Fedora Linux

Adding flags to Gnome keyboard layout switch

One of the little things that has been bugging me for a few years now is the Gnome keyboard layout switch. I am using two layouts – English and Russian – and instead of having two nice flags, like in KDE, I had to live with ‘USA’ and ‘RUS’ letters in my task bar. Not that big of a problem, but annoying. Icons are much easier and faster to understand than text. And all the other things in my task bar are graphical, so the text stands out too much.

Today I finally decided to do something about. Thanks to this forum post I had a solution in hand which almost worked. The steps were:

Download en.png and ru.png icons into ~/.icons/flags/ folder.
Run gconf-editor.
Change the value of /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/indicator/showFlags to true.

The only thing that went wrong for me were the actual images. Gnome scaled them to 24×24 pixels and they looked rater ugly. So I created my own icons using Gimp. I created a new image 24×24 pixels with transparent background and then dropped in the center of it the flag icon that I got from the FamFamFam icon set. Saved the results back into the ~/.icons/flags/ folder and vuala!

Lenovo G550 laptop

A couple of days ago I bought two Lenovo G550 laptops – one for me, one for my wife. After spending a day browsing all the online shops and driving around all computer outlets in the city, I decided that this is the best option available.

Specifications: Dual-core 2Ghz Intel CPU, 15.6 inch glossy screen (WXGA, maximum resolution 1366×768), 4 GB of RAM, 250 GB hard disk, a bunch of USB ports, HDMI out, DVD writer, WiFi, and all the standard stuff, weighting at around 2.7 kilograms. Battery life is around 4 hours. Price: 500 EUR + 15% VAT = 575 EUR.

Both machines are running Linux (Fedora 12) already, even though they were coming with some Windows pre-installed. I wouldn’t know which one since I haven’t even booted into that once. Fedora Linux installation was straight-forward and everything worked, except for the wireless networking, which needs an extra step to enable those Broadcom drivers. Gladly, the required step is widely covered in the blogosphere. – basically, enable RPM Fusion yum repository, install kmod-wl package, and reboot your machine.

Everything is working find and I really enjoy the laptop, except for a few things that annoy me with its keyboard. The layout is somewhat weird. First of all, I am not used to having a number pad on a laptop keyboard. But that’s OK – if there is space, then why not, right? Well, there is space, but I think it would have been utilized better for Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys. As they are now, PgUp and PgDn are located next to navigation arrow keys and Home/End keys are only accessible through a Fn key, which is really strange. On top of that, Insert and Delete keys are in a different part of the keyboard – on top of the Backspace key. And while I don’t use Caps Lock all that often, some people will notice that Caps Lock indicator is missing, as well as NumLock and ScrollLock. What can I say? That’s one weird keyboard layout.

Other than that though there is nothing that I can complain about. The machine is nice and cool and pleasant to use. My wife seems to enjoy it as well.

Fighting Adobe AIR on Fedora 12

Until now I was completely and totally ignoring Adobe AIR. As far as I was concerned, it existed in a separate universe. But recently, quite a few Adobe AIR applications started to come up on my radar that I wanted to try. Yesterday, for example, I saw the Flickrroom, which sounds exactly like something that I need. So, I searched yum repositories, and then Google, and then I found this blog post, which provides clear instructions on how to install Adobe AIR on Fedora Linux. Followed everything to a step, and failed. Then Googled for more, tried, and failed. And no matter what I do, it seems to fail miserably.

As far as I can judge, Adobe AIR is installed on my system. I see two items in the main menu and they even work when I run them. But when I try to install any Adobe AIR application, I get a well known error message.

$ Adobe\ AIR\ Application\ Installer /home/leonid/Desktop/Flickroom.air
Application crashed with an unhandled SIGSEGVCrashlog has been dumped in /tmp/airCrashLogs/0219_1359_vG6AfW

This seems to indicate that I missing some dependency on my system, but I can’t which one. I’ve installed and updated everything that I could find a reference to. I’ve also looked through the crash dump for any hints, but nothing jumped at me.

Any ideas?

Fedora Linux history tour

Last weekend I went through a somewhat lengthy process of upgrading one of my servers from Fedora 6 to Fedora 12. The server is vital for a company that uses it, there is more than 2 TBytes of data on that machine, and I only had a weekend to go through the upgrade.

Fedora is a very dynamic distribution, with new releases coming out roughly every 6 month. An upgrade backward compatibility is maintained only for the last 2 releases. So, I had to first upgrade from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8, then from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, and then finally from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12.

Of course such a long path would pretty much guarantee that things would break. But gladly I didn’t have to fix them for every upgrade, only once, after Fedora 12 upgrade was complete. So the actual upgrade routine was rather simple: insert DVD with the new version, reboot, upgrade, remove DVD, reboot. I was attempting to boot the system at least once into each new version to see how much stuff would break and if I notice anything going horribly wrong. Everything was going smooth, except for once machine refused to boot into the new version (Fedora 8, if I remember correctly). That didn’t stop me though. Just upgrade to the next one, and then to the next one, etc.

After the upgrade was finished, I installed the updates for Fedora 12 and started fixing things. The thing that I was worried for the most was Request Tracker (aka RT3) installation, which is a Perl application. As any proper Perl application, RT3 utilizes a whole lot of Perl modules from CPAN and every time Perl version is changed signifficantly, these modules should be downloaded and installed. Before, it was a rather slow, boring, and time consuming task. Now however things are much simpler. Before any perl upgrade just create an autobundle using the command “perl -MCPAN -e autobundle“. This will create a bundle with all your current Perl modules. After the upgrade is done, run “perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Bundle::Snapshot_2010_01_27_00‘” (where 2010_01_27_00 is the bundle version, as given to you by autobundle). Now Perl will download all modules and their requirements from CPAN and install them automatically. Pure magic.

Apart from RT3 only one thing broke. One that I would expect to break because I don’t follow the development of it that close. It was Samba. After the upgrade to Fedora 12 none of the users could connect to any of the file shares. “Access denied” was given no matter which username and password was used and what was the access level to the share. A quick Google search revealed the fix. Apparently, somewhere in between Fedora 6 and Fedora 12, Samba changed default back-end for storing credentials. A fix was as simple as adding a single line (“passdb backend = smbpasswd) to the configuration file, that switched Samba back to the old backend.

And that’s it! That’s all that broke and had to be fixed after an upgrade between 6 versions of a rather dynamic Linux distribution. Once again, I am really amazed by how well things are managed in Fedora. Kudos and congrats!

Linux on netbooks : distribution question

Linux on netbooks is becoming a hot subject recently. There are more and more netbooks sold, and more and more of them are coming with Linux. Or are being used to try Linux out. Netbooks are small and often cheap devices which makes them affordable and even … expendable. So a lot of people are getting them just to play around. And those of them who want to try Linux out often end up asking the question: Which distribution should I chose?

This question has been asked many times before. Everyone who tried using Linux asks this question sooner or later. And the answer is – it’s pretty much doesn’t matter. The truth is no matter which distribution you will chose, you’ll have a whole lot of questions. Which applications to use, how to configure things, how to do specific things that you are used to doing in your current operating system, etc. With all these questions you’ll go to Google, forums, and other people. So, choose the distribution which you can find the answers for easier. If someone is introducing you into the world of Linux, choose the same distribution that person is using. That simple.

But aren’t netbooks different?, you might ask. Yes and no. Netbooks are in the class of their own because it’s very easy to classify them. They are smaller than laptops, often cheaper than laptops, and often have weaker hardware (less powerful CPU and less RAM specifically). But they are still as normal a computer as any other desktop or laptop. And while there are quite a few Linux distributions for netbooks, you can still use practically any desktop-oriented or generic Linux distribution on the netbook.

How come? Well, the differences between Linux distributions are in:

how the kernel is compiled
which software is packaged
default configuration options

All three of these items are quite easy to change. You can compile your own kernel. You can remove installed software and install additional software. You can change configuration options. Involving yourself in any of these activities is not something I’d recommend to a novice user, but the important bit is that it can be done.

Consider for example, a recent example in my blog post about Fedora 12 installation on my netbook. It went like a charm and the only issue I came across with was that wireless wasn’t working. Which could be fixed either by installing an additional package or re-compiling the kernel and enabling the device driver.

What I am trying to say is that trying different distributions is fun, but you shouldn’t be basing your choice of the distribution just on the fact that you are using a netbook. Consider the purpose of the distribution, software that you will be using, and people that you will be consulting with before choosing the Linux distribution for your netbook.