On Tuesday, 13 May 2008, the Fedora Project released the latest version of their Linux distribution, Fedora 9.

I was able to get my hands on Fedora 9 the previous Friday after it was discovered "in the wild" on BitTorrent networks. I promptly installed it on my Dell Latitude D830 laptop that I use every day for work.

The downside to installing a Linux distribution like Fedora before it is officially released is that you have no access to any updates. You're kind of on your own with what you've got until the official release date.

I wasn't too terribly worried about any of that. After all, Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 were, for the most part, very stable from the get-go.

I think I may have been wise to have waited. Over the last week, I've encountered all sorts of issues. Some have been related to specific hardware I'm using while others are general OS issues. A significant chunk of the issues I've run into are a direct result of my running KDE as my desktop environment. Fedora 9 includes KDE version 4 which is a ground-up rewrite of the fundamentals of KDE.

The experience has given me some flashbacks to 2003 when Red Hat Linux 9 came out with GNOME 2.2. I had been a GNOME user for a couple of years (and used AfterStep as my primary desktop environment before that) and was content with the way the Sawfish window manager worked in GNOME up until Red Hat Linux 9. Now GNOME used the Metacity window manager and I couldn't stand the thing. Where were all my configuration options? What happened to everything I had come to rely on? Well, GNOME had tucked it all away... and made everything work slower while they were at it.

I switched to KDE and found it had advanced leaps and bounds since I had looked at it last. It was mature, reliable, and, most of all, it offered plenty for me as a "configuration nut" to appreciate.

Fast forward to now. KDE4 is cool, very cool, but it's lacking a lot of stuff KDE3 had, understandably. I'm sure it's all forthcoming in due time, but I want it now!

So, below is my current list of annoyances. Some are still outstanding while others I have taken steps to resolve and have documented those steps below so that others may benefit.

Fedora 9 Annoyances

• nVidia video driver - I've got a nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M tucked away in this laptop and to get 2D and 3D accelerated performance out of it, I must use the proprietary nVidia driver available for Linux. I usually get this from the fine Livna repository for Fedora. The kmod-nvidia driver was available from Livna, but it didn't work. I got it to function (details coming) but it's far from perfect.
• Tap-to-click not working on Synaptics touchpad - This is a documented bug and I'm sure Fedora will be pushing a fix soon. In the meantime Bob Kashani at Berkeley has gracefully provided a fix.
• kmix applet is missing - This one is annoying. I have grown very accustomed to having the kmix applet in my KDE taskbar. This gives me a handy mixer utility to control my sound. Without it, I'm forced to launch the kmix application every time I want to adjust the mixer. Lame.
• Font irregularities (related to NVidia?) - Application fonts between KDE and GTK/GNOME applications display differently. This has suddenly been a problem, but it isn't the first time I've seen it. I also saw it with Firefox 3 betas under Fedora 8, but only on this particular system (my laptop) and not on other systems. I blame the nVidia driver.
• Multimedia buttons - The volume up/down and mute buttons just worked out of the box with Fedora 8. With Fedora 9, KDE is completely ignorant of them.
• NetworkManager forgets everything - In Fedora 7, there was a separate KDE NetworkManager component called knetworkmanager which integrated seemlessly into KDE, but major changes within the NetworkManager community forced the Fedora project to adopt the GNOME NetworkManager work for KDE users in Fedora 8 (and Fedora 9). The problem in Fedora is that NetworkManager doesn't seem to be using the GNOME keyring system at all. Every time I connect to a secure wireless network, I have to enter the encryption key or passphrase because it isn't getting saved anywhere.
• KPilot not syncing with Palm Treo 700p via USB - This was fixed with the first Kernel update!
• KDE configuration lacks depth - This is due to the rewrite of everything, but there are things that really bug me: No configuration of the Compose key and I haven't found a way to turn off the silly "Pong" sound the system plays every time I move between virtual desktops.
• No web browser can load Zimbra admin login page - I didn't have any problems with Firefox 2, but neither Firefox 3b5 nor Konqueror can load the Zimbra admin page. Konqueror complains about a script out of control and Firefox 3b5 just sits and spins.
• gpk-application sucks - Pirut (and pup) are gone and now we have this PackageKit suite of applications for managing packages. I think it's a good idea in the long run, but gpk-application has a long way to go before it catches up with how well pirut worked. Just let me install many packages at once, why don't ya?!

Well, there's that for starters. I'll probably be blogging more in the future about these problems in more detail, including, hopefully, how to solve or work around them.

After the MiniDV videotape camcorders and before the explosion of hard disk camcorders,
several manufacturers were making these camcorders that would record directly to DVD media. A handful of them recorded to full-size DVD media, but most recorded to a small (~3 inches in diameter) mini-DVD media. One of these discs can hold about 30 minutes of SD (740x480, 30 frames per second) video or about 1.4GB of data.

A couple years ago, I was working on a video editing project and one of my sources was from one of these mini-DVD camcorders. One of the perks of the mini-DVD format is you can throw it right into a DVD player and it plays it, without much grief, like a normal DVD movie. There's even a scene-selection menu that shows you thumbnails of images to select scenes recorded on the DVD.

I think the mini-DVD format was a great idea for people who just want to videotape an event and throw it in the DVD player, but it's not so good for someone who wants to edit the video on the computer. The camcorder manufacturers probably shipped the cameras with some kind of conversion program to extract the video from the discs and convert it into an editable format, but since I didn't own one of these mini-DVD camcorders, I didn't have such software.

A little googling and I found the answer!

Check out this command:

mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile dvd.vob

This mplayer command may be familiar to those who rip video from DVDs to convert it to an MPEG4 format or something similar.

I can't edit a VOB file, so I needed to convert the VOB into, preferably, an AVI. Most of the AVIs I edit are DV format AVIs that I get off my DV camcorders. I knew if I could get the video on the mini-DVD into that format, I'd be in heaven. I didn't find a direct way to do this, but I did find two more steps that would do it.

ffmpeg -i dvd.vob -target dv dvd.dv
cat dvd.dv | dvgrab -f dv2 -s 0 -stdin

The first command (ffmpeg) converts the VOB into raw DV data. This is data you could stream to a camcorder and store on a tape. It's not in an AVI container, but it's close. The next command (dvgrab) is usually used for capturing video from IEEE 1394 (Firewire) video devices, but being that it has an option (-stdin) for reading data from standard input, we can use it to convert our raw DV data to an AVI.

Voila!

Yesterday, my new laptop arrived. KnowledgeBlue purchased it for me as my HP Pavilion ZV5000Z was about three years old and was starting to show its age. KnowledgeBlue has standardized on Dell as its hardware supplier and, while I don't care for their desktop machines at all and I'm okay with their servers, I really had no clue what to think about their laptops.

What is nice about Dell is they have a line of Open Source laptops. These laptops have been certified as being friendly with open source operating systems like Linux and are available for purchase without a pre-installed operating system (the laptop does come with FreeDOS installation media).

HP also offers FreeDOS as an operating system option on many of its Business laptops for those people looking to run an open source operating system or simply avoid paying HP for a preinstalled Microsoft product.

So, anyway, I got a customized Dell Latitude D830. Here are some of the features:

• Intel Core2 Duo CPU T7700 @ 2.40GHz
• 2GB RAM
• 120GB hard drive (w/ free fall sensor)
• DVD burner
• 9-Cell battery
• NVidia Quadro NVS 140M (256MB)
• 1920x1200 widescreen LCD panel
• Intel 3945 802.11a/g wireless

Let me just say I am impressed. So far, this laptop has been nothing but awesome. The screen is absolutely beautiful. Most impressive is the fact all the hardware seems to just work in Linux. After all the hurdles I had to jump to get my previous laptop working with Linux, this was a paradisical experience.

I did a network install of Fedora 8 after booting from a CD burned from the distribution boot.iso. The software properly configured the video card to use the open source nv driver and accurately identified the characteristics of the display panel. Sound worked fine right out of the box. I was worried about wireless networking and was prepared to install a third-party driver from a site like Livna or FreshRPMS, but when I enabled NetworkManager, it just worked! I could scan for wireless networks (it saw more than my Atheros card ever did) and connected to my home network (encrypted with WPA2) with no problems at all.

One thing I do like about my HP laptop is the ability to disable the trackpad so that when I'm using a USB mouse, I don't have to worry about brushing against the trackpad while I'm typing. Speaking of pointing devices, the D830 has taken a cue from IBM/Lenovo and provides both a trackpad and a eraser-point stick thingie with a second set of left and right buttons.

One thing that has been a bit of a concern is the sound card. Maybe I need to dig deeper, but the mixer support seems really weak. The only controllable channels I've seen in my mixer is PCM and Front. From what I've seen so far, the headphone jack is not independently controllable (it is on my HP) and I haven't seen channels for Line In or Microphone.

Battery life seems good. I haven't timed it yet, but I think I'm getting about 2-3 hours off a single charge and I haven't really tried any power saving settings. I know the Intel chipset offers a lot of options in that department.

I haven't tried any kind of suspend or sleep stuff yet. I'll have to report my findings about that in a later post.

I think this will be the last interview video from the 2007 Utah Open Source Conference. This is Derek Carter of NeverBlock talking about Xen, virtualization, and his history using and teaching about Linux and open source software.

I think I may be able to put together video for one more conference session, but otherwise, we're pretty much done with video for the 2007 conference. We're looking forward to doing a better job of recording all the keynotes and sessions at the 2008 conference.

You can see this video and many others by going to my YouTube Open Source TV playlist, or by visiting the UTOSF YouTube group.

Firefox 3 beta 2 came out this last week. After reading some of the press it has gotten, I decided to give it a try.

I went to the beta download page where there are several language options available for downloads built for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I selected the English (US) version for Linux and was given a bzip2-compressed tar file to download.

I would imagine a lot of less experienced Linux users would have no idea what to do with a tar.bz2 file as this is different than the way most common distributions package software (e.g. RPM files or DEB files.) I'll explain what I did to try Firefox 3 on my Linux system.

I downloaded the file to my /tmp directory. Then, I created a ff3 directory in my home directory:

shellprompt% mkdir ~/ff3

Then, I went into that directory and extracted the files.

shellprompt% cd ~/ff3
shellprompt% tar -xvjf /tmp/firefox-3.0b2.tar.bz2

At this point, I could run Firefox 3 by running ~/ff3/firefox/firefox, but I wanted something a little simpler, so I created a symbolic link in my ~/bin directory called ff3. Alternatively, you could use an alias command for this (e.g. 'alias ff3=$HOME/ff3/firefox/firefox').

shellprompt% cd ~/bin
shellprompt% ln -s ../ff3/firefox/firefox ff3

After that, I could run Firefox 3 by running the command ff3. I highly recommend you terminate any other Firefox processes (i.e. your distribution's Firefox 2 installation) so there's less possibility of the two fighting.

First impressions

It looks a little different, but not too much. All the familiar elements are still there. The first thing I noticed was the bookmark sidebar looked cleaner.

As I opened a few pages in different tabs, I noticed Firefox 3 does respond snappier than Firefox 2, confirming the reports that Firefox 3 employs much better memory management than previous versions.

Next, I checked out some of the cool features I'd read about, like the added functionality of the location bar.

This stuff is pretty dang cool! First of all, the location bar features a drop down button and an autocomplete feature just like it did before, but the drop-down list includes page titles and the autocompletion matches against titles as well! Again, the layout of this was markedly cleaner than similar features in Firefox 2 and the response was refreshingly snappy

Here's an image showing the new drop-down location bar list in action.

Next, an image showing the autocompletion matching against URLs and page titles. I typed ron p and several pages from my recent history were displayed in the location bar drop-down list. I'm not sure how they're ordered, though.

Another nifty feature of the Firefox 3 location bar is an even-easier way to bookmark pages with one click!. A small star icon is displayed at the right side of the location bar (next to the drop-down button). If the inside of the star is uncolored or white, the page is not bookmarked. If you click the star, the inside of the star becomes yellow and the page is bookmarked. Click the yellow star and a small popup appears allowing you to configure where the bookmark goes in your bookmark heirarchy. Very cool!

Here's a look at the unbookmarked location bar.

Below: The location bar after clicking on the star to bookmark the page.

Below: Clicking the "bookmarked" icon to activate the bookmark options dialog.

Another nifty new feature I discovered while preparing this post: When Firefox 3 displays a file upload form, simply clicking in the filename text box activates the file selection dialog. That's at least one less click!

I'll continue exploring this new beast and maybe report some more on what I find. So far, however, this is the most stable Firefox beta I've ever used and that's saying something.

I was just reading this interview with Linus Torvalds and while the questions are fairly typical of a reporter who simply does not understand Open Source software or the mentality of the Open Source developer, Linus' answers were enlightening.

I especially enjoyed reading this exchange:

Q: Don't you feel you missed the chance of a lifetime by not creating a proprietary Linux?

A: No. I'm actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-size house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses. My wife likes the roses more; I like the deer more, so we don't really mind. I've got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need?

Being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged as world-class pays even better. I simply didn't need to start a commercial company. And it's just about the least interesting thing I can imagine. So instead, I have a very good life, doing something that I think is really interesting and that I think actually matters for people, not just me. And that makes me feel good.

This is a guy who clearly understands what is really important.

The next episode of Solitary World is going to feature a segment of Living Free which is targeted at the complete Linux Newbie who has never installed Linux on a computer before in their life. The segment is going to talk about using a BitTorrent client to download a DVD or set of CD images to do the software installation with.

What follows is a rough resemblance of the script for this segment. If you're interested in installing Linux on your computer but have no idea where to start, this information will be of value to you.

The problem

To get started, you need installation media -- a data DVD or a set of data CDs that you can install the Linux software from. You could buy this media at a store or an online outlet, but most people just take advantage of their broadband Internet connection and download an image--or an .ISO file--of the media to their computer and burn it to blank CDs or a blank DVD.

Traditionally, when you download data over the Internet, you go to a web site or an FTP site, select the file you want to download, and the data begins transferring from the remote server to your computer. Many factors can affect the speed of the download. The biggest factor would be the speed of your Internet connection. The speed of the Internet connection for the server you're downloading from is also a factor. And then there are an endless number of things between you and the server you're downloading from that may slow things down.

BitTorrent

A popular method for downloading large files like Linux install media, video files, and music files, is a system called BitTorrent. You may have heard of BitTorrent before in relation to illegal downloads of copyrighted software, music, or video and it can be used for that, but it was originally intended for downloading software like Linux distributions. It's perfectly legal to use BitTorrent to download a Linux distribution.

All you need to use BitTorrent is a BitTorrent client program on your computer.

A couple weeks ago, my Dad’s home computer had a familiar problem. Every once in a while, his computer — which runs Windows 2000 — would not boot. It would go a few seconds through the boot process and then stop with a blue screen and a message about the boot device not working.

This annoying problem has always been solved by booting off the Windows 2000 install CD, going to the Repair console, typing chkdsk /p, and rebooting. Works every time... or did.

This time, after going through that process, his computer went into a reboot loop, getting to a point in the boot process and then starting over with the computer POST.

I had told my dad before the next time I had to reinstall the operating system on his computer, it would not be Windows I’d be putting on it, unless he wanted to shell out the $100 or so for Windows XP.

Knowing how frugal my dad is, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

So, it was time to migrate my Dad’s home computer to Linux. Fedora 7, to be exact. I already moved his office computer to Linux a couple years ago and he’s been fairly successful at getting work done on it. Part of the reason for that is that he really only does a few things on his computers:

• Composes documents (OpenOffice)
• Reads e-mail (Mozilla Thunderbird)
• Browses web pages (Mozilla Firefox)
• Plays Freecell... a lot (kpat)

On his home computer, he also does a few more things:

• Scans of photos and documents
• Downloads digital photos from his camera
• Prints digital photos
• Genealogy

Another problem I had to deal with is, running Windows, he’s been using WordPerfect Office as his office suite and has a large collection of files created in WordPerfect and QuatroPro.

In the past, OpenOffice did not handle WordPerfect files at all, but KOffice’s word process (kword) did a decent job of reading .WPD files. Since then, OpenOffice 2.2.x now has the ability to import WordPerfect documents, but not perfectly. For example, embedded graphics seem to be ignored completely. Since my dad doesn’t use very many embedded graphics, this is only a minor issue.

For scanning, I set him up with kooka which aims to be a fairly easy to use and is pretty intuitive. The OCR support is there, but I haven’t played with it very much yet.

For dealing with digital photos, digikam is very nice. When we tried to print digital photos to his HP photo printer, we could not get them to come out right. One frustration was that digikam uses the KIPI printwizard plugin which only offers a couple page sizes to choose from, none of which matched what we were looking for (4x6 photo paper).

I borrowed some 4x6 paper and told my dad I’d experiment and find a program he could use to print photos.

After experimenting with a bunch of programs (ksquirrel, gwenview, showimg, to name a few), I ended up going back to digikam. I discovered along the way that one of the page sizes digikam offered (10cm x 15cm) was actually what we wanted. That’s roughly 4-inches x 6-inches! Works great.

PAF 5, the program my dad used under Windows to do geneaology, is said to work fine under Wine. It installed fine, but I haven’t played with it to see how well it actually works. If the installation experience is any indication, it may work splendidly.

Great news for Catalyst developers using Fedora 7 or Fedora Core 6 Linux distributions: Core Catalyst modules are NOW available in FC6 extras and F7 repositories!

Yes, it's true! Just do a yum install perl-Catalyst-Devel and BAM! You'll be taking web development to a new level while staying in the comfortable world of managable packages.

(Note: Thanks to redbeard2 for pointing out my stupid typo: "are not available.")

I tried installing Fedora Core 6 on my laptop the day before the official release of the distribution (Thanks BitTorrent). It didn't work so well. X would not load, complaining about DRI support for Screen0. I tried to install the kmod-nvidia driver from livna, but it complained that I had the wrong kernel installed. Apparently, I had a i586 kernel when I needed a i686 kernel.

This really seemed whacked.

I decided to put FC5 back on for the time being.

Fast forward to a week later. FC6 has been out for a few days and this kernel issue I had has turned up as a common problem for which a couple workarounds have been published.

So, tonight I tried again. Using the workarounds, I got X working and I got the NVidia driver working. FC6 is nice! I'm not sure exactly what the X.org guys have done with the display code, but everything looks better than FC5. Text is crisper.

I have run into one annoying problem: I can't use all the features of my ALPS/Synaptics trackpad. It's only recognized as a generic pointing device. So, I can't do horizontal or vertical scrolling or tapping in the corner for middle-click. For now, I'll get by with my optical scroll mouse, but it's annoying nonetheless.