I’ve been trying for some time use Elisa media center on Fedora but it seams that Elisa is too elusive for Fedora. Current version on Elisa home page is 0.5.12 but if you install Elisa on Fedora 9 you will get much older 0.3.2, even bigger issue is that Elisa doesn’t work because of some broken dependencies.
 
You can look at Fedora Bugzilla; more specifically look at bugs #446051 and #429590.
 
So I guessed that there will be some “break my Fedora box” packages in F9 updates-testing repos, but unfortunately there were none :(
So I booted Fedora 10 beta - this is the bleeding edge Fedora so I thought there had to be new Elisa package in F10, but guess what? Fedora 10 also has old Elisa 0.3.2 which doesn’t work.
 
I also tried manually getting packages from freshrpms testing repo, I downloaded and saved all the rpm packages and tried to install them but there were some unmet dependencies :(
 
I tried installing pigment-python-0.3.8-1.fc9.i386.rpm but that packet needs libpigment-0.3.so.8, libpigment-gtk-0.3.so.8 and libpigment-imaging-0.3.so.8 but pigment-devel-0.3.9-1.fc9.i386.rpm packet provides only so.7 but no so.8 libraries…
 
I hope these issues will get sorted out as soon as possible. I’m willing to test Elisa packages and help that way so that working and updated Elisa gets into Fedora 10 repositories.
 
UPDATE:
I found out how you can install elisa on Fedora 9 thanks to thm on #fedora-devel irc channel, and it isn’t too hard.

First you need to setup freshrpms repository; just copy the code below, but you need to remove [ ] around etc because my blog has protection that prevents me to write that path.


su -
cat < /[etc]/yum.repos.d/freshrpms-testing-elisa.repo
[freshrpms-testing-elisa]
name=Freshrpms Testing (elisa)
baseurl=http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/testing/$releasever/elisa/$basearch
gpgkey=http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/RPM-GPG-KEY
enabled=1
EOF
 

and then just install elisa:
 

yum --enablerepo=freshrpms-testing-elisa install elisa

Links:

• Elisa home page
• Bugzilla bug #446051
• Bugzilla bug #429590
• Freshrpms testing repository

Fedora 10 Alpha is out and Fedora developers and Red Hat have asked us to join in and provide feedback. First you need to download Fedora 10 Alpha then read instructions on how to provide feedback back to Fedora developers.
 

If you have trouble booting up Fedora 10 Live CD - give your feedback, if you have problem installing CD or DVD versions - give your feedback, some piece of hardware fails on Fedora - give your feedback, if you see some application not working as it should - you got it by now :).
Le’t take this chance and make together Fedora 10 the best Fedora release so far!
 

If you have any problems understandig some part of providing feedback you can contact me or even better join Fedora users mailing lists. If you prefer there is also a IRC channel on feenode.net servers - just follow these instructions.
 

Some of the exciting new features in Fedora 10 are:
• RPM 4.6
• Brand new boot environment
• Wireless connection sharing
• Improved audio system
• Security audit utility
• Better webcam support
• Improved infrared remote control support
• Haskell support
• OCaml support
• Upstream bugfixes, improvements and enhancements.
 

A bit expanded explanation of some great new features:

* Glitch free audio. The revolutionary PulseAudio stack has been enhanced to use timer-based scheduling. This means that it uses less power, is more hardware independent, and adjusts dynamically to keep audio data flowing without interruption — minimizing drop outs.
 

* Sectool. Fedora 10 will feature a brand new security auditing and intrusion detection system. It has both text and graphical front ends, features highly configurable groups for adjusting test runs, and is completely modular and extensible. Administrators and the community at large can write their own tests to extend its functionality even further.
 

* Connection Sharing. Fedora 10 delivers on the promise of NetworkManager’s “Create new wireless network” tool, with easy setup of an ad-hoc wifi network on any machine with a network connection and a spare wireless card. If the machine has primary network connection (wired, 3G, second wireless card), routing is set up so that devices connected to the ad-hoc wifi network can share the connection to the outside network.
 

The best thing is to keep checking out the ever-changing Fedora 10 feature list.
 

Links:

• Fedora 10 Alpha: Give Us Your Feedback
• Download Fedora 10 Alpha
• How to provide feedback
• Fedora users mailing lists
• Fedora IRC howto
• Fedora 10 feature list

I found a great video lecture on home automation at linux.conf.au site. Looks like this conference is great, and for the rest of us who can’t be there videos are a god send!
 
Check it out:
Linux and Home Automation - Lessons Learned presented by Glenn Wightwick
Download the video here or look at the slides
 
Look at whole Linux.conf.au 2008 programme.

 
Im this tutorial I will show you how to download patched driver and compile it yourself, but first I would like to explain why wireless drivers aren’t working on Eee PC running Fedora 9.
 

Asus Eee PC uses Atheros wireless chip AR5007. Atheros as a company doesn’t support linux and doesn’t make linux drivers available, there are linux drivers but they are made by madwifi project crew. Atheros company doesn’t make any effort in making their wireless chips work on linux; they hide specifications of their wireless chips and don’t make them available to linux developers. It is amassing that a developers around madwifi project actually succeed in making these drivers considering all the obstacles. Madwifi drivers still needs Atheros binary HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer).
 

This HAL is not binary firmware but a piece of code that needs to run in the Linux kernel. It consists of header files for which no permisison to modify is granted, and pre-compiled object files. The vendor’s position is that the Linux community simply needs to accept this sourceless HAL, since in principle the Atheros chip could be tuned to any frequency, and thus produce RF interference with systems operating in those frequencies. This binary HAL is unacceptable to the Linux kernel developers, and the madwifi driver in this state will never become part of the official kernel.
 

Some OpenBSD developers, facing the same issue, reverse-engineered the binary HAL and have produced an open source driver (ath5k), which has now been picked up by the madwifi team as the future direction. At the same time the madwifi driver has been labeled ‘legacy’ to reinforce this point.
 

So we have two drivers that support Atheros chip based wireless cards; madwifi and ath5k, but neither of them currently supports the chip that Asus choose for Eee PC - AR5007. That is now true, you say, my Eee PC runing Xandros linux has a working wireless! If you weren’t aware Xandros uses NDISwrapper to load windows drivers (to learn more look at NDISwrapper article on Wikipedia). So Xandors is using windows and not linux wireless drivers.
UPDATE: I checked with lsmod and Xandros also uses madwifi (ath_pci) driver. They have also custom patched the driver to work.
 

athk5 driver is under heavy development and it is now known when it will support AR5007. Madwifi has a patch that adds support for AR5007, but unfortunately this patch cannot be committed to madwifi, since it breaks the ABI for all non-i386 HAL binaries.
 

In order to get your wireless working on Eee PC with madwifi you need to patch the driver manually so here is step by step walktrough:
Update: Im this tutorial I will show you how to download patched driver and compile it yourself.
 
Update 2: If you don’t wan’t to compile the driver manually then you need to configure Livna repository and then just issue yum command to install the driver.
As root do this:
rpm -i http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm
yum --enablerepo=livna-testing install kmod-madwifi
 

If you still want to do it manually and perrhaps learn how to do it then you need to install all necessary packages; as root do:
yum install make binutils gcc glibc-devel glibc-headers libgomp patch kernel-headers kernel-devel wget
 

Then blacklist the ath5k module; edit your blacklist file (as root) in \etc\modprobe.d\blacklists (I have to reverse slashes because mod_security on this blog that prevents writing \etc\ with regular slashes) and add the line with “blacklist ath5k”
echo "blacklist ath5k" >> \etc\modprobe.d\blacklist (reverse the slashes)
 

You should also edit your \etc\modprobe.conf to look like this:
## Start Atheros Stuff
alias wifi0 ath_pci
alias ath0 ath_pci
options ath_pci autocreate=sta
## End Atheros Stuff
 

Download patched madwifi driver:
wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-nr-r3366+ar5007.tar.gz
 

Extract madwifi source code and compile it:
tar xvf madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018.tar.gz
cd madwifi-nr-r3366+ar5007
make
su
make install
 

That is it, after reboot you have a working wireless under Fedora 9.
 

Links:

• Madwifi project
• madwifi Support for AR2425 (AR5007EG) chipset
• ath5k developers mailing list
• Madwifi page on ThinkWiki
• Fedora Eee PC Wiki page

This is a short post regarding my experience installing and using Fedora 9 (currently preview, not released version).
I have tried installing eeedora on 8GB SD card for many times but without any success. I have successfully run eeedora from my usb stick but when I tried installing it on SD card it failed while trying to copy files from USB stick to SD card.
I have external DVD burner so I popped in Fedora 9 Preview. To my surprise, after bad experience with eeedora, installation went smooth. I had some issues with LVM crashing anaconda but after I manually created partitions with fdisk and rebooted Fedora 9 it was installed without any problems. After partitioning the only issues were the GUI ones - anaconda installer just doesn’t fit in such a small screen. I hope that can be fixed before Fedora 9 ships.

Here is how Fedora 9 boot screen looks like on Asus eee:

 
Fedora 9 wallpaper looks great on eee, much better than on my big 19″ screen. The issue here is that “Install fedora” icon is visible but the text beneath isn’t. If you don’t know exaclty what you are looking for it is hard to start the installation. Here is how Fedora 9 looks on my Asus eee:

Here is how Anaconda Installer looks like like on eee:

As you can see the buttons aren’t visible in Anaconda installer.

 
When I used “create default partition layout” with LVM this is the error I got:

I tried saving this bug but save button freezes Anaconda, so I couldn’t save the bug report.

These all are just small cosmetic bugs and I’m overly impressed how great Fedora 9 works on my little eee! I can’t wait to use it in my daily routine because Xandoros has lots of limitations compared to Fedora.

If you have followed my previous webcam howto guide and found out that you need uvcvideo module for your webcam just follow this howto.

First install subversion, if you don’t already have it installed, so you can get the latest code from uvcvideo project svn repository. As root just start yum in console or if you like gui application managers like pirut just use them. Here is how you can install it with yum:

yum install subversion

now you need to get the source code for uvcvideo webcam module:

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk linux-uvc

and when the download is complete you can compile the code:

cd linux-uvc
make

Now you need to become root and install the module in correct place:

su
make install INSTALL_MOD_DIR=extra/uvc

Then you will get an error saying:

depmod -ae `uname -r`
/bin/sh: depmod: command not found

because you don’t have /sbin directory in your path so only thing you still need is this:

/sbin/depmod -ae `uname -r`

now you can load your module with command:

/sbin/modprobe uvcvideo

and run cheese to test your webcam.

links:

• Fedora webcam howto
• uvcvideo project

ps. I choose images for my blog by going to http://images.google.com and seraching for the most obvious keyword in the article, for this article it the word was webcam. As you can see this keyword provided some interesting search results :)

I have used mugshot service for some time now and I really like it. If you haven’t used it before I highly recommend you sign up and install mugshot client. So far I know this is the only linux user specific social network service and it is made by Red Hat. There is also a windows client but it is more tailored to linux desktop users.

So I wanted to spice up my blog a bit. Wordpress has sidebar in which you can add different add ons. Mugshot people have made “mugshot mini badges” that you can put on your facebook, wordpress and other blogs.

You need to go to your Wordpress administration page and under Manage / Files edit Sidebar file. Choose the appropriate place and just copy/paste the code from mugshot badges page.

If you are interested in how mugshot mini badge looks like here it is:

Update:
Flash version has some issues with my blog, so I found a HTML one also and here is how it looks like:

If you have a webcam that needs some module (driver) that it is not in Fedora kernel then you usually need to compile it manually. Fedora doesn’t include any modules that aren’t in upstream kernel. Livna repository has some modules for some webcams. But if you have a webcam like mine that uses uvcvideo module which isn’t in livna repo then only solution is to compile it manually.

First step in getting your webcam working is to check if maybe it is working but you don’t know it is :)

Install application called cheese with your favorite gui of cli tool. I use yum so here is how I do it:

su -
yum install cheese

If you webcam works that is it, if it doesn’t work then you need to find out which webcam module you need to install or compile.

Start tool called v4l2-tool, if you don’t have it install it. When you start it you will see this:

Click on the last tab labeled “suggest driver”:

Then click on “lsusb output” button:

Now you need to recognize which of all listed usb devices is your webcam. I had only two lines and I recognized microdia as manufacturer of my webcam so I used manufacturer and model ID from that line in my cast that is - 0c45:62c0.

Now you need to enter that info back in main window in “vendor ID” and “product ID” boxes and press suggest driver button:

How you should get the module name and link where to get more info for installing your webcam in Fedora.

Although Cinelerra is GPL licened application it is not available in default Fedora repositories because it depends on some packages that Fedora doesn’t distribute because of patent issues.

If you use Livna repository that you are out of luck because only Freshrpms repository has Cinellera in it’s repository. If you try to use Freshrpms after you allready have installed some packages from Livna you will be confronted with dependency hell because these two repositories conflict on number of packages.

I can’t work without some packages in Livna so I wen’t out looking for an answer, and I found one! It is called Kwizart repository. Kwizart repository is compatible with Livna so you won’t have any problems installing Cinelerra if you are using Livna repository.
All you need to do is this:

su
w get http://kwizart.free.fr/fedora/kwizart-release-8.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh kwizart-release-8.noarch.rpm
yum install cinelerra –enablerepo=kwizart

Now you have brand new Cinelerra installed on your Fedora 8.

Livna and Freshrpms (plus a few others) repositories are merging in RPMFusion RPM repository for Fedora and when they start providing packages Cinelerra will be there, but until then this is a workaround solution.

Links:

• Cinelerra Video Editor
• Livna RPM repository
• Freshrpms RPM repository
• RPMFusion RPM repository
• Kwizart RPM repository

Technorati Tags: cinelerra, fedora, rpmfusion, yum

I regularly listen to Linux Action Show podcast and I found this review of Fedora 8 really worth sharing with others. It is really hard but realistic review and I believe they drive to high standards for Fedora and other distros only so that they become better for us users.

I really love Fedora and I use it on all 3 of my laptops and one desktop but I mostly agree with this review and would like to see Fedora shine more in the future.

Download Fedora 8 review (ogg)
Download Fedora 8 review (mp3)