Tag: Fedora Linux

Upgrade to Fedora 18

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Fedora 18 has been released.  And since now I have a somewhat flagman role for quite a few Fedora users around me, I took the courageous step of upgrading my personal laptop from Fedora 17 to 18.  More or less it went smooth.   Here are the notes for things that broke:

  1. As mentioned in the previous post, you should use “fedup –network 18” instead of “preupgrade“.   This is my preferred way of upgrading, since I can still use the computer while the download and good chunk of the upgrade are being done.
  2. Broken KDE.  Upon the first boot I got as far as the graphical login prompt.  Upon entering the username and password, and selecting KDE as the preferred session, I’d get a KDE loader screen for a bit, then a few screen spasms, a black console, and eventually an automatic reset back to the graphical login prompt.  That was ugly!   I tried it a few times, but it was behaving consistently.  Gnome however worked just fine.  All I had to do to sort this out was install updates.  But, there was a minor issue with that too – see the next one.
  3. No updates.  Running “yum update” was consistently telling me that I have no updates to install.  I found that difficult to believe, since I know for a fact that updates are available for Linux distributions pretty much the moment a new version is released.  Solution to the problem is a reset of yum cache, by using “yum clean all”.  Once that is done “yum update” will bring the usual megabytes of updates.  KDE bits and pieces are in there too.  Which sorted out the previous option.
  4. Google Chrome won’t start, spitting out an error of some missing library.  That looked weird.  Gladly, the solution is easy, and finding one is a single Google search away.  Simply re-install the RPM and all will be back to normal.
  5. Git branch information in bash prompt was no more.  Luckily, that was covered in the Release Notes.  A necessary shell file has been moved from one location to another, so .bashrc should be updated.

So, is there anything good in this version that would counter the above issues?  I don’t know, honestly, I haven’t been using it long enough yet.  The things that I’ve noticed are:

  • Some kind of a new behavior in the graphical login.  There is a screensaver-like mode before the prompt that shows time and date.  That’s convenient.  But dragging that screen away with the mouse a la mobile/tablet interface, is not very productive.
  • Dolphin file manager in KDE seems to be a lot more responsive.  At least it starts now in split second.   That was taking almost five seconds on the same machine before.  Not that I use that often, but it’s handy.
  • Gnome 3 polishing.  When I briefly logged into it, I noticed better shadows and borders for windows, as well as some system monitoring widgets in the activities screen.  That looked better than I remember it.

So far – not too much.  Hopefully, more awesomeness will be discovered during the next few days.

Fedora 18

After a two month delay, Fedora 18 is finally here.  So far, I have been surprised by two things:

  1. Phasing out of “preupgrade” for “fedup“.  Seriously?  How’s “fedup –network 18” better than “preupgrade“?  Especially, when dealing with desktop users…
  2. How much new stuff I found in the Release Notes.  I didn’t have much time to follow the development process last year, but even without that, I realized that a lot of my knowledge is quite outdated.  Specifically: GRUB vs GRUB2 configuration, chkconfig/service vs. systemctl, date/hostname/etc migration to some*ctl scripts, network management (both with NetworkManager and with interface naming changes), and lots more.

And I haven’t even upgraded yet.  I wonder what will come next.

P.S.: if you must know, I’ve written a huge rant on the whole Fedora direction, but after page 35 or so it got a little bit out of control, so I deleted it and left you with the above.

Configuring the Apache MPM on Fedora

Configuring the Apache MPM on Fedora

If you take nothing else away from this article, let it be that you should tailor your MPM’s MaxClients setting so that your web server won’t try to allocate more resources than you have available. Better that a visitor wait a moment for a connection than that the server should dip into swap for more memory and bring the entire virtual machine to a crawl.

Fixing screen resolution on Linux with xrandr

Not the best start of the week today.  For some weird reason my desktop’s screen resolution crashed into a safe 1024×768 mode today.  No updates, no changes in configuration, not even a reboot – just in the middle of the working morning.  I’ve tried to fix it to no avail, installed updates, and even rebooted.  Nothing seemed to help.  Google to the rescue, and I find this handy page that shows step by step how to use xrandr to fix things.  I knew about xrandr for a few years now, but it’sbeen decades since I had to use it, so I’m rusty.  15 seconds later I have the following script ready:

#!/bin/bash

#gtf 1280 1024 60
xrandr --newmode "1280x1024_60.00"  108.88  1280 1360 1496 1712  1024 1025 1028 1060  -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --addmode VGA1 1280x1024_60.00
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1280x1024_60.00

Run it once and all is back to normal. In fact, after a few minutes in 1024×768 mode, it feels like I have a better monitor now than I used to. They say, you need to lose something to really appreciate what you have. Until today I thought I had a crappy old monitor. But just a few minutes in a lower resolution make me appreciate it a lot now.