Though I was tempted to switch to Ubuntu‘s latest release on my “main” computer I decided to give Arch Linux the promotion. Not that there’s anything wrong with “Quantal” aka “Ubuntu 12.10″ – with the exception of the newly introduced shopping lens – but I wanted something different again. I ran Arch Linux some time ago and liked it a lot. It then came to my attention that it was missing one (at least for me) essential feature: package signing. There has been quite some discussion about this matter and I think it was this August when package signing became default for Arch’s package manager. Of course you can argue about the importance but I like to know that packages are as the package maintainer wanted them to be and that nobody messed with them while stored on all the different mirrors. However, I wanted to give it shot.

Arch Linux is kind of unique among linux distros:

1. It’s not based on or forked from any other distro (though there are distros based on or forked from Arch Linux, i.e.: ArchBang, Cinnarch or Chakra).
2. It has a rolling release cycle, so it’s install once and then upgrade the system through time.
3. It has its own unique package manager called pacman.
4. No fancy installer, all very, very simple and basic – not in a bad way! (If you want something to run – make it run!)
5. It is what I think the best documented linux distro (of course this mandatory in order to get things running ) and I refer to its wiki even if I have problems with other distros

From the above you may already guess Arch Linux is not meant for beginners. In order to install and/or use it you should be comfortable using the command line and an editor like nano or vi. Secondly, you should be able to read Arch’s excellent wiki! While installing Arch Linux you should have a second PC/notebook/smartphone/tablet at hand to read the installation guide – or print it out first… (and I don’t mean that as a joke) You’ll be rewarded in a very fast and clean operating system with up-to-date software.

Installation

To get things running grab the latest installation media from here and burn the image to CD or copy to usbstick or whatever you do to get something bootable out of it. Then boot it! As the installation is for both supported architectures (x86 or x86_64) you may choose your desired one right away and once done you’ll face yourself in a command shell logged in as root. Now pay close attention to Arch’s “Beginners’ Guide“, especially the “Installation” part. (I use my Android tablet for that – until I have X and a browser running in Arch ). Arch used to have some ncurses based installer but as it wasn’t maintained anymore it was removed and now you’ll have to do each step manually. I’ll sum up the for me important steps here (it’s all from Arch’s Wiki – if you do a fresh install you should go by instructions given there, as your mileage will vary!!):

1. change keyboard layout to fit your language, i.e. German:
   # loadkeys de
2. change language (again German as example):
   vi /etc/locale.gen
   remove comment for
   en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
   then:
   # locale-gen
# export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
3. network connection (at least if you have a wired connection to your DSL router) should already be established, check by:
   # ping -c 3 www.google.com
   if not, see here
4. partition your disk: mine already has partitions which I’d like to use, so I’ll skip this step – if you need it, see here
5. create a filesystem, in my case:
   # mkfs.ext4 -L "/" /dev/sda1
# mkfs.ext4 -L "/home" /dev/sda3
6. Usually also the swap device is configured here, but they seem to have omitted this part and moved it here. Nevertheless, I create a swap space at this point as I have a dedicated partition for that:
   # mkswap /dev/sda2
# swapon /dev/sda2
7. mount the stuff:
   # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/home
# mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/home
8. edit pacman’s mirror list:
   # vi /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
   (I removed all non-German mirrors)
9. install the base system by:
   # pacstrap -i /mnt base base-devel
   (takes a few minutes)
10. generate fstab for your new system:
    # genfstab -p /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
    and check it by
    # vi /mnt/etc/fstab
    => only “/” should have “1″ as last column!
11. chroot to the new system:
    # arch-chroot /mnt
12. now change the language again (this time for the installed system):
    # vi /etc/locale.gen
    Remove comment for desired language (German here and I always keep English as well), i.e.:
    en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
    and run
    # locale-gen
# echo LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
# export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
# loadkeys de
13. set keys for console:
    # vi /etc/vconsole.conf
    insert:
    KEYMAP=de
FONT=
FONT_MAP=
14. set the timezone (example for Germany and hardware clock set to UTC):
    # ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime
# hwclock --systohc --utc
15. set hostname:
    # echo YOUR_HOSTNAME > /etc/hostname
    editing /etc/hosts does not seem to be required anymore, but I still have my hostname in the two localhost lines as well
16. enable network (example for dynamic IP with wired connection):
    systemctl enable dhcpcd@eth0.service
17. configure package manager – usually there’s nothing to do, but if you’re running x86_64 you might want to consider enabling the multilib repository by removing the comments in /etc/pacman.conf and then refreshing the local package databases by:
    # pacman -Syy
18. create initial ramdisk:
    # mkinitcpio -p linux
19. set root password and create a user (with it’s own primary group):
    # passwd
# groupadd YOUR_USERNAME
# useradd -g YOUR_USERNAME -s /bin/bash -m -c "YOUR_FULL_NAME" YOUR_USERNAME
# passwd YOUR_USERNAME

20. install bootloader (example for non-EFI firmware, non-GPT partition table and sda as boot device):
    # pacman -S grub-bios
# grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck /dev/sda
# cd /usr/share/locale/en@quot/LC_MESSAGES && cp grub.mo /boot/grub/locale/en.mo
# cd
21. edit grub configuration: if you want to see boot messages remove “quiet” from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub, then run
    # grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
22. now exit from change root, umount partitions and reboot:
    # exit
# unmount /mnt/home
# umnount /mnt
# reboot
23. welcome to your new Arch Linux installation!

You now have a very basic installation which needs some additions to do it’s everyday job.

Customization

Firewall

Though connected by router I like to run a basic firewall configuration. To make this easy install ufw:

# pacman -S ufw
# ufw default deny
# ufw enable
# systemctl enable ufw.service

X server

First thing I do is getting X to work. For that I’d like to use Nvidia’s binary driver. Install X:

# pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-server-utils mesa xorg-twm xorg-xclock xterm ttf-dejavu


Install Nvidia driver:

# pacman -S nvidia lib32-nvidia-utils

(lib32-nvidia-utils recommended for x86_64)

This will blacklist the nouveau driver automatically. Though not installed I’d recommend rebuilding the init ramdisk now:

# mkinitcpio -p linux

Run the Nvidia configuration untility:

# nvidia-xconfig

This will create /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Now edit this file and remove everything with the exception of

Section "Device"
Identifier     "Device0"
Driver         "nvidia"
VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option         "NoLogo" "true"
EndSection

(The “NoLogo” part is optional). Then reboot.
Install input drivers (if not already installed):

# pacman -S xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-synaptics

(xf86-input-synaptics needed for touchpads only)

Change X keyboard layout, i.e. German:

# vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf

Search for ‘Identifier "evdev keyboard catchall"‘ and add:

Option "XkbLayout" "de"
Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"

Test X: login in as your regular user (not root!) and run

# startx

This should bring up xterm. Exit from all terminals and you’ll be back to command line. X is working!

Audio

Install alsa:

# pacman -S alsa-utils

Login as your user (not root!) and run

# alsamixer

unmute the main channel (press “m”). It should work then without any further doing.

Choose a desktop environment

I decided to go for Gnome, but of course there is KDE, Xfce or LXDE as well. So, if you’d like to install Gnome as well:

# pacman -S gnome gnome-extra

Enable GDM login manager:

# systemctl enable gdm.service

You might also want to consider installing networkmanager:

# pacman -S --needed networkmanager network-manager-applet
# systemctl disable dhcpcd@eth0.service && systemctl enable NetworkManager

For details and/or desktop customization please refer to Arch Wiki. Also, it’s a good idea to install/enable acpid:

# pacman -S --needed acpid && systemctl enable acpid.service

Now reboot.

Grub

Now as we installed the Nvidia driver the boot process will show an ugly big font. To make it look nicer add

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1280x800x32

to /etc/default/grub

(you have to be sure that resolution is supported by your video adapter – check by vbeinfo, s. here), then run

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Now it’s time to reboot and this time you may login to your newly installed desktop environment!

Packages

If you’re missing software it’s likely you’ll find it in Arch’s repositories. Check it out on their web page or just search via pacman:

# pacman -Ss <PACKAGE>

If you do not find it there, you might want to to take a look at “AUR” (Arch User Repository) here. There you can find a lot of additional software, but be aware that this is contributed by users and packages are not maintained by Arch developers.
And this is one of the nicest things about Arch: it’s package building mechanism is quite simple and straight forward! All you basically need is a PKGBUILD file. The information within this file is used to download the source code, check it’s md5 sum, compile it and finally build the software package to make it installable via pacman. In order to build a package from AUR this is what you want to do:

• search for the package in AUR
• download the tar ball (hyperlink to your right)
• create your package directory (i.e. ~/mypackages)
• unpack the tar ball within this directory
• check the content (and I mean open the files in a text editor and see what they are actually doing!)
• install the dependencies (“depends=(…)” part in PKGBUILD file, you won’t need any “dev” packages as it seems that Arch packages already contain their header files)
• open a terminal, change to the directory of the unpacked tarball (where the PKGFILE is) and run (NOT as root): # makepkg
• once the package is ready install it (of course as root): # pacman -U /path/to/package.xz

From the above you see it’s advisable that you’re aware of what you’re doing and that you understand  what the PKGBUILD files (and probably other install files) will do in order not to harm your system. But after all it’s no rocket science! There also seems to be a front end for AUR called yaourt, but i never checked it out.You can find some information on building Arch packages here. You will also find some information on Arch’s ABS (Arch Build System), which is kind of similar to FreeBSD‘s ports system. You can easily re-compile Arch packages with options which suit you more.

If you want to learn more about pacman: check the wiki!

Conclusion

All together Arch is not meant for absolute Linux beginners, it’s for those who either already have some Linux/Unix knowledge and for those willing to read the wiki and learn. Installation takes a little longer than common “live installers” and of course you need some more tweaking but once this is done you’ll keep it up-to-date for a “life time” – without re-installing. You should take a look at their news page from time to time to see if there are any troubles updating (keep in mind this is a rolling release distro!). I personally never had any big issues with Arch (so far! ) and it runs very stable. Just read the wiki!!!

As with the latest Ubuntu release 12.04 you’re kinda screwed if your hardware is equipped with a Broadcom wireless network controller like my old Acer Aspire:

gerrit@komet:~$ lspci | grep -i broadcom
0a:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

In this case the shipped kernel 3.2.0 won’t boot. There are several bug reports for this issue (i.e. here at Launchpad) and it seems not related to Debian or Ubuntu but is caused by an upstream kernel bug. It’s solved in later kernel releases (> kernel 3.2). Don’t worry the Broadcom network controller will work in the installed system though. So, plug in you’re wired network controller and once the Debian installer boot screen is ready hit the “Tab” key and add:

b43.blacklist=yes

Be aware of the English keyboard layout! Then hit “Enter” to boot. The further installation is very straight forwarded, not any different from previous Debian installers, consisting of the usual language selection, partition layout, adding a user, etc. – and it worked very well. Once the installer finished (might take a while as there are quite some packages to download), it’ll prompt you to reboot.

I think this next step might not be necessary as the installer seemed to take care of blacklisting the b43 module in the installed system already but I didn’t know that (by the way: Ubuntu fails to do so). To make sure my newly installed system was booting I hit “e” key at the grub bootloader screen and again added to the kernel line:

b43.blacklist=yes

Then hit “F10″ to continue booting. Now the system should come up and you may login.

The Debian installer still defaults to Gnome (3.4.2) as desktop. That might be changed to Xfce in the near future according to this commit to tasksel though. However, I’m fine with Gnome 3 as I got pretty much used to it and like it! On my ancient Acer Aspire it’s takes a while loading but from then on it’s OK (1GB of RAM is a little small nowadays…). If you like to install a different desktop environment you may do so now or before installation by hitting “Tab” key at the installer’s boot screen and then entering:

desktop=kde

or

desktop=xfce

for example.

Back to our little WLAN problem related to the b43 module: to enable your Broadcom wireless network controller you need to install the proper firmware which then get’s kernel 3.2 to boot without issues. To do so, enable “contrib” and “non-free” in your /etc/apt/sources.list by just adding them to your mirrors, i.e.:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

Now run (as root):

apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer

Once installed load the module (as root):

modprobe b43

…and you should be able to configure WLAN via networkmanager. To make this persitent, check if the installer generated a file called “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.local.conf” and have a look at it. In my case:

gerrit@komet:~$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.local.conf
# Local module settings
# Created by the Debian installer

#blacklist b43

Comment out the “blacklist b43″ part (already done above) or simply delete the file and reboot:

1. system should boot without trouble now
2. WLAN should be operational

As always with Debian I like to tweak a few things but that depends what you prefer (or not):

Firewall

I like to have iptables configured and that without going too deep:

apt-get install ufw gufw
ufw default deny
ufw enable

Vim

Install the complete version of vim and make it default editor:

apt-get install vim
update-alternatives --config editor

Boot font

I hate changing fonts during boot process:

dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

Keep everything as is except the boot font type.

Gnome 3

Install gnome-tweak-tool and some extensions to change fonts, icons, themes etc:

apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool gnome-shell-extensions

Log out of Gnome and re-login, then run gnome-tweak-tool and see what it does!

Here are two screenshots from my Gnome 3 desktop using Zukitwo shell and GTK theme together with Gome-brave icon theme (from “gnome-colors” package):

Zukitwo Gnome theme

Zukitwo Gnome theme

Though Debian Wheezy still is the testing branch of Debian it run’s pretty stable and I don’t think that there will be any big issues until it’s final release (at least not for a desktop user). I do tend to be a little cautious when updating:

• I do not use any GUI tools for package management, but simply “apt-get“
• keep an eye on what “apt-get dist-upgrade” is telling you
• while applying bigger updates I tend to quit X (/etc/init.d/gdm3 stop)

I’m not sure if any of the above is necessary but coming from aptosid (based on “unstable”) I think it won’t do no harm either!

If you’d like to install GTK G-Rays2 for Ubuntu 12.04 just add my Launchpad ppa and go ahead:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dabang/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gtk-g-rays2

Or just download from Launchpad and install manually.

You can find the Debian packages here (the archive contains a signed md5sum file, see my key here):

• GTK G-Rays2 for Debian Squeeze (amd64)
• GTK G-Rays2 for Debian Squeeze (i386)

You might want to install gpsbabel as well (this already comes with Debian’s/Ubuntu’s default repositories):

sudo apt-get install gpsbabel

Before you can make use of GTK G-Rays2 you need to put a new udev rule in place – otherwise only root would have access to the device. So, create a file called

/etc/udev/rules.d/90-wintec.rules

which has the following content:

# rules for Wintec WBT-201 GPS device
ATTRS{idVendor}=="10c4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="ea60", MODE="0666"

Then restart udev (or simply reboot), plug in your WBT-201 and run GTK G-Rays2!

Here’s a screenshot (without device attached):

gtk-g-rays2 (gtk3)

To download GPS tracks go to “File -> Save as …”.

Credit goes to Jonathan Hudson for writing this nice tool and providing packages for Ubuntu 10.10. All of the above is based on these – thanks!

Some of the indicators just start automatically the next time you log into Unity, others have to be started manually the first time. Let’s have a look at them:

Multiload indicator

This indicator is basically the system-monitor-applet from Gnome. You can configure it to show CPU/RAM/swap/whatever. Install it by

# sudo apt-get install indicator-multiload

Then open dash, search for “multiload” and run it. You will see a nice graph indicating CPU load. By clicking on it a menu shows up and you’re free to configure it. This is how it looks like:

CPU frequency

If you like to control CPU frequency scaling via indicator install this one:

# sudo apt-get install indicator-cpufreq

It shows and let’s you control the current setting (ondemand, powersave, performance) of your CPU and will automatically show up once you’ve re-logged in again:

Weather indicator

Missed the weather forecast in your panel? Just install this one!

# sudo apt-get install indicator-weather

You have to start the weather indicator manually once by searching for “weather” in dash. From there you may choose your location and get the weather forecast henceforth:

Sensors indicator

If you like to have a close eye on your computer’s sensor readings this is for you:

# sudo apt-get install psensor

I’m not sure but I think this will also pull lm-sensors and hddtemp (don’t know because I install those by default). hddtemp will ask if to start as daemon. Just say yes and keep all the defaults. lm-sensors has to be configured manually first by running:

# sudo sensors-detect

I tend to just go with the defaults there as well and then let the setup modify /etc/modules automatically. Now search for “psensor” in dash and run it. It may take a short while (and will during all future logins) but then it’ll show up and you can configure the sensor readings:

Though it’s getting rather crowded in the panel now I’m quite happy with this! For the lazy ones, copy this to install them all:

# sudo apt-get install indicator-multiload indicator-cpufreq indicator-weather psensor

Linux

Let’s start with my main OS and set up everything from here. I got all I needed to know from the guys at WebUpd8 – thanks for that! They concentrate on Ubuntu mostly but of course you can “translate” their howto’s to Fedora as well. So, if you’re running Ubuntu/Debian go ahead with their original post from here.

To install EncFS simply run:

# yum install fuse-encfs cryptkeeper

Cryptkeeper is a nice GUI for EncFS but installation is optional. Once installed create the Dopbox folder which will hold your encrypted stuff, i.e.:

# mkdir ~/Dropbox/mystuff

and the folder where files are going to be mounted un-encrypted, i.e.:

# mkdir ~/Private

Now setup EncFS by:

# encfs ~/Dropbox/mystuff ~/Private

I followed recommendations by WebUpd8 and selected “p” for paranoia mode. Choose a password and you’re set!

Using Debian I had to add my user to the “fuse” group before I could run encfs commands. So run as root:

# usermod -aG fuse

Now start cryptkeeper (either by command line or by choosing the menu entry) and you’ll find a new icon in your notification bar:

cryptkeeper

Right clicking the icon will give you some setting options. If you’re running Gnome you should be fine. If you’re running KDE you might want to replace nautilus with dolphin as filemanager. Left clicking the icon will let you choose to import an already setup EncFS folder. Choose this and add your folders created before. Now you can mount your encrypted filesystem by simply clicking the icon and selecting the filesystem. You might want to add cryptkeeper to your startup programs (run gnome-session-properties for this).
Once your EncFS is mounted you can drop files into your ~/Private folder and you will see them encrypted in ~/Dropbox/mystuff.

There is one (hidden) file though called “.encfs6.xml” (something like the public key for your encryption) and the guys at WebUpd8 suggest to exclude it from being synced to Dropbox. Doing so will have two consequences:

1. you’ll have to copy this file manually to all other machines
2. you won’t be able to decrypt stuff on Android devices

However, if you’d like to do that, first copy the file somewhere else (as it’s going to be deleted) and then exclude it, i.e.:

# cp ~/Dropbox/mystuff/.encfs6.xml ~/Downloads
# dropbox exclude add ~/Dropbox/mystuff/.encfs6.xml
# cp ~/Downloads/.encfs6.xml ~/Dropbox/mystuff

To reverse this run

# dropbox exclude remove ~/Downloads/.encfs6.xml

and the file will be synced again. (Maybe keep a backup of this file…)

So far so good. As I have a bunch of notebooks running different OS’s (sometimes I don’t know why myself…) and an Android phone I need to be able to decrypt stuff on those devices as well. And this is the beauty of this stuff: there are ports for every OS!

Android

Of course you need the Dropbox Android app installed. Then install “Cryptonite“, which is a nice app for handling EncFS plus it’s open source and free! Just search for cryptonite in Google’s Play Store and install it. (In our setup you do not need a rooted device for that to work.) Now just run cryptonite and link it to your Dropbox account, choose “all folders”, then select the mystuff folder, type your password and done!

You might want to reed the “Security Considerations” though.

Windows

My “gamer” notebook runs Windows 7 and I found some nice instructions on d24m.de. I followed the howto given here (in German). You basically need something like fuse which comes for Windows as “Dokan“. So download and install the latest Dokan library from here (by the time of writing version 0.60). Then get EncFS for Windows from here. It’s a zip archive which can be extracted anywhere you want. Maybe C:\Program Files\encfs is a good idea. Now run encfsw.exe and you’ll a see a new key icon in your panel which works pretty much like cryptkeeper with Linux!

EncFS for Windows

Choose “Open/Create” to import your Dropbox\mystuff folder and type your password. From there on you can simply mount your encrypted folder by selecting the “Mount …” option. Also look into “Preferences” as this will let you autostart encfsw.exe.

MacOSX (Lion)

Again you’ll need fuse to make EncFS work. There is a project named MacFuse but it doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention lately and thus a 64bit version (which is required for Lion) is not available. Luckily there is a fork called Fuse4X and it works pretty good on Lion. So download the latest version from here (by the time of writing 0.90) and install it. Next you’ll need EncFS compiled against Fuse4X – you’ll find it here at LisaNet (German). Again, download and install. I havn’t found a GUI so you’ll have to use command line to mount the encrypted folder (yeah, I know that’s a tough one for a default Mac user… ). Create a folder as mount point first and open a terminal (or do both in the terminal):

# cd
# mkdir Private
# encfs ~/Dropbox/mystuff ~/Private

Open Finder and you’ll see all decrypted files mounted as “fuse4x volume…”:

fuse4x

You’ll find the original howto for Mac OSX Lion again at d24m (in German) – thanks!

That’s about it. Now you can use encrypted Dropbox folder(s) on every OS (Sorry, don’t know about iOS though…). Thanks again for those nice howtos at WebUpd8 and d24m.de! And of coures a big thanks to all those porting free software to proprietary operating systems!

• check’s for installed kernel packages
• figures out the currently running kernel
• prompts to remove kernel packages skipping the currently running kernel
• if you opted to uninstall a kernel package it’ll be removed including dependent packages (i.e. kmod-nvidia for that specific kernel) and will also remove a kernel-devel package (and dependent packages) if installed

Prerequisites:

• needs to be run as root
• of course “yum“
• Fedora
• … or a Red Hat based distro (can be overridden with “-f” to force)

Installation:

As root copy the script where ever you like. I’d recommend /usr/local/bin. Then run as root “kernel-remover.sh”.

kernel-remover

If you find this useful and like to download this script, you may do so here (you’ll find a gpg signed md5sum within the tar archive. My key can be found here.):

Download: kernel-remover (Updated to version 1.1 on May, 2nd 2012)

ATTENTION:
I’ve tested this script and it seems to work fine. It may work on other Red Hat based distros as well but I tested on Fedora 16 only. So, it *should* do no harm, but: as always you should know what you’re doing and I give no warranty what so ever! Use at your own risk!

There has been and still is a lot of controversial discussion going on about the latest Gnome release and about Ubuntu‘s Unity as well. Both desktops are quite different from what we where used to and brake with a lot of our habits. But hey, if you don’t like them, simply don’t use them! This is open source and you do have the choice! And there are good alternatives available, like of course KDE, Xfce or LXDE which come with every major distro. Another two quite new alternatives would be Cinnamon (derived by Linux Mint‘s MGSE, a set of extensions for and based on Gnome 3) and razor-qt (a lightweight desktop and like KDE based on Qt).
Personally, I’d prefer if Ubuntu would stick to Gnome but at least it’s no problem to switch to it. Just as a side note

Installation

OK, back to Fedora. Once you’ve booted from the CD and Gnome is running, you may start the installer by moving the mouse in the upper left corner which will make a sidebar appear where you’ll find the shortcut to the installer. Just as hint: if you’d like your own localization as default in the installed system, log out from your live session and log in again, but choose you language first! (Haven’t tried though…). If you skip this you’ll end up with English local settings but of course you may change this once the system is installed.
There is nothing new about the Fedora installer. It’ll ship you safely through all required steps from keyboard settings, time zone, partitioning, root password, etc… I’ll gave Fedora the whole harddisk and let the installer do it’s magic. If you follow this as well, you’ll have ext4 as filesystem and separate partitions for /boot, /, /home and of course swap. The latter three will make use of LVM if you haven’t stated otherwise. In addition to that there’ll be a small 1MB partition labled “BIOS_GRUB”. This is due to the fact that the installer will create a GPT partition layout which needs this workaround for non-EFI systems. (If you already have existing partitions you’ll be fine of course!) Only thing I changed was to make / and /home a little smaller to have space for a 100GB /media/data partition and change the filesystem type of /boot from ext4 to ext3. Once the installer starts copying you’ll have a few minutes – it’s really quick even on my old notebook! Once done you’ll need to reboot (be sure to boot from disk and not again from the installation media then!). During the first boot you’ll get the chance to enable ntp and create a user. If this isn’t you’re first Fedora installation this won’t be new. After you’re done with that you may log in for the first time. I had some selinux warnings caused by my /media/data partition, but they disappeared after a full update (which will follow now…).

As the release of Fedora 16 is already a few months past there’ll be a lot of updates waiting. I’ll strongly suggest a wired connection to your router. Depending on your hardware and especially in case of a Broadcom WLAN interface like a BCM4318 in my notebook WLAN connections might be rather slow! We’ll fix this later. So, this is my recommendation for doing the first big system update. Open a terminal by pointing to the upper left corner of your screen, go to Applications -> System Tools -> Terminal. Switch to root and update yum and rpm (if updates are available):

# su -
# yum update yum
# yum update rpm
# exit

You might now as well use Fedora’s update tool, but I prefer to install big updates without X running. So, log out of your X session and press “Alt + F2″ which will drop you to a console. Login as root and type

# init 3

and login again as root (don’t know why, but this might take some time and you might even see some pam errors – never mind!) If you don’t have a login prompt, switch to another virtual console by hitting “Alt + F1″ or “Alt + F3″ (you get the idea).

Now we’ll start the big update:

# yum update

It’s time for a coffee, as this will take some time… Once done, reboot:

# shutdown -r now

Now we’ll disable a few services which are not needed (unless you need FCoE or iSCSI) or were required during installation only:

# svcs="livesys-late.service livesys.service iscsi.service iscsid.service fcoe.service"
# for i in $svcs; do systemctl disable $i; done


As Fedora switched to systemd you’ll have to handle services now with systemctl command (in some cases it will redirect to the old chkconfig command). You might also want to start the firewall configuration tool (Applications -> Others -> Firewall) and close port 22 for sshd, as it’s not running anyway – unless you need it of course!

If you like to run TrueCrypt, it may be a good idea to grant your user a few sudoer privileges. To do so, add a file to /etc/sudoers.d/ (as root – of course – and don’t forget to replace “<YOUR_USERNAME>” accordingly! ), i.e.:

# echo " ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/mount *, /bin/umount *, /usr/bin/truecrypt *" >> /etc/sudoers.d/<YOUR_YOUSERNAME>
# chmod 440 /etc/sudoers.d/<YOUR_YOUSERNAME>

Check as <YOUR_USERNAME> with:

# sudo -l

If TrueCrypt needs a password: it’s your users password, not root’s!

Installing Google’s Chrome is a piece of cake and once installed, you’ll have a new yum repository by Google which will help you keep it up to date. Download the Google Chrome rpm for your computer’s architecture and install it as root by:

# yum localinstall /path/to/google-chrome*.rpm

This will also install some dependencies needed by Chrome.

Proprietary stuff

Fedora comes with GPL’ed software only. If you need stuff like mp3 playback or Nvidia proprietary driver you’ll have to enable rpmfusion as a new repository. This is done quite easy, just follow the instructions given here. You might want to consider verifying the gpg keys (this may help as well). I just installed the two RPM Fusion packages and then checked the keys /etc/pki/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-*-fedora-16-primary. Now run as root:

# yum update

This will update the two packages and import the gpg keys.

Nvidia driver

If you need Nvidia drivers you can install them by (see this also):

# yum install kmod-nvidia

This will pull some dependencies and install everything you need. Also the nouveau driver will be blacklisted but in my experience that is not enough. So before rebooting we’ll build a new init ramdisk (but save the old one first):

# mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img_nouveau.bak
# dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
# shutdown -r now

There are two things I like to configure as well:
Disable the Nvidia logo at X start by adding

Option "NoLogo" "true"

to the “Device” section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. And make the boot screen nicer by adding

GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1280x800x32

to /etc/default/grub (make sure the resolution fits your screen and is supported by VESA!!! => in grub press “C” and then type “vbeinfo”). Now run:

# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Next time you reboot you should have the plymouth boot screen again.

B43 firmware

As already mentioned, WLAN connections are rather slow with (some) Broadcom WLAN interfaces. This is due to the use of an open source firmware binary which does not enable hardware en-/decryprion. You may run “dmesg” and should see something like this:

b43-phy0: Loading OpenSource firmware version 410.31754
b43-phy0: Hardware crypto acceleration not supported by firmware

Luckily we can install the “original” firmware by cutting it out of the Windows driver which makes WLAN come back to it’s usual speed. If not already installed, install b43-fwcutter:

# yum install b43-fwcutter

Instructions are given here:
/usr/share/doc/b43-fwcutter-014/README.Fedora
/usr/share/doc/b43-fwcutter-014/README
and here http://www.linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware

To sum it up:

# wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3_mipsel.tar.bz2
# tar xjf broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3_mipsel.tar.bz2
# su
# b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3/driver/wl_apsta/wl_prebuilt.o
# chmod 755 /lib/firmware/b43
# rm -r broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3*

Reboot and run “dmesg” again. Now it should look like this:

b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 508.1084 (2009-01-14 01:32:01)

MP3 playback

To enable mp3 playback and have all codecs installed I might need I tend to simply install every gestreamer-plugins-* package I find… (Applications -> System Tools -> Add/Remove Software)

Gnome 3 tweaking

Now for Gnome 3. If you want to give Gnome 3 a try, there are a few things which might be of help. Tweaking the appearance is not made easy, but there are tools and extensions which are very helpful. First check settings in Gnome’s system settings:

Gnome System Settings

…and set them as you wish. Now I’d install a few Gnome extensions. You can install them all but enable only the ones you like:

# yum install gnome-tweak-tool gnome-shell-extension-*

To make the “user-theme” extension work, we need to edit a file first. As root open
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gtweak/tweaks/tweak_shell.py with your favorite editor and change line 46 from

THEME_EXT_NAME = "user-theme@gnome-shell-extensions.gnome.org"
to
THEME_EXT_NAME = "user-theme@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com"

Found this solution here. You might have to log out and in again. Now press the “Windows” key which will bring up the search field in the upper right, type “tweak” and start “Advanced Settings”:

Advanced Settings

I think most options are self explaining. For some of them to work, you’ll have to restart the shell (“Alt + F2″, type “r”).
In “Shell” tab I’d set “Arrangement of buttons on the titlebar” to “All” and I’d enable the “User Themes Extension” and “remove-accessibility-icon Extension” in “Shell Extensions” tab. The first one makes installing/enabling Gnome Shell themes really easy. Simply extract them to your ~/.themes directory and enable them in “Theme” tab. I rcommend two very nice GTK3/2 + Gnome Shell themes: Zukitwo and Ambiance Blue (see the latter in my screenshots).

My Fedora 16 desktop

If not already installed, you’ll need those three packages to make those themes work:

# yum install gtk-unico-engine gtk-murrine-engine gtk2-engines

So far everything is working pretty good and I think Fedora 16 is a fine release. Only thing: from time to time shutting down the computer takes quite long (just be patient, it’ll shut down properly). Until now I haven’t found out why…

That’s about all I remember right now… Ah, one thing additional thing maybe: Rhythmbox gave me a hard time scanning music files as the scan process seemed to crash every few minutes. So I installed Banshee which works pretty good! And of course LibreOffice and Gimp are missing on the Live CD, so you might want to install those, too (Applications -> System Tools -> Add/Remove Software).

As always, have fun!

After a very short Google search it became clear that making bluetooth headsets work would become a lot easier with pulseaudio installed – which is not the default in Squeeze (still using alsa). So, let’s first get the required packages (at least those are the ones I installed by just guessing ):

# apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pulseaudio-module-gconf pulseaudio-module-hal pulseaudio-module-jack pavucontrol

maybe optional:

# apt-get install pavumeter paprefs

Once installed pair the headset with your bluetooth adapter. This is peace of cake using the gnome bluetooth applet. Make sure bluetooth is switched on and your bluetooth adapter is temporarily visible. Get your headset in paring mode and then select “Setup new device” by clicking on the gnome bluetooth applet. Follow the instructions and you should be fine. Once the headset is paired, you may turn your bluetooth device to “invisible” again.

Now we have to configure the sound system. In Gome menu go to “Applications -> Multimedia” and select the pulseaudio volume control. There change the device to the correct “PulseAudio Mixer” (sorry, all screenshots in German…):

Next open the mixer by clicking on Gnome’s mixer applet and choosing “Open volume control”. Go to the “Configuration” tab where you should see your newly paired bluetooth headset. Change it’s profile to “High Fidelity Playback (A2DP)” and keep the window open:

Start your favorite media player (in my case it’s Rhythmbox) and start playing an audio track. Go back to volume control, choose the “Playback” tab and change the output device of your media player to your bluetooth headset:

Listen and enjoy!

One more step though: make pulseaudio the default. I found the solution at stderr.nl (thanks to Matthijs Kooijman!!).
So, create a file called “.asoundrc” in your home directory and copy these two lines into it:

pcm.!default.type pulse
ctl.!default.type pulse

If not already installed, install “gconf-editor” and then open it (i.e. just by typing gconf-editor). Set the value of
/desktop/gnome/sound/default_mixer_device
to
alsamixer:default

This all worked very well for me. As soon as I connect my bluetooth headset Rhythmbox is switching from internal speakers to the headset and vice versa. Very nice!

Let’s start…

1. Install Nvidia driver

To make Conky look good it need’s a working compositing manager.  So we have to install Nvidia’s binary driver first. You may want to follow my instructions given in this post to do so. (Hint: if you are running the latest Debian kernel from backports, you have to skip the “# export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.3“-step!).

2. Get Compiz running

Once the Nvidia driver is running, Compiz needs to be installed and enabled. I will sum up the steps I found in this howto.
First, install Compiz (you might not need Compiz and skip this section if you’re running KDE):

# apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-gnome compiz-gtk fusion-icon

Next make a backup of your X configuration…

# cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bk

…and add some lines to “/etc/X11/xorg.conf”:

• add to the end:
  Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "enable"
EndSection
• to section “Device” add:
  Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
Option "TripleBuffer" "true"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
• to section “Screen” add:
  Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true"
Option "AddARGBVisuals" "true"

Restart X or simply reboot. Once rebooted login and enable Compiz by starting “fusion-icon” either via command line or by Gnome menu (“Applications” -> “System Tools” -> “Compiz Fusion Icon”). You will notice the new icon in Gnome’s notification area indicating that Compiz is running. Right click this icon and go to “Select Window Manager -> Compiz” and then “Select Window Decorator -> GTK Window Decorator”. To re-enable the windows title bars start the “Settings Manager” by right clicking the Compiz icon again. This will open a new window giving you access to all Compiz settings. Navigate to “Effects” and check “Enable Window Decoration”. Then go to “Window Management” and enable “Move Window” and “Resize Window”. If the new settings do not take effect immediatly, just right click on the Compiz icon again and select “Relaod Window Manager”. If everything works fine go to “System” -> “Preferences” -> “Startup Applications” in Gnome menu and add “/usr/bin/fusion-icon” to the list. Log out and in again and you should have Compiz running automatically. (Thanks to Falko Timme for his great howto at HowtoFrorge!!)

3. Make sensors work

To make Conky show all the nice sonsors information we need “hddtemp” and “lm-sensors” installed. To accomplish the first:

# apt-get install hddtemp

Say “yes” to start the hddtemp daemon at boot and keep all the dafaults.

The thing with “lm-sensors” is a little trickier as the version which comes with Squeeze does not work with the Samsung R780… So I downloaded the “lm-senors” sources from Debian Wheezy and built packages for Squeeze. You might try the binaries – I havn’t tested that though. So I’m going to walk you through the package-building-thing. Get the sources from here (by the time of writing: version 3.3.0-4) and verify all prerequisites are installed:

• build-essential
• dpkg-dev
• debhelper
• fakeroot
• bison
• flex
• bison
• sed
• lsb-base

Now move all three downloaded source packages (*.dsc, *.orig.tar.bz2, *.debian.tar.gz) to a temporary directory, extract them and build the new binary packages (don’t need to be root!):

# mkdir /tmp/lm-sensors && cd /tmp/lm-sensors
# mv /path/to/lm-sensors_* .
# dpkg-source -x lm-sensors_<VERSION>.dsc
# cd  lm-sensors-<VERSION>
# dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
# cd ..

…and install the new packages (as root – of course ):

# dpkg -i lm-sensors_-<VERSION>_<ARCH>.deb libsensors4_<VERSION>_<ARCH>.deb libsensors4-dev_<VERSION>_<ARCH>.deb fancontrol_3.3.0-3_all.deb

I installed all with the exception of the “sensord” package. If you run into any errors during the build or installation process, please install any additional dependencies (I listed all I know of above, but might be incomplete). Now we can configure sensors by running

# sensors-detect

as root (just press ENTER to accept the defaults but say “yes” to edit “/etc/modules” automatically. Done!

4. Finally: setup Conky

The configuration of Conky was taken from pinguy (thanks!!) and slightly modified by me to make it work with Debian Squeeze and Samsung R780.

First install Conky:

# apt-get install conky-all

Next we need some fonts. If the “.fonts” directory does not exist within your home directory, create it:

# [ -d ${HOME}/.fonts ] || mkdir ${HOME}/.fonts

Then download the conky-colors zip file from here (thanks to helmuthdu!!), extract it and copy all font files from “conky_colors/fonts/conkycolors” to “~/.fonts”. Then download “my” configuration files from here (“draw_bg.lua” is from here and “.conkyrc” is a slightly modified version from the one also found here – again, thanks to pinguy!). Extract the files to your home directory:

# cd
# tar xvf /path/to/conky_squeeze_R780.tar

If you don’t want the ”draw_bg.lua” in your home directory, move it somewhere else and change line 64 of “.conkyrc” accordingly. Also, if you’re running KDE instead of Gnome, comment/uncomment lines 17-28 of “.conkyrc” as desired (I found the KDE settings in Arch Linux’ Wiki). Now try to start Conky by simply typing

# conky

If everything is fine, press Ctrl-C to terminate it. To start Conky at login, we need a little start script to work around a race condition between the loading of the window manager and Conky (Conky might stay in the foreground then). Create a file with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
# start conky with delay
sleep 10 && /usr/bin/conky &

i.e. call it “start_conky.sh” and put it in a folder called “bin” in your home directory. Then make it executable:

# chmod +x /path/to/start_conky.sh

This will delay the start of Conky by 10 seconds. Now add this file to “Startup Applications” (“Gnome menu” -> “System” -> “Startup Applications”). Log out and in again – enjoy Conky!

First copy the source tarball to a temporary directory, unpack it and edit the file “driver.c”:

# cp /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar /tmp
# cd /tmp
# tar xvf vmnet.tar
# vi vmnet-only/driver.c
(Of course you can choose any other editor like nano or gedit instead of vi as well.)

Now go to lines 267, 271, 1137 and 1139, replace “lock_kernel();” with “lock_flocks();” and save the file. Next (as root) make a backup of the original tarball and generate the new one:

# mv /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar.orig
# cd /tmp
# tar cvf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar vmnet-only

Clean up:

# cd /tmp
# rm -r vmnet.tar vmnet-only

All you have do to now is to start VMware Player again and it’ll compile all kernel modules cleanly!

UPDATE: If you are running kernel 2.6.39 (for Debian Squeeze also available in Backports) the above does not work. I found a solution in Arch Linux‘ Wiki here and listed everything below. Please notice, the procedure involves patching the sources with a patch file written by a third party. If you do not trust this patch, do not use it!

If you decide to trust the patch, start by reverting the original vmnet.tar (if you already followed instructions for kernel 2.6.38 above) and make backups of all source tarballs (as root):

# mv /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar.orig /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/vmnet.tar
# cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
# for i in `ls *.tar`; do cp -p ${i} ${i}.orig; done

Now we need to patch the sources (don’t need to be root for this!):

# mkdir /tmp/vmware && cd /tmp/vmware
# for t in /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/*.tar; do tar xf $t; done
# wget -qO- http://kaslit.com/downloads/vmware2.6.39fixed.patch | patch -Np1

As root:

# for d in *-only; do tar cf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/${d/%-only/}.tar $d; done
# cd /tmp && rm -r vmware

Now VMware should play nicely with kernel 2.6.39!