now for F7.
I've moved on again to the latest edition of Fedora on my home workstation. I took the cowards' way out and bought new hardware to do it. Actually, that was kind of cool too: the disks are two 250GB Seagate SATA (ST3250310AS) drives that only seem to have one platter, so they're unusually light. I'm guessing that this is the new vertical stacking of magnetic signals that I'd read about in Slashdot a while ago.
I installed the drives and booted up from the install disk for x86_64. There was a problem with video, so I swapped to the text only mode. This is where I found that you can't create RAID arrays (or was it logical volumes?) in the textual installer. Frustrated, I switched back to the graphical install but unplugged the 2nd of my two monitors in the hope that that was where the problem lay .Fortuately, it was.
The rest of the install was fine, and I'm very happy to happy to have Firefox & Thunderbird 2.0 now. I overlaid a backup of my home directory on top of the new one, and have pretty much everything back the way I want.
One weird thing was that the sound configuration went out of whack. Having a webcam with audio capabilities seemed to confuse the configuration. I ended up with two entries in my modules.conf for different sound devices, but having the same index. I went looking in there after I'd read some Fedora Forum articles about similar problems. Changing them to different indexes fixed the problem.
I grabbed the latest copy of Gnash from CVS today, compiled it on my workstation, and installed it. To my surprise, it allowed me to use YouTube almost perfectly. Also, Flash content from the Dread Squirrel Foamy now seems to work much better. I was having sound sync issues with it before.
My workstation spec is still Fedora Core 6 x86_64 and I'm running Gnash as a plugin for Firefox 1.5.0.12.
I've followed the instructions from OpenMoko and OpenEmbedded for setting up the environment on FC6.
I've had to get "quilt" and "texi2html", but I still can't see a native FC6 version of Psycho, so I guess my makes will take a while until I get that sorted out. Hopefully the first cut is the deepest, and susequent makes will be paper-cuts.
Running the OpenMokoMake takes a loooong time. In that time, I looked at what's involved with creating a new package. It seems as though creating a new BitBake recipe is what's required.
Well the make died, but fortunately a quick Google revealed that the problem has a bug report already. As I'm using an x86_64 system, I suffered Bug 1765. So I did what I was told from the list archive and went on my merry way
After waiting around for the URL redirect bug in Rhythmbox to get fixed in FC6, I decided to see what the problem was. After some investigation, I found that it had been fixed in 0.9.6 (FC6 uses 0.9.5 at time of writing). I had a look to see if an update was in testing, but I couldn't see anything. I saw that there was a 0.9.7 for FC7, but didn't want to go playing in that area. So, I decided to create my own package.
I took the src.rpm from FC6, updated the source with the vanilla tarball from Gnome and had a go. I had some issues with libgpod being < 0.4 and old Gnome dekstop integration stuff being dropped in 0.9.6 & 0.9.7.
Eventually, I made these:
Rhythmbox-0.9.7
Rhythmbox spec file (Bitwise)
WARNING: I've disabled iPod support because of dependency problems.
WARNING: I'm not an expert at this; use at your own risk.
Contact me at mcl if you have any comment.
I finally figured out how to get two TV tuner cards working in my Myth box. This might seem really obvious at first, but when one card isn't working properly, it becomes a litle more complicated.
Basically the fix is this: add the option parameter to the modules.conf, or in this case the cx88xx file in the modules.d directory. It looks like the following
# DV1000T, then FusionI have to do it this way, because the Fusion card isn't recognised. It doesn't seem to have a sub-PCI-id burned onto the card.
The fix is simple and kinda obvious when you look at how network cards deal with different options (speed, duplex, etc.) for the same module. But there really was nothing I found that just said it could be done for any module. I'm still not really sure that it can, but it would make sense if modules followed a template that allowed this behaviour.
Anyway, I hope this helps somebody out there with a similar problem.
It's that time of year again - another Fedora release means that I have to look at upgrading and/or re-installing my systems to the new release. My impression is that as soon as a new release is done, support tends to move onto it straight-away. So, there's not much point in hanging around on the old and busted version.
This time around, I really didn't feel like re-installing my main workstationfrom scratch. I'd had good success upgrading my work laptop from FC5 to FC6 using an update install, but it didn't translate to the workstation. I downloaded the DVD iso from the iiNet mirror and created an install DVD, but the update part of the install failed to recognise the existing installation. As I'd ignored the built-in fake-RAID controller and used software RAID instead, the installer became confused when it saw the disks. It didn't see the sRAID and LVM disks.
Still not wanting to do a scratch install, I opted for the YUM update method.This is pretty much problem-free, but leaves the system a little rough around the edges. I had to remove some packages that had 64 and 32-bit versions as it was causing problems with dependecy resolution. Post-upgrade, I've still had do things like remove OpenOffice.org and reinstall it. Pupplet doesn't seem to work properly and sound had to be played with so that ALSA knew the difference between the mic on my USB webcam, and the C8KS sound device.
I'm pretty happy with the result, but I may get the urge to buy two new disks and recreate the install from scratch. I'm pretty cautious about messing with my personal data, so I like to leave the data on the disks completely alone if possible. I might just wait until FC7 comes out :)
It happens to the best of us... The 40GB disk I have in the Ultra 10 decided to have a bad day, and took the server with it. I was fortunate in that the data were recoverable. I was able to re-install OpenBSD 3.6 on one of the original 4GB disks, and migrate the data over. I started with the mail server, as I needed it for some important emails coming to the bitwise.org accounts. I've only now gotten around to migrating the web-server files.