Tag Archives: Fedora

Kernel-remover for Fedora

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Once you have Fedora running for while you’ll gather a bunch of kernel updates on your harddrive – and it’s likely you’ll need none of the old ones anymore. So from time to time I tend to clean up and remove old kernel packages keeping only the two latest updates. This procedure involves checking for installed kernel packages and possible related packages and then removing them – but keep the current and running kernel (of course! ;-) ). Inspired by aptosid‘s and siduction‘s kernel-remover package I wanted an automated process. This resulted in a little script which until now seems to work fine. Don’t get me wrong, this is no big deal and it’s definitively not as sophisticated as the one from aptosid/siduction, but I don’t have to think anymore when trying to remove old kernel packages! ;-)
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Fedora 16

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Fedora 16 has been released for quite a while but I just now decided to make use of my old Acer Aspire 5572 notebook again and install the latest Fedora release. As always, Fedora is more or less equipped with “bleeding edge” software releases – which I appreciate a lot. (By the time of writing: once installed and completely updated you will be running kernel 3.1.7.) I’ve downloaded the default Gnome Live desktop installation media. Once burnt to CD and booted you’ll be a running a Fedora Live system with Gnome desktop. Yes, I like the new Gome 3 desktop!
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“googlecl” RPM for Fedora

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Recently Google released a command line tool to manage it’s many different services: googlecl. This might be handy for those who want to script some operations. It’s quite simple to use, i.e.:

# google picasa post title <PHOTOALBUM> /path/to/photo.jpg

would upload “photo.jpg” to the Picasa album <PHOTOALBUM>. Run

# google --help

for more options or have a look at this page.

Google provides the source code or a Debian/Ubuntu package (here), but no rpm. So, if you like you may download the one I built for Fedora 13 (requires package “python-gdata” – install it via ‘yum install python-gdata’):

googlecl-0.9.8-2.fc13.i386.rpm.tar.gz (md5sum: 58e6a2c404d1bd3feb49f39a429164f8)

Or the source rpm:
googlecl-0.9.8-2.fc13.src.rpm.tar.gz (md5sum: 61b111467291182686c866fe01e27fc4)

Have fun!

Fedora desktop with Dust theme and Murrine svn gtk engine

Running Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop I fell in love with it’s Dust theme – not officially part of Ubuntu 8.10, but you can get it here. So I wanted to install it on my desktop machine running Fedora 10.

First problem is that Dust GTK2 theme requires a recent Murrine engine and Fedora provides version 0.53 only. As I recently got to like the fun of building RPMs I decided to try my luck – and it worked out! So, I can provide Murrine svn143 RPMs for Fedora. But starting applications from within a terminal window showed up some error messages concerning Murrine engine & Dust theme. So, I did some slight changes to Dust’s gtkrc files – et voilà, no errors anymore.
Next I needed some orange touched icons for this theme. I liked Tangerine a lot when running Debian/Ubuntu and this icon theme goes very well with Dust theme, but it showed up with Ubuntu logos… Don’t get me wrong, I like Ubuntu (and it’s logos), but not when running another distro… So, I replaced Ubuntu’s logos with Fedora’s and again tried to build RPMs. In the end I was left with a desktop like this:
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Installing and configuring Fedora 10

I still like Debian and Debian based distros like sidux or Ubuntu most, but – as always, if something works too well – I wanted something new… As I recently joined a training course at Red Hat and a new release of Fedora just hit the servers, I went for Fedora 10.

I think the main difference between Fedora and other “big” distros is the fact, that within a Fedora release, you’ll receive major version upgrades of applications and even the kernel itself. I think this is a pro, though you might argue, this might have a negative affect on a distro’s stability. So far, I couldn’t find any big issues.
As you can read in every review about Fedora, it comes strictly with open source software only. No playback of mp3 files or Nvidia drivers. It’s very easy though to add those features, if you know how. If you’re used to Fedora, you won’t find anything new here. If you’re a first time Fedora user or even new to Linux, this post might be of help. I just put together all the useful information I found on the net and I will always refer to the original text. A good starting point is “The Unofficial Fedora FAQ“.

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Fedora 9 & Acer Aspire 5572 ZWXMi with encrypted file systems

This HOWTO is listed at
TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones

A year has passed since installing Ubuntu Feisty on my Acer Aspire 5572 notebook and it was about time to try something new. With recent Linux distributions a lot of manual configuration tasks are not necessary anymore and things became even easier. There is no big difference between installing Ubuntu Feisty or a current Hardy on this laptop, except with Hardy almost everything works out of the box. But I wanted to try something different and I wanted encrypted file systems which are easy to set up. Fedora 9 has those features so I gave it a try. (Of course this would be possible, too with Ubuntu, but Fedora comes with an installer which handles file system encryption very nicely.) So here’s my HOWTO on installing Fedora 9 with encrypted file systems on an Acer Aspire 5572 ZWXMi notebook.

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Ubuntu it is – again

Ubuntu Logo

So, I went for Ubuntu Edgy. Fedora Core 6 gave me some hard times updating because yum couldn’t resolve some dependencies – I never had this kind of trouble with Debian’s apt.

My former experience with Kubuntu Edgy taught me to download the “alternate” install-CD right away. The installation is pretty much the same as with the “desktop” install-CD, but you have the choice to install “grub” not only to the MBR. As I mentioned, my motherboard (and I found some clues that there are a lot of boards with nForce5/AM2 chip set with similar problems) has some issues with Linux. To be precise, without additional kernel options almost no distro would boot. There are two options which made the kernel boot correctly:

  • acpi=off
  • noapic (preferred!)

With “acpi=off” Linux boots but you have no ACPI support what so ever. This means no “powernow” (CPU frequency scaling) and no automatic power-off after shutdown. If applicable I’d go for the second option “noapic”. I don’t no exactly what it does, but I think it has something to do with PCI interrupts. This option works pretty well and you still have ACPI support.
To boot the Ubuntu install-CD you have to press “F6″ at the boot screen and add “noapic” (without the quotation marks) at the end of the line right before the “–” and then hit “Enter”. That’s it – for now… The bad news is that the installer doesn’t remember that extra option and won’t add it to the Grub-boot loader configuration file automatically. I’m going to write a short HOWTO about installing Ubuntu on a system like mine where I’ll explain how to overcome this issue.

By the way, Ubuntu doesn’t have the problem (like Kubuntu) that all drives mounted under /media disappear after logout/login – either they fixed it or it never appeared in Ubuntu.