Recently in Fedora Category

There have been a couple things about Fedora 12 that haven’t been as nice as I would have liked. I finally solved one of them tonight.

My laptop, a Dell Latitude D830(N), has an NVidia Quadro NVS 140M video chipset in it. Fedora 12 worked out of the box with the open source nouveau driver which is an experimental reverse-engineered driver for NVidia chipsets. It works pretty well and I probably would have kept using it if I could get my laptop to hibernate properly. Instead, I could never get the laptop to come back to life after it went into hibernation.

Meanwhile, the RPMFusion folks (a popular third-party repository) usually have the kmod-nvidia package available to install which gives you everything you need to run the proprietary NVidia drivers (Fedora doesn’t include this because they adhere to an all-open, non-patent-encumbered package policy). However, the kmod-nvidia package wasn’t available for Fedora 12.

When it did show up on rpmfusion, there were some caveats. Fedora had done some work to make the nouveau driver work as seamlessly as possible and, as a result, made it a little more difficult to install the proprietary driver. The RPMFusion folks have some errata info on how to get the proprietary driver working. I’ll summarize the process here since it’s a little tricky to execute and understand.

Before you do anything the RPMFusion information says to do, you should obviously install the kmod-nvidia package. Then, run:

nvidia-system-config enable

(I usually do this with sudo.)

Then, reboot into runlevel 3 and proceed with the commands RPMFusion’s page recommends.

The first commands the RPMFusion info indicates should be run are these:

mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

The initramfs-blahblah.img file is a replacement for the old initrd-blahblah.img file. So, we’re making a backup of the original initiam ramdisk image file for the running kernel and adding nouveau to its name so we know this is the initial ramdisk image that contains the nouveau driver (Fedora added the driver to the initial ramdisk so the graphical bootloader can take advantage of the NVidia chipset’s capabilities).

Then, running the dracut command creates a new initial ramdisk image for the running kernel. The dracut command replaces the mkinitrd that has been used traditionally. For more information about dracut check out the Fedora Project’s wiki page on dracut.

Finally, run the setsebool command RPMFusion’s page mentions:

setsebool -P allow_execstack on

If you’re like me, however, you probably have SELinux set to permissive because RPMFusion’s nonfree codec packages have already broken some SELinux stuff. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

Then, reboot again into runlevel 5 and enjoy.

UPDATE: Read below!

Soon after getting kmod-nvidia installed, I noticed some weird issues in KDE. Whenever I would press ALT-F2 to run a command, the UI would freeze for about 10 seconds. I did some searching and found this was a reported bug. I’m guessing a forthcoming xorg-x11-server-* package update will include this, but in the meantime, I installed new xorg-x11-server-Xorg and xorg-x11-server-common packages from this 1.7.1-12 Koji build. Pressing ALT+F2 does not freeze the system anymore.

I’m almost a text-based e-mail purist. I used to use Mutt as my primary e-mail client application, but decided to go with a graphical client such as Mozilla Thunderbird or KMail so that I could at least effectively read HTML-formatted messages.

I’ve been happy with KMail. I’ve had it configured to prefer text-based e-mail and aside from the fact I don’t use my preferred text editor (vim) inside it, it’s been a good e-mail client. Now, my dad is a more typical e-mail user. While he probably doesn’t care that much about composing original HTML messages, he does receive a lot of them that he wants to forward onto other people that he feels may be interested. He’s on lots of political and family mailing lists that swap HTML messages complete with embedded images, etc.

He has been using Thunderbird at his home and KMail (an old version running on a Fedora Core 6 desktop) at his office. He mentioned to me that KMail runs noticeably faster on his work system than Thunderbird does on his home system. I suggested that we could standardize him on KMail and upgrade his office desktop to a more recent version of Fedora Linux.

Things got more interesting when Thunderbird recently got updated on his home system in a package update to version 3.0b4. The Smart Folders “feature” threw both of us for a loop. It combines multiple Inbox, Sent, and other IMAP folders into single virtual folders containing an aggregate of messages from each corresponding folder. I really have no idea who would want this feature. My parents each have their own e-mail accounts and I had Thunderbird configured so they could check mail for both accounts. The new version of Thunderbird combines both inboxes into one virtual “Smart” folder and subsequently confused the heck out of my father.

I figured out how to disable the “smart folder” behavior (View->Folders->All), but Thunderbird was still hiding other IMAP folders like Sent and Trash that my parents often need to access messages in.

So, KMail. KMail works great for almost all things, but my father noticed right away when he tried to forward an HTML message with embedded images that KMail wasn’t letting do what he was used to doing: Editing the forwarded message to remove the annoying gazillions of e-mail addresses the original message(s) were addressed to.

KMail has two methods of forwarding a message: First, you can forward a message as an attachment. This preserves everything about the original message, but KMail doesn’t let you edit anything within the attached message. Alternatively, you may forward a message “inline”. This lets you edit the message, but it only gives you the text portion of the message to edit and completely omits the HTML attachment altogether.

I did some research online to see if there was a way to get the desired functionality out of KMail, but it doesn’t look like it’s possible. If it does ever happen, it’s a couple versions out at least. It may never happen because it seems there are voices within the KMail community that feel KMail should never take on these types of features because it risks KMail becoming “another Outlook/Thundebird clone.”

Has anyone found other solutions to this problem for a Linux user?

I recently encountered a problem when I plugged in my Sprint USB aircard (A Sierra Wireless USB 598) into my laptop running Fedora 12. When I clicked on the NetworkManager applet running in my system tray and selected the mobile broadband (CDMA) device to connect to, it appeared to connect and, then shortly after, disconnect.

I watched the messages sent to the /var/log/messages file to see what was going on and sure enough, NetworkManager was successfully making a PPP connection to Sprint’s service and then PPP was terminated and the connection was closed.

I did some quick searching online but didn’t find anything definite about this. There were lots of links to the Fedora 12 release notes which claimed Fedora 12 had better support for mobile broadband cards than previous releases. That made me wonder if their improvements were actually breaking things for me.

I decided to explore the options dialogs. I right-clicked on the NetworkManager applet and chose Edit connections..., selected the Mobile Broadband tab, selected my adapter and clicked Edit.

Under the PPP Settings tab there is a button labeled Configure methods in the Authentication section. This lets you choose which authentication methods PPP should try. A list of checkboxes next to possible methods appears with EAP, PAP, CHAP, MSCHAP, and MSCHAP v2 as possible selections.

I knew Sprint doesn’t use anything fancy. In fact, you don’t even need to provide a user or password. It authenticates using the device ID or virtual phone number of your device. So, I wondered if disabling some things might work. I figured if it was using anything it was probably CHAP or PAP. I disabled everything else.

Lo and behold, the next time I tried to connect, it connected and stayed connected!

I hope this is useful to someone else.

The ffmpeg package that is available for Fedora 12 via the rpmfusion.org respository does not include faac support. This can be a problem when you want to create H.264 video content that incorporates the AAC (Advanced Audio Codec).

The most straightforward way I’ve found to rectify this situation is to build a new package from the source RPM.

First, download the source RPM using yumdownloader.

yumdownloader --source ffmpeg

This will download the .src.rpm file to the current directory. Install it using the rpm command. (This assumes you have a person RPM build environment set up. This blog post provides some good information on that.)

rpm -ivh ffmpeg-0.5-5.20091026svn.fc12.src.rpm

You probably want to indicate some sort of difference in the version numbering since this version is a modification of the upstream. Edit ~/rpm/SPECS/ffmpeg.spec and modify the Release: line by adding something to the end of it.

Release: 5.%{svn}svn%{?dist}_fozz

Now, you can try building the package with rpmbuild. Unless you’ve already installed all the development libraries and other dependencies ffmpeg relies on, you’ll get some dependency messages. Use yum to install those dependencies and then try building again.

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpm/SPEC/ffmpeg.spec --with faac

This will create RPM packages for you under ~/rpm/RPMS/. Use rpm to install the ffmpeg and ffmpeg-libs packages.

rpm -Uvh ~/rpm/RPMS/x86_64 ffmpeg-{libs-,}0.5-5.20091026svn.fc12_fozz.x86_64.rpm