Posts Tagged ‘Fedora’

I have had a sorted history with Fedora. I first started my Linux in the days before the Fedora Project and before the Red Hat enterprise change. I am not sure of the details, but somewhere along the line, the Development of Red Hat become more commercial minded and the Fedora Project was created to fill in the gap. I am not an expert on the licensing and development policies of Red Hat but I remember the first Fedora releases. This was in the days before automated packaging systems like apt-get, yum, or pacman had become commen place, and I spent my time in “Dependency Hell.”

I have not been a fan of RPM based distributions for sometime, and my initial experiences before the adaption of automated package systems may have something to do with that. I quickly found Debian and the wonders of apt-get and have been mainly a Debian man ever since. All though the Arch Linux and Frugalware package manager pacman has impressed me over the last couple of years. With that said, I check in on the Fedora Project from time to time and have found many of their early innovations, which few distros where implementing at the time, have become major features in other distributions over time. I have admired them for their ability to push the envelop on occasion but have always found the distribution lacking in some way.

My experience started over Thanksgiving brake. I was having some issues on my laptop connecting the to my Parent’s wifi setup. I had Fedora 12 XFCE Re-Spin loaded on a USB stick and was experimenting with it before I had left. I installed it on my old Dell Inspiron 600m and the wireless worked out of the box. This did not surprise me since it is an old wifi card that has well documented support in Linux. I was satisfied that I could surf and watch movies on my laptop and started pocking around Fedora some more. The installation itself was straightforward. I have always appreciated the simplicity of the Anaconda installer. Some people have complained that it is not clear when coming to partitioning, but I understand partition tables well and found it easy to work with. On my laptop everything was preconfigured and I only had to figure out how to play movie and mp3 and watch DVD’s. I was impressed enough with it on my laptop I installed it on my Desktop which I built myself which took a little more configuration.The only installation option I have not seen, and I simply may not be aware of it is a core, striped down, command line only install like Debian. I like to have a bare bones system and build up from their with my own specifications and configure as I go to give me more control over my system.

The biggest complaint I have had since the beginning of the Fedora Project is the RPM based package management always felt sluggish and clumsy to me. Taking much longer then I had become accustom to with apt-get. The other problem I found, was their dependency requirements seemed to be overkill, installing up to twice as many dependencies for the same package I would install in Debian or Ubuntu. The one annoyance I found with it was the package management GUI lacked any kind of progress indication other then simply telling you it was downloading or installing. I think this is odd, since almost all package management GUI’s have a percentage or time indicate on what the system is doing. I hope that future releases of Fedora will correct this over sight.

One of the other things that has always been a point of frustration is their policy about some proprietary drivers and codecs. I understand the philosophy behind this, and respect it. However, as a desktop user there are some codecs I just find I want (such as to watch movies, DVDs, and play mp3s). Debian is also known for its strict open policy, but in some ways Fedora has them beat. I had to install EasyTAG to edit mp3 tags from their unstable branch because mp3 support was not included. Before in my Fedora experiences it had been frustrating finding documentation and third party repositories for these codecs and drivers. Fortunately I found most of what I needed at the RPMfusion website. I found that libdvdcss was no longer supported by RPMfusion and I had to find another source, and I had to install my nVidia drivers manually for my desktop (all of which is documented on this site). Anotehr issue I have found is support for wma files, and converting them to mp3 is limited, and have yet to solve this problem. One feature I would like to see would be an automated search and download system like Ubuntu has when trying to play files not supported by the default installation.

I was impressed with the XFCE re-spin and the detail taken to make it usable and accessible. I like XFCE for its lightweight design but still being a robust Desktop Environment option, and even run it with Compiz. The bug reporting tool was handy to, telling me about minor kenral crashes and giving me some detail about Firefox crashes and other things. The Firewall GUI is relatively straight forward, though I felt it was a little too straight forward at times. Overall the desktop experience on Fedoar 12 has been a stable and consistent experience. Last time I checked in with Fedora this was still the case with their Fedora 10 release. However, that has changed with Fedora 12, and I have been overall impressed with yum and the overall Fedora 12 experience.

Upon installing Fedora 12 on my desktop I had experienced Audio skipping and scratches when playing DVD’s on Totem, but have experienced no other audio issues with playing music, flash, or avi and mpeg files in Totem. I set out to find a solution to this problem. I do not know how much of a difference any of the below processes made because in the end I lost audio playback in Totem altogether, and ended up Installing VLC. If you are having similar problem I recommend installing VLC first, and work backwards from there.

as root:

alsactl init 0

add tsched=0 to /etc/pulse/default.pa

remove pulseaudio as root



yum remove pulseaudio

reinstall with the fallowing as root:



yum install pulseaudio alsa-plugins-pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-libs pulseaudio-libs-glib2 pulseaudio-module-zeroconf pulseaudio-libs-zeroconf xmms-pulse pulseaudio-module-gconf wine-pulseaudio xine-lib-pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils pulseaudio-module-bluetooth gst-mixer padevchooser paman paprefs pavucontrol pavumeter

now edit /etc/pulse/default.pa

replace: load-module module-detect

with: load-module module-hal-detect tsched=0

open /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

replace: ; default-fragment-size-msec = 25

with: ; default-fragment-size-msec = 10

and reboot

check your audio mixer settings. Open the Pulse Audio Device Chooser (loads in system tray) and select default as the default server.

At this point DVD would have audio in Totem on the menu system but not when playing the movie. At this point I got frustrated enough with fixing DVD audio in totem I defaulted to installing VLC.

as root:

yum install VLC

As always VLC works perfectly. I prefer Totem (with the Xine engine), however it appears as if Fedora no longer provides this option. The only real issue I have with VLC is its use of QT libraries when I prefer to run GTK libraries for the simple fact that I run the XFCE desktop with some Gnome components and QT adds extra unnecessary weight to my desktop.

One of the the things that has always bugged me about fedora is some of their rigid policies concerning proprietary codecs such as MP3s. Granted Debian’s policies are nealy as restrictive, but relatively easy to get around if you so desire. A good example of this contrast between the two distributions’ policies is with the EasyTag package which allows me to manage the id3 tags for my MP3 collection. In Debian I only have to install the proper codecs and libraries from a third party source. In Fedora, they have gone to the level of not compiling their EasyTag package with mp3 support. The solution I found was the following command (which takes EasyTag from their unstable branch).

as root:

yum –enablerepo=rawhide –disableplugin=protectbase update easytag

as root:

yum install compiz-gnome compiz-fusion-extras compiz-fusion-extras-gnome emerald emerald-themes fusion-icon

add fusion-icon to menu preferences –> appearances and select the Application Autostart tab

Configure Compiz the way you like it.

note: you need to have RPM fusion and livna.org repositories enable (read here)

as root:

yum install kmod-nvidia

if you are using the PAE kernel:

yum install kmod-nvidia-PAE

for the default kenrel as root:

sed -i ‘/root=UUID/s|$| rdblacklist=nouveau|’ /boot/grub/grub.conf

for PAE Kernel:

sed -i ‘/root=UUID/s|$| vmalloc=256m|’ /boot/grub/grub/conf

Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and for the default kernel make sure nouveau.modeset=0 vga=0×318 has been added to the end of the kernal line or vmalloc=256m vga=0×318 if you are using the PAE kernel.

as root:

setsebool -P allow_execstack on

now reboot