Upon checking my .xsession-error file, I saw:

ksmserver: smybol lookup error: /usr/lib64/libGL.so.1: undefined symbol: _nv000027gl

It took a little looking around, but basically to fix this, you need to point to a proper Nvidia driver file. I ended up removing the old link and making a new one. My machine is x64, hence the lib64 directory instead of just lib:

root{/usr/lib64}: rm libGL.so.1
root{/usr/lib64}: ln -s nvidia/libGL.so.1 libGL.so.1

That did the trick!

It was pretty straightforward, and I found a post that does an excellent job of summarizing it at http://fedorasolved.org/video-solutions/nvidia-yum-kmod

I will comment on one thing though – when I did the install, I used the basic kernel for my i686 32-bit CPU. I found that my 4 GB of RAM only showed up in the system information page as 2.7 GB! I looked into this a bit, and it turns out that if you want greater than 3GB of memory supported, you need to have a 64-bit machine, OR you can handle this in software with the PAE kernel.

PAE stands for “Physical Address Extension” and all you have to do in install the PAE kernel, and then also the PAE Nvidia modules, and everything will work fine!

I know have my machine up with 8GB of RAM and working perfect! I read that the PAE kernel will cause a performance hit (sort of like doing RAID via software versus hardware I suppose), but I don’t see anything like that on my system.

My new server has a nice Coolermaster case that can hold 10 drives, and has a 1100 Watt power supply. I really like the case, it makes putting in drives a snap, plus the cable wiring went very well. Plus the thing is made of cool brushed aluminum. Who can argue with that?

I was re-commissioning this server after having used it as a gaming Windows machine for a bit. So it had dual NVidia SLI cards (GeForce 8800 Ultra) in it. When I first booted up the LiveCD, it got kernel errors that didn’t really track down to anything that was helpful. It would boot up but then freeze after a few minutes.

I tried the DVD install, and that got the same results. After much head scratching and googling, I tried removing one of the Nvidia cards. I was planning on only using 2 monitors anyway, and each card had 2 DVI outputs. This did the trick!

Next up, I had to run keyboard/mouse cables to my home office. I like to keep the actual computer down in my server room in the basement, it keeps my office nice and quiet. But I found that my 100 foot run for my PS/2 mouse didn’t work! My mouse is a Logitech MX310 that is really USB but I use a PS/2 converter on it so I can use a long cable run. This had been working fine on my previous Linux installations.

I found that the mouse would work fine if directly attached, so it was a distance issue! Which is odd, since on my old server it worked fine, and the cable was the same. I ended up using an USB extender device that I had bought years ago and never needed. It uses ethernet cable in between two adapters so you can have a long USB run. This did the trick! The brand is “coolgear” and I forget where I got it.

Next up: Getting Nvidia working on Fedora 13

But I had been putting up with my Thunderbird email client spawning Firefox when I would click http links in emails. I tried to fix this via the KDE system GUI, and via the Thunderbird preferences->config-editor functions but nothing would work.

I would also see an error in my thunderbird logfile that looks like:
Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIExternalProtocolService.loadUrl]” nsresult: “0×80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)” location: “JS frame :: chrome://communicator/content/contentAreaClick.js :: openLinkExternally :: line 188″ data: no]

Eventually I found this gnome tool did the trick!

% gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command

firefox %s

% gconftool-2 --type string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command "google-chrome %s"

% gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command

google-chrome %s

Also, while you’re at it, do the same commands but use “https” instead of “http” to handle SSL URLs.
Another way to do this is to use “gconf-editor” — just “yum install gconf-editor”

I actually googled around a bit to figure out if I needed a JPG codec or something, but it turns out all I needed to do was click “Preview” instead of “Icons” !

Sometimes you overlook the obvious

1. check permissions on your .ssh directory and authorized_keys file

2. make sure /etc/ssh/sshd_config allows authorized_key connections, although this is almost always on by default

And still no luck; it turns out I had to upgrade my key from RSA to DSA!

So, use “ssh-keygen -r dsa” and use the key it provides, that did the trick for me.

I had problems getting the DVD bootup to go into graphical mode, it kept showing an error that it couldn’t start X, and would continue with text mode. Of course, this is less than ideal since the text mode doesn’t have all the nice install options (not sure why) so I needed to figure it out.

The easy solution was to remove one of the cards and try again! This did the trick, and now I have Fed11 nicely running on the one card powering two monitors. Another thing to note is that I had to install Nvidia’s linux drivers. Also note, that if you run “yum update” after installing those drivers, you will need to re-install them one more time since yum will overwrite their functions.

My next step is to plug in the 2nd card and see if it is recognized properly and I can get 3 monitors going in independent configurations…

[Update] I added the second card after the fact, and now have 3 monitors hooked up nicely with no problems!

I had php scripts failing and generating “500″ errors on the browser because they were running too long, or sometimes because a large file was being uploaded. I spent time playing with php.ini variables, only to find out that PHP wasn’t processing some of them!

Using phpinfo(), I noticed that the vars were not being set via php.ini, which I had set properly when it was compiled, ala:

‘./configure –with-apxs2=/opt/apache2/bin/apxs –with-mysql=/opt/mysql –with-zlib –with-config-file-path=/etc/php.ini –with-curl=/usr/lib64 –with-pear=/usr/share/pear –libdir=lib64 –with-pdo-mysql –with-gettext –enable-bcmath –with-oci8=instantclient,/home/instantclient10_1′ ‘–enable-sigchild –with-pdo-oci=instantclient,/home/instantclient10_1,10.1.0.5′

I didn’t want to risk affecting the system by re-installing PHP, so instead I found the workaround was to create a .htaccess file that contained:

php_value upload_max_filesize 8M
php_value max_execution_time 600

and this did the trick! So hopefully that helps anyone who is running this version of php and encountered this problem.