Fedora 10 beta on eee pc 901 – take 2 Monday: October 27th - 2008

* before i forget – there’s an odd bug where if you press ctrl– to shrink the text in gnome-terminal it crashes.  i should track that down at some point but it’s certainly there in the f10beta livecd. … seems to be fixed after an update. – ah! actually i think it’s just that with compiz enabled the window resizes itself off the screen.

this time i set up /boot on RAID1, the rest of the 4G disk and a matching chunk of the 16G as a RAID0 physical volume  with /home on it and the rest as another physical volume with / followed by a 1G swap partition.

the 480 updates took 11.5 hours to complete.  no errors so far as i can see.  no new updates to apply.

so, let’s try rebooting from kernel-2.6.27-0.352.rc7.git1.fc10.i686 to kernel-2.6.27.4-47.rc3.fc10.i686

i’ll edit the grub boot line so it’s not quiet or graphical and i’ll press escape if the blue bars appear at the bottom of the boot screen so i can see what happens.  also, i’ll do a shutdown and power on rather than just a restart.

——-

it’s absolutely fine.  no problems at all.  *sigh*

new things:

• the add/remove software window doesn’t have a maximise button and appears maximised by default.  if you unmaximise it (by dragging) you can’t re-maximise or resize it.  with desktop effects enabled it appears small by default – so you can’t use it.
• the first attempt to add more software produced an odd error.  just clicking apply again has worked with a message that “An untrusted package was installed”.
• i installed google gadgets.  clicking Run when it finished either didn’t work or it crashed.  running it again from the menus worked.
  • another software install – another ‘run not working’ – so i don’t think it crashed.
• i’ve discovered the neon theme for cairo-dock – it’s pretty!
  

  eee desktop screenshot

• installed the wireless drivers from the development part of the fusion repo.  success!  (you don’t need to reboot – just modprobe rt2860sta and wait a few seconds for NetworkManager to pick up some networks.)  of course, the moment it starts working a new kernel becomes available in rawhide.
• also discovered that the black variant of the most excellent comix cursors have a super-nice little featurette – the ‘bar’ cursor that appears over text has a red bar.  super-nice.
• i had intended to do lots of carefully controlled restarts to pin down the problem if it reoccurred .. but i wasn’t concentrating and accidentally did a default reboot.  i’ve done a couple more since then – no problems.

happy now. 

eee 901 wireless on fedora 10 Saturday: October 25th - 2008

along with the 1.8.0 driver there’s an intriguing WebUI file.  not sure what it is but the install script builds some stuff (possibly including the driver) and then starts firefox pointing at a local server running on another port.

don’t forget to install make, gcc and kernel-devel before running the script!

Error unpacking rpm package glibc-common-2.8.90-14.i386
エラー: アーカイブの伸長に失敗: ファイル /usr/share/i18n/charmaps/ISO_6937-2-25.gz;490266ab: cpio: open

for the WebUI you also need openssl-devel

of course, the kernel-devel package it’s picked up isn’t the right one for the original kernel – that’s not available through yum.  so we’ll have to update the kernel and reboot…..

oooh, while i’m waiting for the kernel to install – watching videos with compiz enabled works fine now! 

although that reminds me – with a 5.1ch ogg movie playing in totem all i’m hearing is the rear channels no matter what sound options i select – at least that’s what happened  on F9.

had filesystem problems when i rebooted and it wouldn’t accept my root password.  booted with the old kernel and it still had the fs probs but accepted my password and fsck’d the problems.  now i’m back with the latest kernel.

looks like the driver compiled okay – and it’s done its mad “and copy the file to /tftpboot” thing as before.  let’s try that WebUI thing again…

the script uses zenity to pop up prompts – extremely slow if you’ve got input methods enabled.  lots and lots of compiling but it still doesn’t work.  whatever, back to the actual driver…

hmm.  it looks like it’s loaded okay.  there’s a ra0 device but networkmanager hasn’t spotted it and i can’t ifup it or rmmod the module.  time for another reboot i think….

didn’t help much.  i can rmmod and modprobe now but nothing happens.

tried adding “alias ra0 rt2860sta” to /etc/modprobe.conf …. no change.

running the webui thingy adds the ra0 interface and locks up the module.  doesn’t appear to have any other effect though. … oh, apart from allocating it an IP6 address.  hmm.

guess i’d better install these 460 updates!  good old rawhide.

on the plus side, fiddling around with this has revealed that there is a monitor mode.  iwconfig ra0 mode monitor works!

welcome to fedora 10 Beta Friday: October 24th - 2008

so, almost first impressions:

• had to install from livecd again – no problems except that, as with f9, the window doesn’t fit until you reduce the font size from 10 to 6pt.  (the font properties window is too big too!)
• i’ve accepted the default layout this time – no RAID weirdness.
• like the funny little coloured  bars (white, light blue and blue) during the initial boot.
• near the end of startup something crashes just before X starts.  i think it happened with the liveCD too.
• starting X for firstboot takes forever but i think it did that for fedora 9 too.
• enabling desktop effects for the first time leave a lot of the screen black – needs a redraw.  changing workspaces fixes that.
• the adobe repo works as does flash (from that repo)
• the wireless drivers still haven’t arrived in the kernel
• SELinux is preventing alsactl (alsa_t) “getattr” to /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf (usr_t).

now to try out the suspend stuff…

on AC:

selecting suspend from the battery status icon suspends (even though it looked like it was about to hibernate because it took ages and went into text mode and displayed some messages)

screen brightness Fn keys still work – there’s no OSD but ‘dim on idle’ seems to work.

suspend on idle works too just the same.

suspend on lid works fine too.  a lot faster but i think that’s just because some system stuff was busy thrashing the disk earlier.  opening the lid doesn’t wake it up – you have to press a key (same as in F9 – presumably it’s a eee thing).

on battery… (screen dims and OSD shows)

suspend from the icon works.

suspend on idle… hibernates!  (that’s probaby what was happening on F9 too) hmm.  seems to be a bit smarter than before – removes cache and “shrinks memory” before writing memory to disk – but it took a looooong time to start up again.

suspend on lid works.

so that’s still annoying – if you’re running on batteries you have to remember to shut the lid otherwise it’ll hibernate.  boo.

but they’ve fixed the screen brightness on resume – hooray!