Archive for the ‘fedora’ Category

Good news in linux-land

Samstag, Juni 7th, 2008

I have already mentioned earlier, that my new laptop and Fedora (back then in version 8) work quite flawlessly together. Things are always on a move, and since that other post, Fedora has been moving forward and it was released in version 9, codename Sulphur.

The change delivered several improvements. For me particularily useful are the new error-message-system of evolution (no annoying pop-ups anymore), Firefox 3 (still in beta/rc, though) and the better suspend/resume stuff. There is no more need for any quirks and the overall suspend/hibernate/resume-feeling is way better than it was ever before. In addition with another new Sulphur-feature, namely packageKit, it gave me an absolute astonishing, albeit small experience:

I usually only use the hibernate or suspend functionality and do not shut down the computer. This works without any problems – except when you install a new kernel and put the laptop to sleep afterwards. While rebooting, the latest kernel is chosen. The laptop tries to boot and sees, that there is a suspend-image which it tries to load. As the suspend image was created by the old kernel, the boot process might (and for me it did) fail. This messup may result in an undefined state and destroy data (well, again, that is what happened to me).

Say hello to PackageKit. After installing a new kernel, the suspend will fail. Although there is no notice of why it fails, it must be due to the new kernel. Small detail, but this little feature protects the user and its data because the inconsistency I described above can not happen (so easily)!

Linux on the desktop, way to go!

April, 1st

Dienstag, April 1st, 2008

It’s joke time.

This came on the fedora-devel list this morning:

Subject: rawhide special report: 20080401 changes

Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 12:08:17 +0000 (UTC) (14:08 CEST)

New package apt
Advanced front-end for dpkg

New package dpkg
Package maintenance system for Debian

Removed package rpm

Removed package yum

Updated Packages:

[…]

Funny 🙂

I wish I had internet

Mittwoch, Februar 6th, 2008

This:

--- google.com ping statistics ---
49 packets transmitted, 30 received, 38% packet loss, time 54259ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1288.705/2175.903/3347.027/364.736 ms, pipe 4

really makes me want back my internet at home.

But a good reason to finally install and configure presto. For the sake of all the poor Linux users, who do not have a fast internet connection I really hope, that it will make it into Fedora 9.

Ich bin ein Babbelfisch!

Montag, Februar 4th, 2008

Ich bin jetzt hochoffiziell Übersetzer in Fedoras German Translation Team. Was mache ich da? Übersetzen natürlich. Damit wird versucht, Linux, hier Fedora im Speziellen, für möglichst viele Sprecher nicht-Englischer Sprachen zugänglich zu machen. Weil Deutsch mit über 100 Millionen Sprechern eine große Zielgruppe ist, sind hier Helfer immer gerne gesehen.

Aber natürlich gibt es auch andere Möglichkeiten, bei Fedora mitzuhelfen. Diese Seite zeigt diese Möglichkeiten auf.

Schaut euch also meine Seite über mich an und meldet Fehler oder schlechte Übersetzungen! Dann können wir die verbessern!

Acer 8204 and Fedora

Montag, Februar 4th, 2008

As some of you may have read or somehow learnt, I do own a new laptop now. Well, actually it’s only used-new, but as good as new and still with warranty. Anyway, first thing I did: Put in the Fedora 8 Live-CD, booted, enjoyed. Almost everything worked out of the box. Exceptions were the graphics (ATI Mobility Radeon x1300) and the webcam, at least everything else I checked worked, including wireless (most important!) and the CPU-throttling, which cools the laptop quite down a lot. So, next logical step: Install Fedora. After doing so, I activated the additional repositories, livna, freshrpms and atrpms. Following the guidelines from this tutorial, I got almost my previous installation. Only one really bothering thing was still there: Graphics not working!

The laptop does have the already mentioned ATI Mobility x1300 graphics chipset and there is the proprietary fglrx driver for it.  BUT: the version available until some time ago (7.12) did not support the native resolution of the screen, which is 1680×1050. I want that resolution, badly, that’s what I spent the money for! So, what are the alternatives? I don’t use the 3D-effects of the desktop, so any driver would be fine. That’s how I found out about the radeonhd driver. It’s a free, though yet incomplete driver for ATI graphic cards. At least, with it I got my 1680×1050 resolution. Too bad though, that it doesn’t allow me to use my webcam, at least it’s not working within skype and cheese but it worked when I used the fglrx driver for testing. Lately, a new version of that driver was released and it promises to fix my resolution problem. I will give it a try, as soon as it is in the livna-repo. And yes, I am too lazy to circumvent my package manager!

What would be the overall conclusion, regarding the Acer Travelmate 8204 and Fedora? Well, it is a pleasure. I barely, if ever reboot, as Suspend and Hibernate are working as well and I can say for sure, that this is the most productive and fastest laptop I’ve ever worked with. Well done, Acer! Not so well done, ATI!