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

 
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

Udruge Linux-Osijek i Osijek Wireless pozivaju sve zainteresirane na predavanje i linux radionicu:

Pozivamo sve zainteresirane na predavanje i radionicu koja će se održati u četvrtak, 15. 5. 2008. u CnC Klub za Mlade (Strossmayerova 68 - blizu Rokove crkve) s početkom u 18h.
Linux distibucija Fedora 9 izlazi dan prije, stoga ćemo imati prezentaciju novih i najzanimljivijih stvari u Fedori 9. Nakon prezentacije Fedore 9 dijelit ćemo besplatne instalacijske medije Fedore 9 i Ubuntua 8.04 te još neke stvari koje će za sada ostati iznenađenje. Ako vas zanima što će to biti, morate doći i sami vidjeti. ;) Samo ćemo vam reći da ponesete svoje USB stickove. ;)

Nakon prezentacije i dijeljenja poklona kreće praktični dio, odnosno install fest. Kako je radionica već popunjena nemamo više mjesta za one koji bi željeli doći na praktični dio radionice i sami instalirati linux na svoje računalo. No svi zainteresirani mogu doći pogledati radionicu i naučiti kako se vrši instalacija tako da poslije i sami mogu instalirati linux kod kuće . Ako želite doći ili na bilo koji način prisustvovati; bilo samo pokupiti poklone, gledati prezentaciju ili naučiti kako se instalira linux, svakako se prijavite putem emaila: info@linux-osijek.org

Google karta - http://tinyurl.com/6rhwge
Karta - http://tinyurl.com/5pf54a

Link na stranicu udruge Linux-Osijek:
http://www.linux-osijek.org/node/14

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 :)

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.

Fedora Projekt nastavlja sa svojim brzim tempom razvoja i inovacije Slobodnog softvera s izdavanjem Fedora 9 Alpha. Dok druge distribucije tek počinju prihvaćati tehnologije poput PulseAudio i PolicyKit mi smo jos jednom korak ispred s projektima poput FreeIPA. Red Hat je i dalje firma koja više od svih drugih pridonosi razvoju Linux kernela. Red Hat također pridonosi i drugim velikim poboljšanjima poput GNOME VFS layera - GIO/GVFS koji je dio Alpha izdanja Fedore.

Neka od najvažnijih novosti u Fedora 9 Alpha su:

* Podrška za promjenu veličine particija tijekom instalacije (ext2,ext3 i
NTFS)

* Podrška za kreiranje i instaliranje enkriptiranih datotečnih sustava

* Brži i učinkovitiji yum

* PackageKit

* FreeIPA, integrirano rješenje koje obuhvaća Linux, Fedora Directory
Server, FreeRADIUS, MIT Kerberos, NTP, DNS te pruža provisioning i
administriranje putem web sučelja i komandne linije

* GNOME 2.21 Development Release

* KDE 4.0

* Firefox 3 Beta 2

* Kernel 2.6.24

.. i puno toga još.

Linkovi:

I love the SonyEricsson K750 phone, it is a great device. From the first time I played video demo file on K750 in a shop I knew I’m gonna buy it because the video looked really good, despite the small screen. Now I have K750 over a year and I figured out it is time that I play around with watching video on it. My excuse for not doing it before was the amount of storage memory (64Mb), but 1GB sony memory stick card fixed that.

First thing I had to find out is what kind of video does it play. It can play two file formats (or file containers to be more precise) and they are .3gp and .mp4

Both containers can contain H.263 or Mpeg4 for video and AMR or AAC for audio.
For low-end and low-bandwidth use H.263 and AMR but if you want high quality then use Mpeg4 and AAC combination because it produces better quality video.

So I will use Mpeg4 as video codec and AAC for audio codec and 3gp as a file container.

Video resolution has to be 176×144. K750 has a screen resolution of  220×176 pixels but it doesn’t support video larger than 176×144 :(

Framerate can be up to 30 fps but it consumes a lot of the file size and quality for video podcast isn’t noticeably better so I use 15 fps.

Setting bitrate was a bit difficult because ffmpeg man page isn’t updated with the changes made in the parameters. So if you want 200kbits video bitrate by the ffmpeg help page you need to set the parameter “-b 200″ but they changed it without updating the help or man page so now you need to set it to “-b 200k” - for me this is a bug.

Combined audio and video bitrate should be below 264kbps or the finished video will stutter during playback.

For video podcasts I set audio to 32000 Hz, mono, 32 kb/s - you can set lower or higher audio quality but remember the maximum combined bitrate should be below 264kbps. If you are conversing something more audio intensive than speech, like music videos, than use audio bitrate of 64 kb/s.

Now for the part you are all waiting for. For converting diggnation to my K750 I used this command:

ffmpeg -i diggnation--0093--2007-04-11--large.xvid.avi -vcodec mpeg4 -s 176x144 -r 15 -b 200k -acodec aac -ac 1 -ar 32000 -ab 32 -f 3gp diggnation--0093--2007-04-11.3gp

UPDATE (for newer ffmpeg):
Last year (2007) ffmpeg has renamed codecs - so that all codec names that use external library are renamed to libfoo.
On Fedora (and other distros) if you have installed newer ffmpeg from Livna or RPMFusion repositories the command is a little different. Instead of “-acodec aac” you need to use “-acodec libfaac”. So on Fedor it should be like this:

ffmpeg -i diggnation--0093--2007-04-11--large.xvid.avi -vcodec mpeg4 -s 176x144 -r 15 -b 200k -acodec libfaac -ac 1 -ar 32000 -ab 32 -f 3gp diggnation--0093--2007-04-11.3gp

I found out that variable bitrate works better and produces smaller file and higher quality file!
ffmpeg -i diggnation--0093--2007-04-11--large.xvid.avi -vcodec mpeg4 -s 176x144 -r 15 -qscale 4 -acodec aac -ac 1 -ar 32000 -ab 32 -f 3gp diggnation--0093--2007-04-11.3gp

UPDATE (for newer ffmpeg):
ffmpeg -i diggnation--0093--2007-04-11--large.xvid.avi -vcodec mpeg4 -s 176x144 -r 15 -qscale 4 -acodec libfaac -ac 1 -ar 32000 -ab 32 -f 3gp diggnation--0093--2007-04-11.3gp

I used here “-qscale 4″ instead “-b 200k” for video bitrate. With this parameter you define the quality you want and not the rigid video bitrate. This is better for dynamic content - so when the video is dynamic more bitrate is given to maintain the quality but when video is less dynamic then it uses significantly less bandwidth and produces smaller files.
You need to be careful because using VBR method combined bitrate can over 264kbit/s because you are giving the encoder the option to give rise to the bitrate when it calculates it is necessary and that can cause a bit of video playback stuttering. If this happens a lot during video playback then lower the quality and bitrate by setting qscale to a higher number.

If you are using windows please try reading Converting vids for K750 using NERO recode.

Parameters for you to tweak are these:

-i # this it the name of the input file
-vcodec # set this to mpeg4 or h263, depending which codec you want to use
-s # this is the video size. don’t change it - has to be 176×144
-r # video frame rate - experiment with this in the sane range of 10-30 fps
-b # set video bitrate (in bits/s) - use the range from 100k to 200k
-acodec # set “aac” older ffmpeg or “libfaac” for newer ffmpeg as the audio codec
-ac # set number of audio channels; 1 for mono, 2 for stereo
-ar # set audio sampling rate (in Hz)
-ab # set audio bitrate (in kbit/s)
-f # choose file container; 3gp or mp4
-qscale # use fixed video quantizer scale (VBR)

• ffmpeg bitrate bug
• Converting vids for K750 using NERO recode