For the week of: Wednesday, January 7th 2004
Welcome to the first issue of Fedora News Updates, the weekly (or
bi-weekly) newsletter for the Fedora community. We aim to release this
often and can do so with the help of the community. It should contain
user information as well as some useful developer discussions that will
shape the outcome of Fedora.
With so much information available out there, keeping a list of all
current resources would be very handy. Sites that contain useful
information include:
Anderson Silva has some quick tips that will make using Dave
Jones 2.6.0 kernel a breeze. It should be noted that VMWare, and
the Cisco VPN client also work well. Read more at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-December/msg04465.html.
As for differences between what Dave Jones (davej) and Arjan V.
(arjanv) have in their kernels, Jeremy Katz states the 4G/4G
patch and some configuration related differences. The davej kernel
is available via Rawhide, while arjanv's is available via his website.
Several BIOSes and motherboards tend to behave differently when
faced with Fedora Core 1. For instance, the Dell Latitude D800 works
differently, and requires different boot parameters passed on to the
kernel. Ben Stringer offers the use of the "allowcddma"
option for his Inspiron, while Simon Bell mentions that the 'apm=off
acpi=on' options work for the Dell 4100 laptops - it allows
shutting down of the laptop automatically.
Chris Ricker shows us Lorma Linux
which is aimed at educational institutions and its students. It's
Fedora under the hood, but with five scenario choices: office
workstation, classroom workstation, personal desktop, personal laptop
and customised installation. To make it more interesting, it includes
the Flash plug-in, DivX 5 Codec, Real Player as well as Yahoo!
Messenger, all by default. They've removed Java to make way for more
programs, and they're also working on a server installation.
Dirk Westfal has been working
on an un-official LiveCD based on Fedora Linux. It is in beta, and
makes use of the KDE environment, just like Knoppix does. Go ahead and
give the beta a
download - you can also read the entire package list, and join
their web forum.
M. Hokcings noticed that while using Fedora, his hard disk never did
spin down, in-spite of getting the BIOS set to spin the disk down after
10 minutes. Tom Mitchell attributed this to disks not being idle long
enough, and shows how you can see that your disks aren't idle by way of
the lsof and sar commands. Look at the examples at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-December/msg04941.html.
Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN, or INET_ECN in the kernel
.config file) is turned on in 2.6 kernels, and it is known to break
buggy routers with a buggy TCP/IP stack. The affected seem to be
certain Cisco and Linksys routers - the problem being that you can't
connect to them via their Web interface. Correction is via saying N to
INET_ECN or via the sysctl. Andrew Chalmers tells us how to get it done
via the kernel, or just
simply echoing text into the sysctl configuration, while Pedro
Morais show's us how to get it done
during boot-up by editing the
/etc/sysctl.conf file.
Warren Togami has proposed that rpm-4.2.2
should refuse to build as the root user, for it has security
implications. There is also hope that upstream Makefiles get tidied up.
He also proposed that there should be discouraged
use for the rpmbuild --sign option, as this is not the proper way
to build and sign packages, again, for safety reasons. To this, Alan
Cox responded saying that the whole
"root" issue will be irrelevant when Fedora Core 2 comes out, as
SELinux comes into the picture.
As Fedora has deprecated the use of LILO as a boot loader (in the shipping release), and taken
on to using GRUB, command syntaxes have changed. In LILO, the -R option
allowed it to use a new kernel once only, and then revert back to the
older kernel upon the next reboot. This is greatly useful for testing
on remote servers, in case of kernel panics and the like. GRUB also has
the --once option, as pointed out by Sean Estabrooks at
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2003-December/msg01703.html.
Bill Nottingham show's us how we can get a
base system booting off a USB key.
It's as simple as copying the isolinux/* directory to the USB key,
renaming isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg and running syslinux. So, if the
BIOS supports booting off USB devices, this will definitely work.
RPM tends to hang and locks up sometimes, and seemingly the best way
to fix it at the moment is to remove some of the database files. More
instructions are at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-list/2004-January/msg00030.html.
Michael also indicated that Jeff Johnson (jbj) said that --rebuilddb is normally no
longer necessary in recovering from the Red Hat 8 and 9 RPM deadlock
issue.
The most definitive answer however is that
jbj confirms that --rebuilddb is almost never needed. He indicates
here how to detect a deadlock situation and what to do about it.
That said, here's a little more about it in terms of using
--rebuilddb, for reference.
In using older releases of Red Hat Linux, it's probably a wise
choice to keep up with the Fedora Legacy team's happenings. Of interest
would be Yum for 7.x at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-list/2004-January/msg00023.html. The Legacy RPM Upgrade
Guide by Warren Togami is another useful resource.
That's those Macintosh machines, which generally only run Yellow Dog
Linux (or Debian or Gentoo), but now can be made to run Fedora as well.
Alex Kiernan has some really
good instructions as to how he did it, with the help of a Yellow
Dog CD. Getting Mozilla to work seems to be an issue, however it's
solved via getting the Yellow
Dog version (1.4.1), or applying
a patch. And no, the SRPM
for RHEL will not work either.
Ever wondered why there are forced
FTP downloads invoked to us when we download ISO images from
http;//download.fedora.redhat.com/? Light was shed, and its because of abuse
by download accelerators.
We now have an official DVD ISO image available for download. Get it
from http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/.
For folk using RPM2HTML, a utility which generates a HTML index from
directories of RPMs, and wanted it to work with Fedora Core 1 and RPM
4.2, Hugo van der Kooij tells
us that they're available at http://www.wesmo.com/rpm2html/x86/rpm2html-1.8.2-1.i386.html.
Previously released by Daniel Veillard, Richard West has taken on this
new release.
It has been mentioned that Mozilla 1.5 will be skipped, and if 1.6 final proves to be stable, an update to FC1 will exist at a later date. Meanwhile, Warren Togami has MozillaFirebird on the fedora.us stable tree, while MozillaThunderbird is requiring some QA. Read more at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2003-December/msg01681.html.
Lot's of IP phone software tends not to be written to natively work
on Linux. However Jim Laverty shows us about four interesting projects.
It might not be Cisco's IP phone software, but there are plenty of
alternatives. Read more at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-December/msg04614.html.
We won't be seeing Evolution 1.5 in Rawhide, but we may be seeing
Evolution 1.5.1 when it does get released. Read more at http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-January/msg00074.html.
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