Spind.net Blog

For some odd reason, the guys over at Skype is refusing to release a pure 64-bit version of Skype for Fedora. Instead they ship an i586 version, without any dependencies defined for the 32-bit libraries is require. Here is what you need to install to make it work:

I’m an early adopter, so of course I’m giving the newly release Fedora 16 a go. This blog post will cover my basic setup woes and delights.

My system’s a pretty straight forward Intel i7-based setup with some kind of nVidia graphics adapter. Honestly, I don’t remember which model, but I don’t think it makes that much of a difference. Its rather large and looks more like a vacuum cleaner than a electronic device for producing shiny pixels. The box has 6GB of RAM and two monitors attached via DVI. There’s a Logitech HD webcam attached too. Other than this, it’s pretty much plain vanilla.

First issue: After burning the 64 bit install DVD, I rebooted and found that the installation process (Anaconda?) failed to provide me with the bottom part of the dialog window, meaning I can’t see the Back and Next buttons. I tried to make it through the process just by counting my tabs, but I finally gave in, rebooted and started the install with VNC by adding the parameters ip=dhcp vnc vncconnect={ip of laptop}. This issue could perhaps be is due to my dual monitor setup, and it could be a showstopper for many people who want to give Fedora a spin.

A picked a pretty basic installation – Graphical Desktop on a freshly formatted root partition with my old home partition preserved. I rarely do a lot of system wide customization on my office box, so reinstalling like this really isn’t a big deal for me.

Besides the dual monitor issue and the general confusion about the new data/install media dialog box – which didn’t seem to work – the installation process itself went without a hitch. When completed, I rebooted my system, and was presented with a blank screen and a blinking cursor.

I rebooted from the installation media in rescue mode, mounted the system and ran this:

That seemed to do the trick – I expect my three hard drives got in each others way. First boot drags me through a lengthy SELinux relabelling, which annoys me since I’m probably going to disable it anyway.

After relabelling, the system rebooted and presented me with a text-mode login. Logging in as root and issuing “init 5″ seemed to fix that problem, and presented me with the usual graphical “Welcome” dialogue. I’m not sure if my previous boot problems caused this? Changes in the system now means that /etc/inittab isn’t the place to fix this – instead a symbolic link is required:

Next up – installing the right repositories:

Then make sure the system is fresh:

Install drivers for my nVidia graphics card:

Make absolutely sure the open sourced nVidia driver – Nouveau – does not conflict with the proprietary driver:

Disable (or partially disable) SELinux to allow Gnome Shell to use the nVidia driver:

Reboot, and the proprietary nVidia driver should be rolling. If you need dual monitor support, run nvidia-settings as root.

Various multimedia stuff that isn’t distributed with Fedora itself:

Stuff that Fedora thinks I can live without, but I really think I need:

That was easy, wasn’t it? I’m not so impressed with the installation process of Fedora 16 – even if it’s due to multiple hard drives and monitors on my system, someone should have caught the issues mentioned above before it was released. Once fixed though, the system seems to work find. Can’t seem to find the new “j” command mentioned in the release notes though.

UPDATE: Tried to install the office printer (HP Color LaserJet CP2025n), but the graphical setup tool said it couldn’t detect network printers without installing, enabling and starting firewalld. I did so, but it didn’t help much – I still had to select Search by address and punch in the printer’s IP.

UPDATE: Xorg seems to take up ~99% CPU at times according to top, and it’s really sluggish. Not sure what’s causing this.

UPDATE: VirtualBox-OSE seems to be broken – I get this error:

UPDATE: This morning my system greeted me with one black screen and one half gray. It turned out this was the locked screen dialogue, so entering my password and hitting return brought my desktop back. Still horribly slow, especially when changing focus to another window. Switching tabs in Firefox is just unbearable. I miss Fedora 15.

Fedora releases are sometimes a bit flaky, and Fedora 13 isn’t an exception – at least not when I was trying to install it on my MacBook Pro 5,5. It simply froze while booting the installation operating system – last display error was “Waiting for hardware to initialize”. Hours later, it turns out the magic trick is to add the nomodeset kernel option when booting the installation.

I couldn’t find any updated information on this online, so this is my ultra short guide to converting VMWare disk images to VirtualBox. This is tested with VirtualBox 3.0.0 under Fedora 11.

Step one is to concatenate fragmented VMWare images. This might not me necessary in your case, but we’ll do it anyway. Let’s assume the image you want to convert is called leopard-fragmented.vmdk:

Now you’re got a rather huge VMWare disk image file, and we’ll use qemu to convert it into a raw disk image:

This will take a while, and you’ll probably end up with a less-than-huge file since this is the raw file, without any fancy compression. Now you’ll want to convert this to the VirtualBox disk format, vdi:

The vdi ended up being around 7GB – more or less the exact size of the vmdk file. The temporary bin file was 32GB though. Be sure you’re got enough room on your disk for this job.

I’ve been playing around with Sun VirtualBox. Installation of both Windows XP and CentOS 5 went smooth, but installing the guest OS tweaks – in the VirtualBox world referred to as Additions – gave me a little trouble on CentOS. It’s done the same way as on VMWare, by mounting an ISO with the scripts and drivers required. It’s not as painless as on VMWare though.

For starters, you have to find the ISO yourself – but I’ll give you a hint: look in /usr/share/virtualbox/ After mounting the ISO image, a directory popped up. I tried double clicking on autorun.sh but nothing ever comes easy, does it? I tried running it in the terminal, and was somewhat enlightened as I realized it was looking in vain for gksu – probably a Gnome frontend for su. Luckily there seemed to be another script I could run – VBoxLinuxAdditions-amd64.run – but it whined about OpenGL direct rendering:

Before I ran the script, I made sure the newly installed CentOS was crispy by running yum upgrade. I also had a sneaking suspicion that a C compiler was required, so I made sure the system also sported gcc. The only thing I personally noticed by reading the message above, was that some missing OpenGL crap prevented the additions to be installed. As I was typing the message in this blog, I also noticed something about kernel headers. Rather embarrassing, but I really didn’t see it until now. Anyway, obviously the thing needed was kernel goodness, so I ran yum install kernel-devel. That seemed to make the VirtualBox additions script more happy and now it seems to be running flawlessly.

So, to summarize – what to do to make the damned thing work:

I rebooted as I was told to, but mouse integration didn’t seem to work. Probably due to the kernel being upgraded without rebooting and actually utilizing it. So, I ran the additions script again, rebooted again and woo – mouse integration seems to work. The clipboard doesn’t though, and the maching is still creating some really nasty spikes on my CPU graph every three seconds or so:

It’s worth mentioning that when I’m running my Windows XP guest in VirtualBox, the CPU graphs on the host system are nice and flat.

I’m not entirely pleased, but I think VirtualBox will eventually win me over from VMWare.

As a website developer, I unfortunately need to test everything in Microsoft’s dreaded Internet Explorer. For this, I’ve got a Windows XP running on an installation of VMware® Workstation on my Linux desktop. It works like a charm, except when the kernel is updated.

Aside from being a website developer, I’m also a paranoid system administrator. One of the first thing I add to my login scripts, is umask 077 – the command that sets the permission mask for newly created files. Setting this to 077 prevents anyone but the current user from being granted any rights – read, write or execution. It’s a sane thing to do, but unfortunately a lot of scripts fail to explicitly grant access to other users, especially when installing RPM packages or – in this case – running VMWare after a kernel upgrade to build new VMWare-specific kernel modules.

In this specific case, VMWare kernel modules were built by the root user, and ended up in /lib/modules/2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.x86_64/misc/ which was created by the build process. Read permissions were not explicitly granted to everyone, so when running vmware as a mortal user, it was unable to actually read and verify the newly built kernel modules. The natural response to the user wasn’t “Unable to read kernel module files”, but instead “You need to build kernel modules for your specific kernel”. Makes a lot of sense, eh?

Manually granting read and execution rights on the /misc directory and the files in it fixed the issue.

I rarely need a Java plugin for my 64-bit Firefox browser, but once in a rare while I need to use certain government services that require a digital signature and the original Sun Java plugin – OpenJDK just doesn’t cut it. Sun changed a couple of things recently, so many of the howto’s are outdated – this will work though:

Make sure you remove/disable OpenJDK:

Get the latest Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) here. Make sure it’s the 64-bit non-RPM version. The RPM might work too, I just didn’t test it. We’ll assume it’s version 1.6.0-12. Execute the following commands to unpack it:

Accept the license agreement. The directory jre1.6.0_12 is created. Execute the following commands to move JRE and make a symbolic link to the plugin:

The new thing here is that they recently renamed the plugin from libjavaplugin_oji.so to libnpjp2.so – that set me off track for a while.

Restart Firefox and type in about:plugins and look for Java – if it’s there, you’re all set.

This is just an easy one-liner to install the Danish language pack for OpenOffice.org in recent versions of Fedora Linux:

Today I lost my Ethernet devices, probably as a result of upgrading the apartment server from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10. The culprit turned out to be the service responsible for dynamic device management – udev. These symptoms started showing up in the logfile:

The udev daemon creates and renames devices according to configuration files in /etc/udev/rules.d/ called rules. One of them – 70-persistent-net.rules – specifically handles network devices. This file was screwed up badly by Anaconda, and had dupes and network devices from a previous hardware configuration. I cleaned up this file, so it had only contained rules that matched the hardware addresses of the installed network devices:

Various external “plug-and-play” helpers may add newly found network devices to this file, so if your network devices start changing names, you might want to check /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules.

Is your machine too old and too slow? Does the Gnome Desktop make you grind your teeth with impatience? Why not take Xfce or LXDE for a test spin?

Install both software groups:

Installing the LXDE group also gives you Openbox. LXDE and Xfce pretty much looks like the Gnome Desktop with application menus and icons on the desktop, whereas Openbox reminds me more of the good old days, where every application launch started with right-clicking on the desktop.

To try these desktop environments out, click your username on the login screen, pick the environment you want in the Session pull-down menu at the bottom of the screen, enter your password and you’re all set.

Note: Openbox’ Logout menu item didn’t work for me, but Exit did the trick. If you get stuck, you can simply kill the whole graphics subsystem (Xorg) with CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE.