Colin Charles Agenda

Being the long-time Linux user that I am, there was no way I was going to be satisfied with Xandros, which is the stock Linux that ASUS ships with the Eee PC. I was stuck for choice between Ubuntu and Fedora, and after some careful evaluation, I decided that Fedora, was right for me.

Getting Eeedora, was pretty straight-forward. The installation wiki is pretty accurate when it comes to the “how” of installing Eeedora. For me, it was made easier that I had a Fedora system already, so I could run the tool to create Live CDs from the livecd-tool package.

One snag I noticed, and this is more with the Live CD script, is that when you don’t have a bootable USB thumb drive, it tells you that, but doesn’t quite tell you it didn’t make an installation on the thumb drive. I guess the script could be more idiot-proof. Anyways, making the drive bootable is easy.

Now, once that was done, it was on to installing on the Eee. I ensured that in the BIOS (accessed via pressing F2), the first boot device was the USB thumb drive attached to the system at boot-up. However, it was never booting into Eeedora, and I only managed to see the Xandros start up. Highly disappointing.

Turns out, that hitting the Esc key was the magic sauce, during boot-up. Only when doing that, was I given a boot menu, and then I could choose if I’d like to boot off the internal SSD, or the USB thumb drive. Once that was sorted, I was pretty happy to see a familiar Fedora-looking screen (sure, it said Eeedora, for legal reasons, but I think its a pretty darn good spin :P).

The installation process went on pretty smoothly. During partitioning, I was pretty much rid of Xandros - the chosen default was actually the most sensible. Just one / partition, filling up the entire disk, with no swap. As usual, anaconda (the Fedora installer) will warn you that not having a swap partition will be detrimental to performance - I wonder how many newbies might decide to create a swap partition (kind of a big no-no, on these SSD based devices).

One thing I did notice was the use of ext2 partitioning as opposed to a journalled filesystem like ext3. The natural question then comes to mind, as to why not just use jffs2?

Once the filesystem partitioning was sorted, and GRUB was chosen as the default bootloader, anaconda proceeded to install packages. This was a fairly speedy process, and once that was complete, it was a simple reboot, and I was booting off the SSD before I knew it.

You’re logged in by default as the eeedora user. You get a stock XFCE4 environment (or stock, that I would think anyway), and it comes with the basic utilities you need to get working (Firefox, wireless, etc.).

There were some things I obviously did not like, so decided to poke a little further. First up, was creating a user, that was not”eeedora”.

Dissecting the .bash_profile of the eeedora user, I noticed some things:

• pulseaudio -D - pulseaudio as a daemon for the user? Why, sound seems to work just fine on my Eee without it
• xsetroot -solid steelblue - seems OK, but not actually required anyway
• startxfce4 - if you want a GUI the moment you login, this is useful. But it only really works out well, because of the hack in /etc/inittab that says c7:12345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty –autologin=eeedora tty7. Seeing that I disabled autologin for the eeedora user, I pretty much see a login screen, and startxfce4 manually. Sometimes, I can actually get away with working in just a shell… However, I can see this from a usability point of view, I guess. Of course, the other issue is that the eeedora user, does not actually have a password!
• Logging out of XFCE4 and going back to the console, immediately triggers a machine shutdown. This seemed counterintuitive.

Needless to say, I disabled all this, in my new user account, as well as disabled autologin in the inittab.

Why XCFE4? Its a 900MHz Mobile Celeron processor, deliberately underclocked to 600MHz, with 512MB of RAM. This is the kind of environment, that can run GNOME. And when we notice problems with GNOME, its time we fixed it. Heck, I have an almost similarly configured IBM laptop, without PAE, that runs GNOME just fine!

I must commend WiFi Radar - this is something that pretty much, just works. And its small. It looks unmaintained, sadly, so its probably time to take an interest in it. Fn+F2 enables and disables wireless very well. I do however notice that even with the wireless disabled, the WiFi light (in blue), remains turned on. I find this to be rather quaint, and must prod it further.

Brightness control (Fn+F3/Fn+F4) seem to work well in Xandros, but I can’t seem to replicate such joy in Fedora. There is absolutely no reason why this shouldn’t work. It does annoy me, because its sucking precious battery life, from my usage of the Eee, by keeping it nice and brightly lit, when I’m on the battery.

Suspend and resume, just work. And because we’re dealing with an SSD, it just works, really fast as well. Sure, when I open up the screen of my Eee, I actually need to press the power button to get it to resume, but this kind of behaviour is perfect for me.

Do I like recompiling all the magic in /root/eee-setup, everytime I get a new kernel? No. Speaking with Dave Jones though, there is an expectation that all the drivers will be available in F9. Kudos.

Webcam? Works fine when I run lucview. Doesn’t work with the Skype beta that I get from the Skype download site. No idea what is missing, I just feel a bit bummed that I’ve got to find the solution to this issue at some stage soon.

As an install report, I think this does, just fine. Its now just time to hack on the distribution, to get it to the way I want it to work.

Was hardware shopping yesterday, and couldn’t resist getting myself a webcam, now that Skype 2.0 on Linux supports it (okay, its beta, but it works). Picked up a Logitech QuickCam Family for RM65. There was a more expensive version (RM10 more) that was “Skype certified”, but I figured I could save the cash, seeing that there is no way Logitech supports Linux officially anyway.

Did it work with Linux? Most certainly, on Fedora 8, it just worked. Of course, you need the livna repository. Just install gspca (it’ll pull in some kernel modules too), and then run modprobe gspca, and voila! you have a working webcam. Tried it with Ekiga, it was detected. Tried it with Skype, and even had a chat, with a user on Windows, and it worked. Glad to be webcam enabled.

Technorati Tags: fedora, logitech, quickcam family, linux, skype, video, ekiga, gspca

I managed to get my old Vista image created on Ubuntu Gutsy, to see if it would run under KVM on Fedora 8. Turns out I get a similar blue screen of death. Looks like it might be the splash screen of Windows causing KVM/QEMU to bork. Decided that it might be time to try VirtualBox.

No Fedora 8 RPMS are provided, so the Fedora 7 RPM will have to suffice. First snag? Lacking kernel-devel (by default, you now get kernel and kernel-headers). After installing that, its a simple sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup. Ensure that the user you’re running as, is also a member of the group vboxusers (you have to do this manually).

Starting up innotek VirtualBox is now a breeze. Though I have a feeling I have to run the setup everytime I get a new kernel (which is a problem in Fedora land, as there’s a rapid pace of development). This feeling was confirmed quite quickly, as I had a new kernel release almost immediately from the time I trialled this to the time I wrote this. At first glance, its an ugly application (Qt based).

Setting up a VM requires no KVM support, so in Fedora, this means removing kvm_intel and kvm from the running kernel. Good thing they’re modules, eh?

Setting up Window Vista was a breeze. Allocating it 1GB of RAM on my 2GB machine, seemed OK, as long as Firefox with multiple tabs weren’t running. Vista does something quirky - it pre-allocates all the RAM, probably by writing zeroes, and thus makes use of 1GB of RAM even before it starts. Oh well. At least I have Windows, and it performs, relatively well, so I can test software.

Networking? Much has been written about this, in fact, there’s even a ticket #504 for this. In fact, it was easy - Devices -> Install Guest Additions. Then get Windows to probe for new hardware, and add the network card. Very simple, quite unlike my KVM experience. If you for some reason want to mount the image itself, its located at /usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso.

Technorati Tags: virtualbox, windows, linux, fedora, fedora 8, vista

Statistics are interesting. Every Fedora Project Contributor gets an @fedoraproject.org alias. So I’m presuming, this number is greater than just package maintainers…

Fedora, via Max Spevack:

• non-RH maintainers: 276
• RH maintainers: 202

total @fedoraproject.org aliases for package maintainers: 478

Ubuntu, via Daniel Robitaille:

• 348

total @ubuntu.com aliases: 348

By the above, does it mean Fedora is way more successful than Ubuntu? Some detractors will say, RH has a lot more package maintainers than Canonical can afford. Sure. But an @fedoraproject.org “Fedora Membership” also extends to ambassadors, translators, etc. and not just package maintainers (so the number, 478 up there, is woefully under-reported). Sadly, I couldn’t find a nice easy way to show all the @fedoraproject.org aliases via the online pkgdb application.

Long gone are the days where these aliases were maintained in /etc/aliases by Seth and I ;-)

Technorati Tags: fedora, ubuntu, inflammatory, statistics

I’ve been harsh when it comes to Linux on laptops. Simply put, the week before going to foss.in (i.e. last week), I got tired with my tried daily usage of Ubuntu (besides, I went through Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon). So I went with Fedora 8. You’ve got to love rdiff-backup.

What works?

• Wireless, out of the box. This is ipw3945d. Fedora comes with the firmware now, so all is well, it just works out of the box.
• X mirror out, out of the box. Finally, I can present, using my Linux box, without worry that it would suck with an external display. Just hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, ensure the external display is connected, and voila! I get a mirrored display. I’m sure setting it up to be dual-screen is the next uphill task, but lets just keep the good memory of things “just working”.
• Suspend, and resume, out of the box. I can place my laptop to sleep, and wake it up, and all works. Sure, I need to hit Alt+F1, then go to Alt+F7 to see the screensaver login (otherwise, it remains blank), but this tiny workaround is very worthwhile to ensure that my laptop, works like a laptop.

What doesn’t work?

• The WiFi light on my Dell doesn’t turn on. The Bluetooth one is, but the WiFi one remains permanently off. Who cares?
• Occasionally (and I mean, very occasionally), the laptop doesn’t wake up from sleep. I haven’t figured out why yet.
• Pressing Fn+Up or Fn+Down, to get the brightness controls going doesn’t work. While I can control the brightness just fine, its the GNOME applet not displaying it fine. Sound seems to work, so I’m wondering what it might be.
• Occasionally, yum barfs, but I’m on a really slow, and unreliable link. yum clean all, seems to fix things.

I haven’t tried hibernate. I haven’t played with the TV Out. However, my laptop seems to be working more like a laptop, than when I had Ubuntu installed.

Oh, a minor point of annoyance. I can get Compiz working. But playing videos with it enabled, makes the video jerky, slow, and well, sucky. So I clearly can’t use Compiz, yet. But hey, it works (bottom-line and all, right?).

Technorati Tags: fedora, linux, fedora 8, laptop, dell inspiron 640m, inspiron 640m

foss.in is officiated. Atul is on stage, speaking and the room is filled up. The lighting ceremony happened, a while ago. “Only an Indian can give a keynote, at foss.in” - here comes the Anjuta keynote, by Naba Kumar. History of Anjuta? The name, was the name of his girlfriend, and now, its his wife (they have a cute daughter, whom we got to see at Opus last night).

Last night quite a number of us went to the Opus, for a Mozilla party. It was truly, a hip event. Lots of beer, lots of chatter, and there was even some local Indian scotch towards the tail-end of the night. We were having so much fun, we didn’t even realise dinner wasn’t around yet ;) Aizat and I wolfed down some amazing pasta in under 5 minutes around 11pm.

Kudos to Shreyas and Shilpa for ensuring we were all safe and sound (and Kishore who sent me home, since I missed the bus :P). It was great to speak with Tejas, Allen, Gopal and the rest of the crew.

Yesterday, spent some time in Juergen Schmidt’s talks in the OpenOffice.org Project Day. I tailed into another talk about translations in Kerala, who seemed to represent the government of Kerala to some extent. Translations alone don’t interest me, but finding out more about FOSS use in Kerala clearly does. I am after all, a Mallu ? I hope I got that right :)

Jumped to see Tom Callaway speak about Fedora Secondary Architectures, though there are some things there that I feel are a little incorrect with the idea behind it. Build machines, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Packages and the distribution itself, save for the torrents, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Allowing a build of software to fail on a secondary architecture? Wrong. Allowing the secondary arch maintainer to fix broken packages? Smart. Though honestly, I think this might end up having to becoming a team.

Rahul Sundaram’s talk about spins was great. Considering I was building LiveCDs before there were tools, to do so, I’m glad that there are so many ways to do so now (easily, even). And of course chit chatting with him over beer at the Opus later, was fun.

Anyways, time to pay attention to the Anjuta talk. Not a big fan of IDEs myself, but I’m seeing the need for it (for folk that aren’t comfortable with vim).

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, opus, party, fedora, openoffice.org, secondary architectures, livecd

One of the reasons I like Ubuntu is because they have a really swanky commercial repository, and they make it easy for me to get some commercial software, without pulling an RMS-styled “Freedom is a feature” on me. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Fedora with all my heart, but when you get out of the distribution business per se, you feel that you might just want your primary machine to “Just Work”(tm). And long gone are the days where I carry 2-3 laptops when I travel - I just aim for one (I have lots of photo gear to worry about, instead).

The Feisty Fawn, was a pretty good Ubuntu release. That is, I got my commercial software fix - Sun’s JDK (moot these days, hello IcedTea in Fedora, for instance), VMWare Server (its free, kind of useful for running other distributions), and even Opera (sometimes I’m bored with Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany, I need to test things in another browser).

When Gutsy Gibbon got released, I couldn’t wait to update to the next, best thing. You expect things to move forward, never regress right?

Well, Sun’s software still works. As does Opera. But VMWare, has since, stopped working. Kernel 2.6.22-14 does not come with appropriate VMWare modules. Yes, that means, there’s no vmmon or vmnet loaded (or even, loadable, to be exact). Effectively, they’ve broken VMWare. I wondered why, so I hopped on to a package search, only to find out that VMWare has been removed from the commercial repository. No real explanation that I can find as to why it doesn’t exist.

So, my next option is to maybe build-my-own-package. There’s a guide titled VMWare in Ubuntu Gutsy - Kernel 2.6.22 that might be a good read for those that want to use this. Then I recall why I moved to using Ubuntu daily - I did it to get away from the frustration of having to build things myself. I did it, for the “Just Works”(tm) experience.

My options are to move to using some free software, quite obviously. There’s KVM, Xen, or even VirtualBox. Hey wait a minute, I can get all this in Fedora 8 too, can’t I?

The Gutsy Gibbon was supposed to come with a rocking new tool, displayconfig-gtk (i.e. System -> Administration -> Screen and Graphics). Unfortunately, it is broken beyond all thought. Then I remember an old friend, system-config-display, from Fedora - at least it works, and it has been around for ages (since what, Red Hat 8?). displayconfig-gtk is supposed to give me all the wonderful hotplug goodness of an external display, but it doesn’t. I can manually push xrandr to at least mirror my display (Intel chipset, might I add), which I’m sure I can also do in Fedora 8.

So I’ve come to the realisation that things are broken, and I’m going to have to do things manually, if I want them to work. This is irrespective of if I run Ubuntu or Fedora. Being just an “end user” is hard, to almost impossible.

My needs-to-work-list:

• sleep/resume - this can also be kernel version dependant, Ubuntu has the advantage for a less aggressive release policy, but it seems Fedora is catching up with wanting to ensure laptop stuff, just works
• wifi - ipw3945d is my poison, and it seems that both Fedora and Ubuntu have this working out of the box (a stark improvement to previous Fedora’s where you had to get the firmware yourself). Of course, repeated sleep/resumes tend to make WiFi die, and that just annoys me
• video out - this is hacky at best, Ubuntu works if I tweak things manually, I wonder if Fedora 8 will have this any better. Nonetheless, xrandr should come to my rescue
• sound - well, my laptop is my primary music listening device as well as video watching device. Ubuntu and Fedora should have this working just fine
• codecs - I need to watch DivX, play MP3s, and so on. Ubuntu provides this via Medibuntu and Fedora via Livna
• media keys - Ubuntu and Fedora should have this working fine, and GNOME in both environments is highly friendly
• virtualization - I don’t care if I end up using KVM (which is looking like what I’m going for), or Xen (no ACPI, and obviously can’t sleep/resume), but I think I’ve had it with VMWare unless they have sensible packages. I have useless VMs sitting on my laptop now.
• fully 64-bit OS - I plan on moving on from 2GB of RAM to 4GB of RAM (its kind of cheap nowadays), and want a fully 64-bit OS. Ubuntu works, sure, but I have to have ugly chroot hacks for a 32-bit environment. Fedora just works, some say because RPM is broken but I say, if that’s the case, its broken in a good way. Mixture of 32/64-bit rpms, are sweet
• Skype, GizmoProject - closed source, install your own, works on Ubuntu and Fedora

My “it’ll be nice if it worked” list:

• compiz effects - Doesn’t seem to work on Ubuntu, I wonder if Fedora will have it any better
• hibernate - not quite suspend/resume, but it can be handy to have around
• sd/mmc/memory stick card reader - Doesn’t seem to work on Ubuntu (Feisty, last I tried it)
• tv out - Never tried, but if video out is this bad, I doubt s-video is any better

I take it that’s enough ranting for today. Congratulations to the Fedora Project for releasing Fedora 8 today. I think Werewolf will be a gutsy release alright.

And a happy Diwali/Deepavali to all Hindus. As an aside, the number 8 is interesting - in Chinese, it loosely translates to being lucky. And November 8 2007 seems to be the “festival of light”. The only way it could’ve been any more numerically lucky is if it were released on 08-08-2008 (a day for a lot of weddings, I assume).

I seem to enjoy asides today, so here’s another. I ran dict gutsy, and it has some interesting definitions:

  gutsy \gutsy\ adj.
     1. marked by courage and determination in the face of
        difficulties or danger.
       Syn: courageous, plucky.
      2. rough or plain; not sophisticated or refined; earthy.
        Opposite of {sophisticated}, or {refined}.
       Syn: earthy, lusty, robust.

I wonder if, definition-wise, Gutsy Werewolf is #1 and the Gutsy Gibbon is #2?

Technorati Tags: fedora, ubuntu, gutsy gibbon, gutsy werewolf, ubuntu, commercial repository, virtualization, everything’s broken, linux on laptops, werewolf

In the open source world, its quite common to see bug statuses as CLOSED, RAWHIDE (on Fedora, to tell you its in the current development version). Sometimes, you also see CLOSED, CURRENTRELEASE (which usually implies that they’ve bumped the minor version number up, and have pushed the update to you, via yum/up2date). Sometimes, CURRENTRELEASE is used to define ERRATA (though with a fast moving project like Fedora, you tend not to really have errata releases - this is more RHEL-space).

Bottom-line: I get my bug fixes, for free.

Over a year ago, I reported a bug to Apple about an iChat error I was getting, that gave me a Feedbag Error 10. I’ve definitely got numerous other radar entries, but no point linking to them, since there’s no public bug tracker. Today, Apple basically closed the bug as CURRENTRELEASE (or really, what they meant to do was close it as NEXTRELEASE). And as a consequence, they’ve decided that charging me AUD$158 would be the most appropriate course of action. They’ve told me to upgrade to Leopard!

I won’t paste the message here, because that’s apparently under NDA (how can you really NDA a bug report? I’ve seen radar numbers being posted on the Web before… and its not like my bug report, which is my own, isn’t public - maybe if there were actually responses from Apple engineers, then it’d become private). But to paraphrase, Apple Engineering thinks my bug has been fixed in the commercially available Leopard, and upon installing the new software, my bug will most likely be fixed.

Bottom-line: I have to become $158 poorer. Or renew my ADC membership, and wait patiently for the mail (really, why do they even bother sending updates on CD/DVD monthly, when pretty much every Mac developer is connected to the Internet? Waste of resources Apple, how non-green of you, worse, thinking that Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for all his work. The only good thing about renewing an ADC membership is possibly the free t-shirt, the occasional pushes of OS X on DVD, and the hardware discount, if utilised).

Technorati Tags: fedora, apple, macosx, bugs, bugzilla, apple radar, bug status, adc