Category: Unix

Categories
Hardware Unix

Fedora13 kernel update breaks video

I did my usual old “yum update” the other day and it hosed up my video upon reboot!

Never fear, it is a known problem, and has probably already been fixed by the time you read this.

But one thing I learned is that you should have akmod installed so the system will be smart and use a previous video driver if it fails. To do this, all I needed to do was:

yum install akmod-nvidia

then, on reboot, it was all working again.

[Update]

One thing to note is that when you do a yum update, make sure if there is a new kernel that there is a corresponding nvidia update for it! If not, then DO NOT yum update, and try again in a day or so. Eventually there will be a matching nvidia update and you are safe to update. Example:

Installing:

kernel x86_64 2.6.34.9-69.fc13 updates 22 M

kernel-devel x86_64 2.6.34.9-69.fc13 updates 6.4 M

Removing:

kernel x86_64 2.6.34.7-63.fc13 @updates 102 M

kernel-devel x86_64 2.6.34.7-63.fc13 @updates 23 M

Installing for dependencies:

kmod-nvidia-2.6.34.9-69.fc13.x86_64 x86_64 1:260.19.36-1.fc13.3 rpmfusion-nonfree-updates 2.8 M

Removing for dependencies:

kmod-nvidia-2.6.34.7-63.fc13.x86_64 x86_64 1:260.19.29-1.fc13 @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates 12 M

Categories
Unix

KDE won’t start in Fedora 13

I ran a yum update on my Fedora13 install the other day, and then when I booted back up and logged in, my KDE would not start! It would start to show the login screen, but once I did a login, it blacked out and went back to the login screen again.

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!

Categories
Hardware Unix

Fedora 13 and Nvidia

Now that I got my new system running Fedora 13, I needed to configure my Nvidia card to support my two monitors.

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.

Categories
Hardware Unix

Installing Fedora 13

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

Categories
Unix

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”

Categories
Unix

Icons in Dolphin Viewer

I was running Dolphin on my Fedora Linux install to view some images, and I was confused as to why in “Icon” view I wasn’t seeing the actual thumbnail images as I would expect to see using Windows Explorer or similar.

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 🙂

Categories
Unix

SSHD on Fedora11

Quick tip on getting sshd to accept authorized connections on Fedora 11… I did all the main things but still had problems, those things are:

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.

Categories
Hardware Unix

Installing Fedora 11 with dual Video Cards

I’m configuring a new desktop setup for myself, using dual Nvidia 9600 GSO cards so I can hook up 3-4 monitors. I’ve been using Fedora more than other distros, so I wanted to stick with it for now (although I was tempted, after running into this issue, to jump to Ubuntu).

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!

Categories
Coding Unix

PHP not fully recognizing php.ini

OK, here’s an odd one I encountered on one of my older servers running Apache2 and PHP 5.2.5

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.