/kernel_reloaded/ » tips&tricks

Btrfs Fedora Remix

valent — Sat, 29 May 2010 13:37:43 +0000

Currently I’m testing if it is possible to create btrfs live CD-USB Fedora Remix. If this works next release of Community Fedora Remix will have btrfs by default.

What you need to do is to edit Fedora kickstart file. Instead of just one line that creates single ext4 root partiion you also need a dedicated /boot partition. Currently it is not possible to boot from btrfs partition.

Original lines from Fedora kickstart files look like this:

part / --size 5000 --fstype ext4

And you need to change so it look like this:

part /boot --size 120 --fstype ext4 part / --size 6000 --fstype="btrfs" bootloader --location=mbr --append="btrfs"

Keeping my fingers crossed that this works ;)

UPDATE:
This isn’t working, livecd-creator just fails when use kickstart file that is edited this way. I got a tip to try one different setup:

part /boot –size=128 –onpart=sda1 –fstype=ext3 part pv.01 –size=128 –onpart=sda2 –grow volgroup VolGroup pv.01 logvol / –size=128 –vgname=VolGroup –fstype=btrfs –grow –name=root –fsoptions=ssd

This works so far that it creates iso image but it is ext3 image, and not btrfs?!? Any ideas on how to create btrfs livecd is more than welcome.

iRecovery Fedora Howto

valent — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:41:35 +0000

Some time while jailbreaking and unlocking process iPhone refuses to boot in normal mode and every time you restart your iPhone it enters in Recovery mode. This situation is named as recovery mode loop. If you are in a recovery mode loop (i.e. your phone enters recovery mode on every reboot).

To get the rid of recovery mode loop we use iRecovery, iRecovery is a libusb-based command line utility for Mac OS X and Linux (perhaps Windows too). It is able to talk to the iBoot/iBSS in Apple’s iPhone/iPod touch via USB. If you are on Windows then you need to install LibUsb-Win32 in order to run iRecovery.LibUsb-Win32 is a port of the USB library libusb the Windows operating system. The library allows user space applications to access any USB device on Windows.

There are a few gotchas on Fedora so here are step by step instrucions.

su -
yum install readline-devel git
exit
git clone git://github.com/westbaer/irecovery.git
cd irecovery/

There is a bug in irecovery.c code so in order to make it compile I needed to delete line 323 containing this code:
signal(SIGINT, irecv_quit); // Close USB on ^C

Use vim, gedit or any other text editor or your choice and delete this line, because it won’t compile if you don’t remove it, and you will get this error:
irecovery.c:323: error: ‘SIGINT’ undeclared (first use in this function)

Now we can continue the compilation process:

ln -s /usr/include/readline .
make linux

Now you have iRecovery installed and can use the instructions on how to use it to Get Rid of iPhone from Recovery Mode Loop on Restart.

Ubuntu and VIA VT6421 PCI SATA Howto

valent — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:59:50 +0000

I have seen question of how to make VIA VT6421 PCI SATA card work under Ubuntu on number of forum posts and only solutions I have seen on Ubuntu forum was: “Solved:: Installed Windows. Got data no problems.” :(

This obviously is not the solution. I found a solution that works on Ubuntu 8.10 but probably will work on any other Ubuntu version.

So in order to make this device work you need to see what module it uses:

lspci -k|grep -i VT6421 -A 2

01:07.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6421 IDE RAID Controller (rev 50) Kernel driver in use: sata_via Kernel modules: sata_via

So we can see that the module this card uses is called “sata_via”, now just load the module for this VIA card and of you go:

sudo modprobe sata_via

My favorite Firefox Extensions

valent — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:16:24 +0000

Here are Firefox extensions I use, if you have some good ones that I misses please feel free to suggest.

Must-have Firefox extensions:
del.icio.us
Scrollbar Anywhere
Download Statusbar
Omnibar (Integrates location bar and search bar into one)
TinEye Reverse Image Search
Tab Mix Plus
Nightly Tester Tools (enable uncompatible plugins)
AdBlock Plus
Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper

Anonymity and security Firefox extensions:
No Script
Cookie Button
BetterPrivacy

Advanced surfers addons:
GreaseMonkey
Extended Statusbar
ScreenGrab
Diigo: Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes
Better Gmail 2
Digg Firefox Extension
Dugg mirror
URL suffix
FlashGot
ScrapBook
SwitchProxy
DownThemAll!

Interesting addons:
Fasterfox
Image Toolbar
Clipmarks
BugMeNot
StumbleUpon Extension

Addons for blog writers:
ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox)
Deepest Sender

Biggest installed packages in Fedora

valent — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:56:32 +0000

Quick tip to see which are the biggest currently installed packages on your Fedora box:
rpm -qa --queryformat '%10{size}-%{name}-%{version}\n' | sort -k1,1n

You might also be interested in fslint:
yum install fslint
It lists packages by size, and it will autoselect dependencies for packages you want to delete

Geotagging on Nokia N95

valent — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 19:17:54 +0000

I would like to upload geotagged photos via my Nokia N95 and every guide on the internet suggested installing Shozu.

There are a few issues with Shozu:
- it doesn’t add exif tags to jpeg files!
- it adds geotaggs only when uploading to flickr
- it isn’t free

Nokia actually made an application that fixes this but it is quite unknown.

Just download and install Location tagger.

Custom Fedora Remix (Desktop DVD)

valent — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:36:29 +0000

In our local LUG we have been brewing a custom distro based upon Fedora and Omega linux distributions. We also added a lot of applications from many categories; like gps, astronomy, office and multimedia software.

What makes it apart from distributions that it is based upon are these points:

Much more pre-installed software

Latest updated packages

Bonus (proprietary) software (Skype, Flash…)

Support for broadcom wireless chipset (via firmware)

Multiple desktop environments: Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, LXDE…

Why did we make this distribution? Because there are just too many things missing by default in current Fedora. Due to laws in US and because the software in question isn’t licenced under open source licence Fedora can’t provide things like skype and flash that most of users are just too depended upon and can’t work without them.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome, tell us what we are doing wrong and how to make this distro better.

Fedora makes possible for anybody to use it’s packages for remixing, respinning and making custom versions of Fedora, but those distributions need to have different name. If you have any suggestion how this distro should be called drop a line in the comments.

Because we currently don’t have means to make iso images available we can only give you instructions on how to make this remix yourself.

You need to have at least 10GB of free space on your /home partition, or some other partition you use for storing temporary files and for this iso image. Finished ISO image is around 1.4 GB.

First you need to download our custom kickstart files: base, desktop, extra.

Then you need to issue these commands:



 

su -

yum install livecd-tools spin-kickstarts

setenforce 0

mkdir /home/temp/

mkdir /home/yum-cache/

cd ⁄home

livecd-creator -t /home/temp/ --cache=/home/yum-cache/ -f F10-Extra-Edition -c linux-osijek-10-extra.ks

load_policy

setenforce 1

Eplanation of used commands;
yum – installs needed tools for making iso image
setenforce 0 – disables SELinux because it fails with SELinux enabled
mkdir – creates directories needed
livecd-creator – main command that makes the remixed iso image
load_policy and setenforce 1 – re-enables SELinux

Add “previous page” to your WordPress theme

valent — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:14:16 +0000

If you use some WordPress theme that doesn’t have “previous entries”, “old entries” or “previous page” in the footer of your blog then there is a really easy way to tweak this and add this functionality.

I use great Rhianna theme on my blog I love it but I found that this missing feature isn’t user friendly. What you need it to edit your index.php file from your theme and add few lines near the end of the file.







< ?php next_posts_link('← Previous Entries') ?>





< ?php previous_posts_link('Next Entries →') ?>

Just add previous lines before this line:
< ?php get_sidebar(); ?>

So that end of your index.php looks like this:







< ?php next_posts_link('← Previous Entries') ?>





< ?php previous_posts_link('Next Entries →') ?>




< ?php get_sidebar(); ?>
< ?php get_footer(); ?>

NOTICE:
Please note that because of modsecurity apache security plugin on this blog I have some restrictions, so in order for this code to work you need to delete spaces between < and ? in lines that have ?php in them.

Digital SPDIF sound via fiber cable on Asus M3N78-EM (nVidia MCP78S)

valent — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 22:51:18 +0000

I have bought Asus M3N78-EM motherboard for my new HTPC. I’m currently testing it with KnoppMyth R5.5 and installation with KnoppMyth R5.5 worked flawlessly.

Motherboard specs:

Socket AM2/AM2+ – AMD Phenom™ FX / Phenom / Athlon™ / Sempron™

Integrated NVIDIA GeForce® 8 Series GPU with HDMI/DVI/RGB

Realtek® ALC1200 8 -Channel High Definition Audio CODEC with optical S/PDIF out port at back I/O

NVIDIA built-in Gigabit MAC with external Realtek PHY

1 xUltraDMA 133/100/66/33, 1 xExternal SATA 3 Gb/s ports 5 x SATA 3Gb/s ports (Use SATA1-3 for IDE mode.), NVIDIA® MediaShield™ RAID Support RAID 0,1,0+1,5,JBOD

After installation:

Onboard Nvidia 8300 GPU worked

Analog sound worked

Gigabit ethernet worked

Only thing that didn’t work was digital SPDIF sound via optical (fibre) cable.

To enable optical sound you only need to edit etc/modprobe.d/sound file, it needs to have this line:
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=6stack-digout

sound chip on this motherboard is MCP78S as seen via lspci -v command:

00:07.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP78S [GeForce 8200] High Definition Audio (rev a1) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Unknown device 82fe Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 21 Memory at fce78000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask+ 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable- Capabilities: [6c] HyperTransport: MSI Mapping

Enjoy your new digital sound.

Which wireless driver does your wireless card uses?

valent — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:16:05 +0000

If you have a new Fedora user (or user of any other distro) who has problems using his wireless card first thing you need is for him to tell you which wireless card he has and which wireless driver his card uses. For experienced users this is trivial and can be done in several ways. I found that this can be a bit tricky for new users and there isn’t one simple command that displays ONLY this information.

This one liner seams to do the trick for PCI wireless cards:

lspci -k|grep -i -E “wireless|wlan|802.11″ -A 2

UPDATE:

Also try this command:
lshw -class network |grep -i ‘description: wireless’ -A 11

BROADCOM:
30:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
	Kernel modules: ssb

INTEL:
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
Network Connection (rev 02)
	Kernel driver in use: iwl3945
	Kernel modules: iwl3945

ATHEROS:
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg
Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: ath_pci
	Kernel modules: ath5k, ath_pci

INTEL:
3:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)
     Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
     Kernel modules: iwlagn

I tried this with Intel, Atheros and Broadcom wireless cards. Do you know of a better way to do this? How would you do this for USB wireless cards?