Jonathan's blog

Fedora 13 (“Goddard”) was released today.

I wouldn’t normally go upgrading my OS to the latest on the day of release, but frankly anyone who runs Fedora is an early adopter by definition.

I started by upgrading two unimportant Fedora 12 virtual machines at work using preupgrade. One went smoothly but the other failed because the /boot partition was too full. I cleared out all old kernels and tried again, with success. Each upgrade took less than an hour, I think, but I wasn’t really paying attention.

After brief testing to make sure all the important stuff had upgraded properly, I upgraded my work desktop PC, my home PC and my laptop too. They were all on Fedora 12 and the upgrades went without a hitch. I’m very impressed.

Massive thanks and kudos are due to the Fedora team for working so hard to get this release out and for providing such an easy upgrade path. I look forward to getting stuck into the new features of this release in time.

My next task is to upgrade my home server, which is currently running Fedora 11. Updates for Fedora (N-2) are only available for one month after the release of Fedora N, so time is now of the essence if I wish to keep my server secure. Unfortunately the reason I’m still on 11 is because the upgrade to 12 failed and I wasn’t able to get it working. I will probably take this opportunity to do a complete wipe and reinstall (scary!). Then I can also migrate from i386 architecture to x86_64.

Watch this space!

For those who have been following the issues around Samba suddenly breaking upon upgrade, I’ve now got to the bottom of it.

I’ve updated the original post with details, so if you wish to leave comments, please leave them on that post.

Some time ago I bought a cheap USB thermometer called TEMPer. I was disappointed to find that it didn’t work on Fedora. It would only work on Windows using a poor piece of proprietary software.

I eventually found the blog of Tollef Fog Heen, who had managed to get his TEMPer to work. Unfortunately his solution involved patching and compiling a kernel.

However since then, it seems his patch has been integrated into the stock Fedora kernel and it is now possible to read the temperature from it.

The TEMPer device appears to be a USB-serial adapter, with a serial I2C device at the end of it. It’s not straightforward to extract the temperature from it, but Tollef Fog Heen has written a simple C program to return the temperature.

His program polls the TEMPer every second and prints the temperature to the command line. It doesn’t stop until you kill the program. I made a couple of tweaks to the code so it prints the temperature once, formatted as a raw number with no extra text, and then quits. You can find my modified source here.

Disclaimer: I don’t know C. I haven’t changed any of the logic of the code, only the way it prints the output. If the code is buggy, it wasn’t me!

Now I have an executable that returns the temperature from the TEMPer, I can think about building some application that could use this. How about a Nagios plugin?

If you have Fedora and an nVidia graphics card, chances are you’ll want to use kmod-nvidia as your graphics driver. It is closed-source, but produced by nVidia themselves and has several advantages over the default open-source drivers that are typically bundled with most distributions – for example, 3D hardware acceleration.

If you have already installed kmod-nvidia – read on, and find out why you should upgrade to akmod-nvidia.

So what’s wrong with kmod-nvidia?

The way it works is simple. For each kernel version, there is a corresponding nVidia kernel module. Keeping the two in sync is a pain, so the packagers at RPMFusion have made a metapackage, simply called kmod-nvidia which tracks the right version of the module for your kernel, e.g. kmod-nvidia-2.6.29.5-191. It’s simple – you install just the metapackage and yum automatically installs the right version of the kernel module.

The problem arises when a new kernel is released, but the packagers of kmod-nvidia haven’t yet released the corresponding kernel module. Sometimes they do it in a few hours but often it takes longer – maybe a day or two. For all the time that the corresponding kernel module doesn’t exist, you cannot update your kernel (and if you are using PackageKit to update your system, you cannot easily update anything!)

What’s different about akmod-nvidia?

akmod-nvidia is different. Rather than downloading someone else’s kernel module when it’s available, akmod-nvidia compiles its own version of the module for whatever kernel you have.

So if you update your kernel, next time you boot into the new kernel, akmod will see that no module exists yet on your system for your kernel, and it will compile it automatically. This takes only one or two seconds – I haven’t noticed the delay on my system.

The advantage is that you don’t have to wait for anyone else to do anything when you update your kernel. It’s also extremely useful if you are running some sort of custom kernel, such as PlanetCCRMA‘s realtime audio kernel.

So how do I install akmod-nvidia?

If you haven’t already got the RPMFusion repository set up on your computer, you will need to do this. (The following code snippet is for Fedora. For CentOS, see the RPMFusion Configuration page.

rpm -Uvh
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

If you already have kmod-nvidia, uninstall it.

yum remove kmod-nvidia

Then you can install akmod-nvidia. It will probably need to pull in a handful of dependencies.

yum install akmod-nvidia

Now if you reboot, akmod will automatically compile your kernel module. You’ll never have to wait for packagers again!

Recently, a friend asked me if I could copy her home videos from a miniDV tape onto a DVD. I said sure, OK, and if she lent me her camcorder I’d be able to get it done.

I’ve never actually used miniDV before, and I’ve only ever tried to process video on Linux a handful of times – and it’s usually been a disaster. Fedora seems to be a rock-steady platform for many tasks, although I would say it can be a bit lacking in high-quality media tools. I decided to give it a go on Fedora, but I was also prepared to fail over to Windows Movie Maker if necessary. Yuck.

So I searched the Fedora repos for the term DV, and came across a tool called Kino.

Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings.

Great – sounds like it will do the job. I plugged in the camcorder (a Sharp VL-NZ50) and fired up Kino. It immediately recognised the camera, no intervention necessary. Kino has full control of the tape – I was able to start, stop, rewind, and fast-forward the video. There was a single button to capture the entire tape to disk.

I found it made a new file for each time recording had been restarted on the camcorder. This might be ideal if you wanted to later burn a DVD with scene selection, but I wanted to create a single video.

After capture was complete, approximately one hour of video took up just over 12 GB – luckily I have crazy disks in my PC!

Kino also has features to export video in various formats. I simply exported as a single DV file (no re-encoding required).

Then I used DeVeDe to wrap the raw video file in a nice DVD format with a basic menu, and create an ISO image that I could simply burn to DVD.

I was very pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get great results copying a miniDV tape to a DVD using Fedora.

My requirements

When I built this computer back in January, I had carefully considered the RAID storage configuration. My requirements were basically:

• Must dual boot Fedora and some flavour of Windows (unfortunately)
• Fedora must have a redundant /home partition, as it holds my most important data
• Windows must have a fast Media (aka /home) partition for my audio work
• Would also be nice to have redundant OS partitions

The initial plan

So I decided to buy a pair of identical 320GB disks for the OS, a set of three 640GB disks for my media. My new motherboard had 4 SATA ports on an ICH10R controller, and 2 SATA ports on some other SATA controller.

It seemed best to set up a fakeraid RAID5 array across the 3 media disks in the ICH10R controller, and to let the OSs do their own thing on the 2 OS disks.

I split both of the OS disks in half to allow Linux software RAID1 (mirroring) across both of its RAID partitions, which would be mounted as /. The two partitions showed up to Windows as C: and D:. It is not possible to use Windows software RAID (aka Dynamic Disks) on a Windows boot partition so I installed Windows on C: and used D: for Program Files.

I created a RAID5 array across the 3 disks using the ICH10R RAID BIOS. Booting into Windows, it was immediately spotted so I cut the device in half and created drive J: for my media. Sorted – it was fast and worked nicely.

No such luck with Fedora 10 (the latest relkease at the time I built this PC). Anaconda, the Fedora installer, was not able to see the RAID partition – it only saw the three separate disks. Try as I might, I could not get round this. Kind of a showstopper.

Onto plan B

I figured that I could avoid using the ICH10R fakeraid by keeping the disks as 3 separate disks, cutting each in half and using three halves for Linux software RAID, and 3 halves for Windows Dynamic Disks. No such luck – Windows is only able to use a whole disk as a Dynamic Disk, and wasn’t able to share it with Linux. Bugger.

What I ended up with

Given that Windows and Linux cannot share a RAID array, whether it be software or pseudo-hardware, my only choice was to somehow divide up the disks.

The two OS disks were fine as they were; Windows was not using RAID but rather a more manual approach to having two disks (OS on C: and Program Files on D:).

Eventually I decided to give Windows two of the media disks and use them in a RAID0 (striped) Dynamic Disk for performance. This still gives approximately the performance of a 3-disk RAID5 array, but without the redunancy. I get around this by not keeping anything permanently on the RAID0 array. It is only used as a cache/buffer during audio work, and the audio files are primarily stored on my server via the network.

This left just a single disk for Fedora’s /home partition. It doesn’t tick the box of having redunandcy, but thanks to my hourly backup script this is less essential.

This diagram shows my current sub-optimal setup. Click for a bigger version. Windows partitions are in red and Linux in blue.

My partition setup

The future

Since setting up this PC, I happened across a blog post that seems to be the answer to my prayers. It’s a bit hacky, but it’s the only documented way I have seen of getting a dual-boot system to share an ICH10R array.

Next time I can be bothered to reinstall both OSs, I will write about it here.

I’ve dabbled in Linux for several years now – I’ve looked after Linux servers at work and at home, and I’ve had a secondary desktop PC running some version of Fedora or other.

Two years ago I switched over my PC at work from Vista to Fedora, and I haven’t looked back. I didn’t have any particularly unusual requirements of a work PC; just an ssh client to configure servers. I actually prefer the GNOME desktop to a Windows desktop, and I’ve been getting on with Fedora very well indeed.

A couple of months after this I decided to install Fedora on my main PC at home. I felt that I’d learned enough about desktop Linux to be able to get it going satisfactorily. And while it’s all good and well having a secondary Linux PC, you get any good at it unless it’s your primary.

The transition went very smoothly on the whole – I got most of my hardware working and I was very pleased with the usability. But it still nags me that there are a handful of things that don’t work (either satisfactorily, or in some cases at all) on Linux, so I’m still forced to keep Windows.

Audio Editing

I’m a massive fan of home audio production. I play a few musical instruments and I own a set of decent recording equipment (see my Equipment List), including a Phonic Helix Board 24 firewire mixer. I purchased the mixer when I was still running Windows XP as my primary OS, and it worked very nicely. I used to use Syntrillium’s Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) and I got on very well with it.

When I moved over to Linux, I was keen to get the mixer working. There exists a project named ffado which strives to get firewire audio devices working on Linux. Unfortunately it doesn’t offer full support for Phonic devices. I did have it working at one point, although it was iffy at best, and a pain to configure each time I wanted to use it.

And while Ardour is a pretty decent piece of software, I had grown used to Cool Edit and Audition and didn’t see why I should move away. So I still boot into Windows for my audio work.

Gaming

This is one of the most common complaints from individuals who migrate to Linux. Their games don’t work.

I’m not a massive gamer anyway, but I did often enjoy spending the odd hour on Age of Empires or one of a number of driving games.

Of course some games work under wine, but many don’t. Of the ones that do, they often have missing features or oddities. So I still return to Windows for my occasional gaming.

Unfortunately, since upgrading my Windows installation from XP to Vista, I’ve discovered that Age of Empires doesn’t work on Vista either. A Microsoft game… on a Microsoft OS. Quality. I don’t play Age of Empires any more.

Scanning

For those who read my review of my slide scanner, you’ll recall that it doesn’t work on Linux (at all) or Vista (at all) so I had to use the XP installation on my laptop to scan in 3,000+ slides.

I also have a Canon LiDE 25 flatbed scanner which is detected and apparently works out of the box on Fedora – but unfortunately the colours are funny and broken. I haven’t found a way to remedy this so I still scan on Windows. At least it works on Vista on my desktop PC.

Other applications

And of course, there are always the rare occasions when you encounter the need to use a specific application that is Windows-only, or a file format that somehow ties you to Windows. Recently, I’ve needed to use Windows for…

• Boson online testing environment – for practising Cisco exams
• Noteworthy Composer – a MIDI editor that’s so good I’ve never found a Linux application that comes close. It does actually work quite nicely under wine with Timidity, but some screen fonts break.
• TomTom Home – software for updating the maps on my sat nav
• Vue – a 3D rendering suite that I occasionally play with

Summary

Overall, it’s a shame I can’t drop Windows completely. The vast majority of my needs are satisfied by Linux, and Fedora in particular has come a long way since I started using it at Fedora Core 5.

So who’s to blame for this dependence on Windows? In my opinion, the blame must lie with the application developers who write their applications and games for only one OS; the hardware vendors who don’t bother to write drivers for any but the most common OSs.

Linux developers work hard to provide drivers and applications for new devices and new file formats. Their task is made harder by manufacturers who stick to closed formats and proprietary devices. It’s a shame, because it ruins my life!

For those of you who read my earlier post, Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an EeePC 701, you’ll know that I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) on my other half’s EeePC 701. The clue is very much in the name.

Initially I was sceptical of using it myself. I’m a Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora fan. All my home machines are Fedora; my work PC is Fedora and all the servers I look after are CentOS. My own EeePC 901 was, until yesterday, running Fedora too. I had no real gripes about Fedora on my 901, except the boot time, which was acceptable but slightly slow.

But after seeing how well thought-out UNR is, I was tempted to give it a shot. Despite being a Red Hat fan, I eventually decided that I didn’t actually use my 901 for anything Red Hat specific – basically I use it as a web browser, email client, MSN/AIM client and ssh terminal. So I’m not tied to any particular OS at all.

Installation from a Live USB was a breeze. My 901 has a so-called 20GB SSD, which is actually a 4GB SSD and a 16GB SSD. I’ve also added a 16GB SDHC card. In the end I set up my partitioning like:

• 4GB SSD: /var
• 16GB SSD: /boot, /

• 16GB SDHC: /home

In short, this gives me 16GB for the OS, and 16GB for my stuff. This is a pretty healthy amount for a netbook, and more than I’m likely to use in a hurry.

So what are my first thoughts on this Debian-based OS that I’m supposed to hate?

Well, it’s pretty good. The first thing I notice is how polished everything is. The login screen, the custom menu, the theme… UNR looks like a saleable OS. The UNR custom menu looks smart and is easy to use on a netbook screen – 9″ in my case, and 7″ in Hana’s.

I was able to configure my installation the way I like it without using a terminal. Of course, the terminal is there if I want it but I think this distro marks a new era – a Linux distribution that can be installed, configured and used without the user having to use the terminal. I’ve already said that my non-geek girlfriend Hana is using UNR and finds it great. I’d also be happy to recommend it to other non-technical users.

Well done Ubuntu!