May 2010 – Doug's Blog

I was readying my nice new home Linux server/desktop for Fedora 12 when I realized I only had to wait a few more days for Fedora 13. Sounded good!

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

Getting Thunderbird to use Google Chrome

I’ve been using Google Chrome on my Fedora11 system lately, it seems to handle Flash better than Firefox does (on linux). There were a few things I found missing in Chrome at first, but they are releasing version updates pretty regularly that are fixing all my issues.

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: “0x80004005 (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”