Archive for the ‘fedora’ Category

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Scr3wed

Montag, Dezember 17th, 2007

Yesterday I somehow managed to screw up my home partition. It was a cryptsetup-luks encrypted partition and it seems like I wrote over the beginning of the partition when updating grub, which I had to do due to some re-partitioning… Today was consequently mostly spent on fixing that mess. At home I usually keep a copy of the most current Fedora Rescue CD. Or several copies. Well – I am not at home. And the Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD does not support LVM… Quite a hazzle with a not-so-happy ending.

Anyway, my „new“ /home is now bigger (who would not like that) and my last backup is luckily less than two weeks old. Rdiff-backup is doing its thing and restoring (almost) all data.

Lessons learned:

  • backup, backup, backup
  • never screw with a system if you don’t have a rescue cd at hands
  • backup, backup, backup
  • rdiff-backup works really well *

Next time, I just won’t resize but delete stuff instead…

* somehow one directory within my ~/.evolution can not be restored. rdiff-backup hangs at 100% cpu and seems to do nothing on that 4 MB directory with ~20 files in it. I didn’t find anything on that, but if anyone knows something…

Posted in computer, fedora, linux, rdiff-backup | No Comments »

Mood-GNOME

Dienstag, November 20th, 2007

Yesterday Evening I had an idea.

Inspired by the changing background in Fedora 8 (which rocks, by the way!!!), I had the idea about some „mood-applet“ for GNOME (or any desktop, for that matter). What’s the idea?

Well, think of it as a global setting applet, where you can somehow „change“ your mood, kind of like you do with the volume of your speakers. Depending on the mood, the desktop could change its appearance, the music selection could be influenced, your instant messenger will change your status, maybe something else?

It’s just an idea and I am not a programmer, who could implement it, but if there are some, feel free 🙂

Posted in computer, fedora, gnome, linux | No Comments »

Fedora 7 and problems with the laptop fan

Dienstag, Mai 29th, 2007

Maybe this also concerns others, despite me.
I have Fedora running on my Acer Laptop, which is a Travelmate 661 LCi (now running flawlessly for almost four years!). Since I upgraded to Fedora 7 with its Kernel 2.6.21 I had problems with the fan of the laptop: When it started spinning, the laptop froze. Under X, it froze the whole computer, the num lock led was blinking. When using the console solely, the computer just froze and sometimes threw some acpi error messages on the console.

Well, after a while I found out, that it is a regression in the Linux kernel, bug #8385 in kernel’s bugzilla, to be more precise.

So, what to do about that? I want to use Fedora 7 and its kernels. Just patch them with the patch supplied in Comment #50 of the above mentioned bugzilla report. And for those new to building kernels, here is a short howto on how to do so (hence the name „howto“…)

  1. Install the fedora-devtools package: yum install fedora-rpmdevtools unifdef
  2. Create your rpmbuild-directory: fedora-buildrpmtree
  3. cd ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS
  4. wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/7/SRPMS/kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7.src.rpm (or whatever kernel you would like to install)
  5. rpm -ivh ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7.src.rpm
  6. cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS; rpmbuild -bp kernel-2.6.spec
  7. cd ~/rpmbuild/BUILD/kernel-2.6.21/linux-2.6.21.i386 ; vi Makefile (your actual directory may differ)
  8. Change the string behing EXTRAVERSION to something sensible, let’s say -own.kernel
  9. Download the patch:
    wget -O p1.patch „http://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=11684“
  10. Apply the patch:
    patch -p1 < p1.patch
  11. make oldconfig (we will not customize the kernel in any way, so no make menuconfig or similar done now)
  12. make; su -c „make modules_install && make install“
  13. reboot
  14. When rebooting make sure to chose the new kernel in grub. The default choice can be selected by editing /etc/grub.conf

I hope, this mini-howto helps anyone out there to get Fedora 7 turned back into a usable system again.

Update: edited to include the recent development / updates / better patches

Posted in acer, acpi, fan, fedora, kernel, laptop, linux | No Comments »

FC6 und Suspend-to-disk und Acer Travelmate 661

Dienstag, Dezember 12th, 2006

Ich habe es endlich (zugegeben, vorher nie intensiv probiert…) geschafft, suspend to disk auf meinem Acer Travelmate 661 LCi unter Fedora Core 6 zum Laufen zu kriegen. Im Nachhinein war es gaaaanz einfach…

  1. FĂĽge

    [atrpms]
    name=Fedora Core $releasever – $basearch – ATrpms
    baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/fc$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable

    zur yum.conf bzw. als Datei in /etc/yum.repos.d hinzu

  2. installiere
    • hibernate-suspend2
    • kernel-suspend2-2.6.18-1.2849_1.fc6.cubbi_suspend2

    Die Kernelversion kann sich natürlich ändern, außerdem sollten alle zugehörigen Module installiert werden

  3. Ă„ndert in der /etc/hibernate/hibernate.conf die Zeile

    SuspendDevice swap:/dev/EuerSwapDevice

  4. Editiert die /etc/grub.conf:

    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2849_1.fc6.cubbi_suspend2 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/RootVol000 resume2=/dev/EuerSwapDevice quiet

  5. FĂĽgt in /etc/hibernate/common.conf hinzu:

    OnResume 20 /usr/sbin/855resolution 4d 1400 1050

  6. Startet einmal neu und bootet den suspend-kernel

Diese „Anleitung“ ist kein HowTo und kein Handbuch, nur eine kurze schriftliche Niederlegung meiner Schritte, damit andere und auch ich etwas zum Nachlesen haben.

Mein Dank geht vor allem an diese Seite, mit deren Hilfe ich das 1400×1050-Auflösungs-Problem behoben habe.

Posted in fedora, laptop, linux, suspend | No Comments »

FC6 und wpa_supplicant

Samstag, Dezember 9th, 2006

Ich habe mich heute mit der Frage beschäftigt, warum mein FC6, welches ich von FC5 aktualisiert habe, nicht richtig mit WLANs zusammenarbeiten wollte. Es war nicht mehr möglich, mit dem NetworkManager einfach ein WLAN auszuwählen und sich dann zu verbinden. In der /var/log/messages gab es immer Fehler mit wpa_supplicant. Die Erleuchtung kam mir dann eher per Zufall: Es war noch ein wpa_supplicant-Paket von den ATRPMs installiert:

Removing:
wpa_supplicant i386 1:0.4.9-13.fc5.at installed

Dadurch kam es also zu den Unstimmigkeiten. Bei einem einfachen yum update wurde das Paket ĂĽbrigens nicht aktualisiert. Also schnell ein yum remove wpa_supplicant und dann ein yum install NetworkManager, das hat’s dann geholfen und jetzt habe ich

wpa_supplicant i386 1:0.4.9-1.fc6

installiert. Alles läuft. Juhu.

Posted in fedora, linux | No Comments »

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