New /boot/grub/menu.lst for Linux on usb-HDD

Because I had to delete ALL of my internal HDD because of an unrepairable problem in OS X, my precious menu.lst that handled, besides 4 Linux OSes on the internal drive, a further 6 installed on my usb drive.
Today I got three of them back, updated and generally tidied up to make them usable again. The three I got were Pclos, Fedora 9 and Mepis. Few if any problems were encountered other than the fact that the first two (Pclos and Fedora insist on calling the drive on the usb HDD /dev/sdax rather than the expected /dev/sdbx.

Add myself to sudoers list on Fedora 9

Did this today on Fedora 9 (MacBook) which really is starting to look good and is now very usable (even with the shortcomings I noted in earlier posts).
I added my self to the sudoers lists in F9 today. Even though the command to do this is very simple, I can never seem to lay my hands on it when I need it.
So, here it is:

# echo 'paul ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

Note that 'paul' is, of course, my username. Yours could well be different.

Fedora 9 on MacBook improving.

Yes, things are looking better as they always do if you're persistent enough.
One problem I did have though was with flash videos.
In Opera (9.50) the videos played but without sound even though I had installed flash-player 9 a few times. In Forefox (3.0.5) videos wouldn't play at all although i had installed the flashplayer several times.
What got things moving for me was this guide.
Strange that this should work whereas the download and install direct from the Adobe site didn't. Anyway that's what happened.

After getting no useful replies from my post to Fedora Forums on the fact that 192.168.1.254 kept showing up as the primary DNS server, I was forced to edit /etc/resolv.conf and make it immutable.
Distasteful as this is, it did make huge improvements. Browsing speed increased significantly. Not only that but the Fedora Forums page opened readily even in Opera. Prior to this, it really didn't open at all in Opera and only reluctantly in Firefox.
Even so, in the Fedora Forums site, pages still open much more quickly of opened to a new tab.

Still haven't made any progress in getting fusion-icon to work without white-screening. However, by installing emerald and emerald-themes through add/remove software and placing "emerald --replace" as a command in startup sessions, then could get everything I needed from fusion-icon other than the pretty cube in the gnome panel.
Interestingly, putting "emerald --replace" in the command line in Window decoration in ccsm didn't seem to do anything.

So, right now, Fedora 9 is working pretty well.
This is a useful resource to get more things operational in Fedora 9.
Here's another one which is quite a bit simpler. Go through this one first if you need to do both.

Fedora 9 setting up on MacBook

Some progress and some problems with this today.
Got 3D effects working (System>Preferences>Look and Feel>Desktop Effects>Enable
Then installed Awn and Awn-extras from Add/Remove programs. No problem here.

However, then I installed fusion-icon from the same source but invoking it just gave a white screen. This seems a well-known problem as detailed here.
The solution is to run "indirect rendering".
However, if you just have a white screen, it's not clear to me how you can change to indirect rendering which, AFAIK, can only be done by making a change in the fusion-icon.
(BTW, I did also try "compiz --replace --indirect-rendering, but this also just produced a white screen.)
So, haven't solved this yet.

Another big problem is that 192.168.1.254 (router IP) keeps showing up as the preferred DNS server. I've tried a lot of stuff here (posted to fedora forum too) but made absolutely no progress.
Included in what I did was a variant on the old /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf which has worked for me in nearly every other distro apart from Foresight. But here too, it didn't work in that the router IP kept showing up.
Here's a guide on how I got dhclient.conf set up.

Another problem was to get .wma files to play in Rhythmbox (without having to pay out an money -- a suggestion was made by Fedora to buy some stuff from Fluidec).
Actually, you can get this stuff for free from the mplayer site. (win32 stuff gets installed in step 7).
Or just do this:

cd /tmp/
wget http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/all-20071007.tar.bz2
tar xfvj all-20071007.tar.bz2
mkdir /usr/lib/codecs/
cp all-20071007/* /usr/lib/codecs/
ln -s /usr/lib/codecs/ /usr/lib/win32

Probably more tomorrow.

Fedora 9 on MacBook

Well, today I got F9 more or less up and running on the Mac.
There were some problems which I'll list here below:
1. The .iso is big (3.4 GB) so, if you share a router, you'll get complaints.
2. No problems with download, burn or install but configuration other than the Ubuntu Grub on the mbr got wiped even though I installed Fedoras bootloader (also Grub) to its root partition.
To get the Ubuntu Grub back on the mbr (and the penguin to show up again in rEFIt) I used a Ubuntu Live CD and ran the following terminal commands (as ROOT):
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
Here I got a list of devices like (hd0,1), (hd0,8) etc. I picked (hd0,8) as I knew this was the Ubuntu root partition (on /dev/sda9) and then ran
grub> root (hd0,8)
and then
grub> setup (hd0)
This gave me a success message. Now the penguin was back in rEFIt and booting from the Ubuntu menu.lst was perfect.
3. The Fedora root was installed in /dev/sdb15 on the Seagate usb HDD. However, using root-/dev/sdb15 in the kernel line of menu.lst didn't boot. I had to change this to /dev/sda15 and then everything booted fine.
4.Fedora booted up with the Gnome desktop which is not what I wanted. So, I tried to install all the KDE stuff in Add/Remove Software. However got an error

The group was not found
comps categories could not be found

The solution which I found in Fedora Forums was to run

# yum grouplist

However, still couldn't get KDE4 to show up
5. To get KDE4 need the following

Make a file /etc/sysconfig/desktop containing the following two lines:
DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"

and then
#yum search switchdesk
after which I got a choice of session to run at startup.
Details are here.
6. KDE4 does look different indeed. However, this version in F9 just is not ready for serious work. So many things just don't work.
In particular, the kicker disappears after the first reboot. You can get it back by deleting ~/.kde. However, doing this takes away any widgets you put on the desktop.
Another problem is that I couldn't get a network connection at all.
7. No choice but to go back to Gnome.
Even here getting the network connection took a little fiddling around with the configuration but it always comes.
An annoyance here is that I can't find how to get the DNS server choices to remain permanently. Doesn't seem to be any /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf although there are some similar files that I'll have to look at.
SeLinux seemed to be interfering with the network connection so I disabled it as described here.

More tomorrow.

Problems getting Sabayon operating again.

What I did to get Fedora 8 back was simply to copy the vmlinuz and initrd files from the F8 /boot directory into the /boot/fedora/ directory on the Ubuntu root partition.
However, for reasons I don't understand, the equivalent Sabayon files were no longer available in the corresponding location in the sabayon root partition.
I have absolutely no idea what became of them.
In any event, I was left with only one option which was to re-install Sabayon but had quite some problems with this.
First, my "old" Sabayon 3.4f disk (actually it's less than 6 weeks old) didn't seem to work too well in that I couldn't get beyond a blank page when trying to get to the home page that would allow me to install Sabayon.
Remembering the problem I had a few weeks ago where I seemingly the MacBook can't run Sabayon with kdm but only with gdm, I tried some messing around along these lines and eventually got something that worked.
Instalation was fairly straightforward once I got over these initial obstacles and I installed ALL optional items. The install took about 2 hours in all.
Once that was done, I had to do EVERYTHING described in this earlier post of mine.
Then the vmlinuz and initrd.gz files from the sabayon /boot directory had to be copied over to /boot/sabayon on the Ubuntu / partition.
After that, Sabayon booted fine (although due to some UUID problem in /etc/fstab, it had to ask for the boot device during the boot. Once I supplied /dev/sdb13, it booted fine).

Problems with Opera in F8

For about the last year I've been using Opera as my preferred web-browser. What I like about it is its speed and the speed-dial/new tab facility. Of course, Firefox now has speed dial (possibly even better than Operas as you can include many more icons on the speed dial page). But, I just don't find FF to be as "fluent" as Opera.
However, I'm having very severe problems with Opera in F8.
First, none of the stable versions of Opera that I've tried have even opened for me in F8. This includes 9.25, 9.24 and 9.22
When I click on the icon, the processor usage goes immediately to 100% (presumably just one processor and nothing at all opens. Only way to get out of this is to kill opera.
If I open Opera from a terminal, again nothing happens but no error messages are given.

Rhythmbox in F8

I installed Rythmbox from the repos but, at first, only .flac files were recognised.
Later I ran

sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-bad

and now all of the mp3 stuff was loaded. Still missing the .wma files.
I'll post later with an edit when I find out how to get .wma files recognised.
Edit: OK, to get the .wma files to play I had to install this:
gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg
which I got from here.

Problems with Fedora install

I'll just go quickly through some of the many problem I had in getting Fedora 8 into a reasonable working state on the MacBook.

1. First tried to boot from the version of F7 (set up for Dell desktop) to the MacBook. It booted fine but with quite a few errors which didn't really affect its performance.
2. The upgraded to F8 using little more than "yum upgrade". This went fine without errors but took a long time. Downloading for more than 2 hours and then installing for almost that again.
After changing the /boot/grub/menu.lst on Ubuntu and putting the new vmlinuz and initrd.img into the folder on Ubuntu root partition, this booted fine. There were however some problems:
3. Problems included:
3.1 Couldn't get screen resolution to go to 1280x800 either by changing /etc/X11/xorg.conf or by system-config-display.
3.2 Compiz fusion showed many dependency errors when I tried to install the 6.99 version of CF
4. So, I decided to do a clean install from DVD (both / and /home) and this went fine. This time no problem with either of the above two difficulties.
5. As usual I installed Yakuake (from repo). Although it installed fine, no command prompt was available on the terminal page. (I had seen the same thing before in Zenwalk, which miraculously cured itself without me knowing why). Could find few, if any, useful references to this problem in googling around. Finally, when installing CF 6.99, one of the dependencies was kdebase. It seems, although I can't be fully sure this was the reason, that immediately after this, Yakuake started working perfectly.
6. Eventually got wireless working in F8. Principally, I downloaded three files from the madwifi site. Can't remember exactly what they were but they were something like this:
i) madwifi 2.6.23.9.85.fc8
ii) madwifi-kdml-2.6.23.9 -9.3.3
iii) madwifi-hal-kdml-2.6.23.....
Note that I couldn't match the architecture; so the first file was i386 and the other two were i686.
However, didn't seem to make a difference as after a few reboots, ath0 showed up as active in Network Configuration. Still couldn't get it to connect however.
So, then I went through all the steps that I had used before to get these things started; particularly a) all the madwifi steps i.e. modprobe ath_pci, iwconfig, wconfig ath0 essid "essidname" etc etc. Then, I took out the ethernet cable and rebooted and I had a wireless connection.
Note that for iwconfig or modprobe to work you MUST run "su -", not just "su" as the first has something to do with what paths are used to get to the desired command.
Another strange thing was that NetworkManager doesn't seem to work well in Fedora 8. When I had a connection (through Network Configuration) and then started nm-applet, I lost the connection and just could NOT get it back no matter how many times I typed in the WEP key.
So, I tried the wicd manager and this at least works. However, it doesn't seem to manage in the same manner as NetworkManager in that it seems to just accept what connection is already there and then just displays an icon with available connections which it will allow you to configure and change connection -- but all manually. It doesn't seem to be possible to just plug in the ethernet cable and get the wired to immediately take over from the wireless as happens with nm-applet. Nvertheless, it's a hell of a lot better than nothing.
7. Had a problem where the Software Updater stopped working and just gave an error message and shut down. How to fix this, which is very easy, is explained here.
8. Had a problem where I couldn't install nonfree extras for Amarok to get it to play .mp3 and .wma files. However, solved this as detailed here. Have to say however, that I'm still not 100% aufait with the repository control thing here in Fedora. Seems quite a bit more complicated than in Ubuntu.

Other than that F8 is working quite reasonably, although I really haven't seen tht it has any advantages over Ubuntu and quiete a few disadvantages.

Fedora 8 on MacBook

Over the last couple of days I've been trying to get Fedora 8 up and running on my MacBook (C2D, 2.16 GHz). One interesting thing about this is that Fedora is installed on an external HDD (250 GB Seagate).
I had previously had Fedora 7 running from this usb HDD on my Dell desktop (Dimension 4550 which is more than 5 years old now but still runs flawlessly).
Note that the Dell does not support booting from usb devices so you need to boot the vmlinuz and initrd.img files first from the bootable internal HDD (or from a CD, which is what I did initially. However, it is so much more convenient to do the initial boot from the internal HDD).
The entry for Fedora in the /boot/grub/menu.lst was

title Fedora (2.6.23.9-85.fc8)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/fedora/vmlinuz-2.6.23.9-85.fc8 ro root=LABEL=/1 apm=off rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/fedora/initrd-2.6.23.9-85.fc8.img

Here, (hd0,2) refers to /dev/sda3 which is the Ubuntu (root) partition which is the one I use to boot all my Linux OSes.
In addition, it was necessary to store the vmlinuz and the initrd.img files of Fedora in a folder called fedora in the /boot directory of the Ubuntu root partition.The second mention of root in the above coding refers to the rot partition of fedora on the usb drive. This makes sure that once these two initial files have been booted, the computer knows where to get the rest of the stuff needed to complete the boot.
Simple as it is, it works perfectly although errors can easily creep in if you're at all careless.