93 replies to this topic

[bornagainpenguin]

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Distribution Release: Fedora 13

Fedora 13, a new version of one of the world's most widely-used Linux distributions for desktops and servers, has been released:

"The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the availability of Fedora 13, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution."

Some of the more interesting features in this release include: "A streamlined installer; automatic print driver installation; new desktop applications and enhancements, including Shotwell photo manager, Deja-dup backup software, Pino Identi.ca/Twitter client and Simple Scan scanning utility; NetworkManager improvements; color management; enhanced iPod functionality; enhanced streaming and buffering support in Totem; 3D support for ATI cards via Radeon driver...."

See the press release, release announcement and release notes for further information.

Downloads are here: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora.html

Unfortunately the guy who runs the Fedora-netbook site (formerly Fedora-eee) has not posted any updates, so unless its already in the default kernel, we're going to have to wait for any missing hardware support...

--bornagainpenguin

[ojdon]

I'll probably get it when the netbook kernel gets updated. :)

[Cheryl]

I'm running it on my 1000HD now. I did get kernel errors which didn't kill me, and which I didn't understand so I did 2 updates immediately, the first was an update to the package manager. Since then everything looks good. The only thing I had to configure so far was the touchpad to get 2 finger scrolling and tap.

It did mess up my grub menu, I already had Win XP, Mint 9 and Crunchbang. Now crunchbang and mint aren't accessible, not sure whether it was my fault or Fedora's & don't have time to figure it out tonight.

Overall, I like Fedora a lot! :D

[oupsemma]

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Unfortunately the guy who runs the Fedora-netbook site (formerly Fedora-eee) has not posted any updates, so unless its already in the default kernel, we're going to have to wait for any missing hardware support...

RPM Fusion has now the rt2860 (http://download1.rpm...iew/rt2860.html), the various kmods for rt2860 (http://download1.rpm...ew/K.group.html) and akmod-rt2860 (http://download1.rpm...mod-rt2860.html) for Fedora 13.

[bornagainpenguin]

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I'm running it on my 1000HD now. I did get kernel errors which didn't kill me, and which I didn't understand so I did 2 updates immediately, the first was an update to the package manager. Since then everything looks good. The only thing I had to configure so far was the touchpad to get 2 finger scrolling and tap.

Hmmm...That sounds quite good if its all that is needed to be changed! Could you install powertop and tell us what kinds of battery life\processes you have running all the time preventing idle and how many watts the eeepc is using?

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It did mess up my grub menu, I already had Win XP, Mint 9 and Crunchbang. Now crunchbang and mint aren't accessible, not sure whether it was my fault or Fedora's & don't have time to figure it out tonight.

Not an issue for me, since I only run one OS on my eeepc at a time. Could be a real deal breaker for some though! I wonder if this si the same issue that required Canonical to do a last minute replacement of Lucid?

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Overall, I like Fedora a lot! :D

Good to know! I'll have to give it a try soon and see if the main issues I've been having with Lucid are fixed...

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RPM Fusion has now the rt2860 (http://download1.rpm...iew/rt2860.html), the various kmods for rt2860 (http://download1.rpm...ew/K.group.html) and akmod-rt2860 (http://download1.rpm...mod-rt2860.html) for Fedora 13.

That is GOOD NEWS! hopefully those will work better than my current method (compiling the kernel module manually every time there is a kernel update...gets old fast!)

--bornagainpenguin

[bornagainpenguin]

Also, this is a must read for anyone using Fedora:
http://www.freesoftw...peed_yum_fedora

It really makes a difference in how long it takes to download updates and applications!

--bornagainpenguin

Edited by bornagainpenguin, 25 May 2010 - 09:34 PM.

[aj123]

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Unfortunately the guy who runs the Fedora-netbook site (formerly Fedora-eee) has not posted any updates, so unless its already in the default kernel, we're going to have to wait for any missing hardware support...

RPM Fusion has now the rt2860 (http://download1.rpm...iew/rt2860.html), the various kmods for rt2860 (http://download1.rpm...ew/K.group.html) and akmod-rt2860 (http://download1.rpm...mod-rt2860.html) for Fedora 13.

Works perfect on 1005HA. For those that are butthurt about rt2860, F13 has the latest drivers. IMHO, the greatest improvement is the latest intel drivers (2.11 vs 2.9) that come default.

Grub problems: This is the old grub. You have to add other versions of linux.
__________________

I have been updating the wiki for fedora. See here for tweaks and battery tips:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EeePc


XFCE, LXDE, and Moblin spins are available and you should run one of those on netbooks.

[bornagainpenguin]

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Works perfect on 1005HA.

Good for you. Unfortunately not everyone has that model. Unfortunately not everyone has your level of experience in configuring Linux systems. This means your experiences do not hold across the board for everyone.

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For those that are butthurt about rt2860, F13 has the latest drivers.

Who is 'butthurt' about rt2860? I simply reported that the Fedora-netbook site had not yet been updated for Fedora version 13, and oupsemma reported the happy news that there were installable modules that worked and where to find said installable modules. How is this a bad thing? I took it as good news really, much better than the futzing about that seems to be necessary for Ubuntu these days...

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IMHO, the greatest improvement is the latest intel drivers (2.11 vs 2.9) that come default.

Really? Great! What differences have you noticed between the updated version and the older version? How is performance enhanced? (The tone of your comment suggests there have been improvements.) While your experience will not necessarily be the same as every one else's it still can be instructive and an encouragement to us to try out Fedora..

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Grub problems: This is the old grub. You have to add other versions of linux.

That explains a lot right there. Is this issue covered in the documentation and people just didn't see it?

Quote

I have been updating the wiki for fedora. See here for tweaks and battery tips:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EeePc

Thanks for doing that for us! Your work there is appreciated!

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XFCE, LXDE, and Moblin spins are available and you should run one of those on netbooks.

Hmmm... really? While I am looking at LXDE off and on as a replacement for Gnome should the 3.0 update turn out to be as much a train wreck as the KDE 4.x upgrade I honestly do not see much advantages for them over Gnome if you like that environment. Gnome just works for me...or at least it did up until recently when the developers began to shift their focus to version 3.0 and stopped fixing bugs...

--bormagainpenguin

[oupsemma]

I had Fedora 13 installed weeks ago and could not have any wireless connection, as there was no rt2860 anymore, the driver being replaced by a combination of rt2800pci & rt2800usb & rt2x00pci & rt2x00usb.
At the time it was on my computer, there were no RPM Fusion packages available for rt2860 and Fedora 13; so for me it's a good news that they are at least there now. (And checking today in rpmfind & RPM Search I couldn't find any rt2860 for F13, apart in RPM Fusion; but correct me if I'm wrong).

[aj123]

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Works perfect on 1005HA.

Good for you. Unfortunately not everyone has that model. Unfortunately not everyone has your level of experience in configuring Linux systems. This means your experiences do not hold across the board for everyone.

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For those that are butthurt about rt2860, F13 has the latest drivers.

Who is 'butthurt' about rt2860? I simply reported that the Fedora-netbook site had not yet been updated for Fedora version 13, and oupsemma reported the happy news that there were installable modules that worked and where to find said installable modules. How is this a bad thing? I took it as good news really, much better than the futzing about that seems to be necessary for Ubuntu these days...

Quote

IMHO, the greatest improvement is the latest intel drivers (2.11 vs 2.9) that come default.

Really? Great! What differences have you noticed between the updated version and the older version? How is performance enhanced? (The tone of your comment suggests there have been improvements.) While your experience will not necessarily be the same as every one else's it still can be instructive and an encouragement to us to try out Fedora..

Quote

Grub problems: This is the old grub. You have to add other versions of linux.

That explains a lot right there. Is this issue covered in the documentation and people just didn't see it?

Quote

I have been updating the wiki for fedora. See here for tweaks and battery tips:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EeePc

Thanks for doing that for us! Your work there is appreciated!

Quote

XFCE, LXDE, and Moblin spins are available and you should run one of those on netbooks.

Hmmm... really? While I am looking at LXDE off and on as a replacement for Gnome should the 3.0 update turn out to be as much a train wreck as the KDE 4.x upgrade I honestly do not see much advantages for them over Gnome if you like that environment. Gnome just works for me...or at least it did up until recently when the developers began to shift their focus to version 3.0 and stopped fixing bugs...

--bormagainpenguin

There's been two releases since 2.9 that is in ubuntu/debian. Pineview works better and just overall improvements.

2.10:
http://www.phoronix...._item&px=Nzg1OA

2.11:
http://www.phoronix...._item&px=ODExMQ

2.12 (released in July):
http://www.phoronix...._item&px=ODI4MA

____

AFAIK, the older version of grub only picks up windows for dualboots, not other linux distros.

_____

Gnome is huge and bloated. Running a lighter desktop frees up resources for applications. It is your prerogative to run whatever you want though.

[aj123]

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I had Fedora 13 installed weeks ago and could not have any wireless connection, as there was no rt2860 anymore, the driver being replaced by a combination of rt2800pci & rt2800usb & rt2x00pci & rt2x00usb.
At the time it was on my computer, there were no RPM Fusion packages available for rt2860 and Fedora 13; so for me it's a good news that they are at least there now. (And checking today in rpmfind & RPM Search I couldn't find any rt2860 for F13, apart in RPM Fusion; but correct me if I'm wrong).

You will only find those drivers at RPMfusion and not at official mirrors.

If you want the drivers included create a remix of your own in fedora:
1. install revisor
2. add the rpmfusion repo and the drivers you want.
3. let revisor create a usb image
4. Reinstall using that image and things will work out of the box.

[oupsemma]

Thanks, I know that. I was just explaining that it's recent that rt2860 drivers were available for Fedora 13 in RPM Fusion. Many weeks ago, when I had F13 already installed, nothing was available yet.

[bornagainpenguin]

Well I managed to get Fedora 13 installed. (I know I said elsewhere I was rolling back to Hardy but I'm a glutton for punishment I guess...)

First off if you're using the live-cd installer like I did it looks like you really have to create a /boot partition. Not doing this will result in some pretty serious issues.

After installing and doing the EULA HULA (what you thought that was just for Windows...LOL!) and logging in to the desktop I tried the network manager. While it clearly saw there were WiFi hotspots available it refused to authenticate. I downloaded the rpms mentioned by oupsemma on a different computer but those didn't want to install because of missing dependencies. I plugged into my router directly via ethernet and tried the rpms again and still got errors about dependencies missing. That's when I wised up and set about looking for the authentication to use RPM Fusion.

In order to use RPM Fusion you need to install the following:

http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Those will act the same way installing the getdeb.net authetication debs work.

Now I was able to install the RPM for my rt2860 WiFi card.

http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/releases/13/Everything/i386/os/rt2860-2.3.0.0-1.fc13.noarch.rpm

Upon doing a reboot the WiFi was already up and ready to go, since I'd tried to log into my WiFi router earlier and Fedora remembered the WPA key.

I then went to the Fedora-netbook.com site and copied the fstab lines from his install HOWTO:

su
gedit /etc/fstab

For each of your partitions (/, /boot, /home) add ",noatime" after "defaults".

UUID=XXXXXXXXXXXX /                       ext4    defaults,noatime        1 1
UUID=XXXXXXXXXXXX /boot                   ext4    defaults,noatime        1 2
UUID=XXXXXXXXXXXX /data                   ext4    defaults,noatime        1 2
UUID=XXXXXXXXXXXX /usr/share              ext4    defaults,noatime        1 2

Don't forget to add the tmpfs lines at the bottom like this:

tmpfs                   /var/tmp                tmpfs   noatime        0 0
tmpfs                   /tmp                      tmpfs   noatime        0 0

Then adjust the sysctl.conf fiule to reduce actual usage of the SWAP partition and save it for hibernation purposes:

su
gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Add these lines to the bottom

#
# reduces the likelihood of the system using the swap partition as swap
vm.swappiness = 1
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 50

I then installed the fastest mirror tweak from freesoftwaremagazine.com like so:

su
yum install yum-fastestmirror

That's as far as I got now...I'm waiting on the updates to finish installing and will see what things look like from there. Speaking of which--yowza! it's only been two days and already we've been treated to a whopping 114 updates! @_@; Only time will tell whether that is a good thing (fixing bugs) or a bad thing (buggy release that will never be completely baked)...

I'm hoping to find a copy of eee-control more recent than the various edits that have been going around or the rpm from the Fedora-netbook.com site intended for Fedora 12. Otherwise I'll give alien a try at converting the deb on Grigori Goronzy's site.

--bornagainpenguin

Edited by bornagainpenguin, 27 May 2010 - 10:08 PM.

[bornagainpenguin]

Has anyone found a recent version of eee-control (0.9.6) for Fedora 13?

I gave git a try and checked out the source but was unable to build it for some reason. It kept complaining about gcc not being installed (even though I'd just installed it!) so I'm not sure if marx made some Debian\Ubuntu specific changes that are causing me grief or what.

I tried using alien on Lucid (on my desktop) to convert the deb to an rpm only to get errors:

tar: Record size = 8 blocks
Package build failed. Here's the log of the command (cd eee-control-0.9.6; rpmbuild --buildroot=/shared/Downloads/Fedora/eee-control-0.9.6 -bb --target noarch eee-control-0.9.6-2.spec):
Building target platforms: noarch
Building for target noarch
Processing files: eee-control-0.9.6-2.noarch
unknown, 0: Warning: using regular magic file `/etc/magic'
Provides: config(eee-control) = 0.9.6-2 ioport.so
Requires(interp): /bin/sh /bin/sh /bin/sh /bin/sh
Requires(rpmlib): rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) <= 3.0.4-1 rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix) <= 4.0-1
Requires(pre): /bin/sh
Requires(post): /bin/sh
Requires(preun): /bin/sh
Requires(postun): /bin/sh
Requires: /bin/sh /usr/bin/python python(abi) = 2.6
error: Arch dependent binaries in noarch package


RPM build errors:
Arch dependent binaries in noarch package

Anyone know what that all means? I would have thought that trying the conversion on Lucid would work, since the package was made for Lucid... O.o

I installed the old one that was hacked together from earlier versions and made for Fedora 12 and that gave the usual errors about the daemon not being installed until I rebooted upon which it began working as usual--except for the cpu scaling which is still requiring manual switching unlike the Lucid version of 0.9.6 which is able to shift into powersaving mode automatically...

So anyone have any ideas?

--bornagainpenguin

[bornagainpenguin]

Okay...wow...

Cn                Avg residency       P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running)        ( 0.3%)         1.60 Ghz     0.3%
polling           0.1ms ( 0.0%)         1333 Mhz     0.0%
C1 mwait          0.0ms ( 0.0%)         1067 Mhz     0.5%
C2 mwait         23.5ms (49.8%)          800 Mhz    99.2%
C4 mwait         28.0ms (49.9%)

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 39.1     interval: 5.0s
Power usage (ACPI estimate): 7.0W (7.2 hours)

Top causes for wakeups:
  39.8% ( 21.8)     <kernel core> : hrtimer_start_range_ns (tick_sched_timer) 
  12.4% (  6.8)     <kernel core> : hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
  12.4% (  6.8)              hald : __mod_timer (process_timeout)
  11.7% (  6.4)       <interrupt> : acpi
   6.6% (  3.6)       <interrupt> : ehci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb2
   4.4% (  2.4)   USB device  1-5 : Mass Storage Device (Generic)

Suggestion: increase the VM dirty writeback time from 5.00 to 15 seconds with:
  echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
This wakes the disk up less frequently for background VM activity
 Q - Quit   R - Refresh   W - Increase Writeback time

I know that I will be eventually giving Fedora a permenant place on my eeepc once eee-control becomes available...the reduction of wake ups is phenomenal! I may shift back to Hardy for a bit to give the fedora-netbook.com guy a chance to udate his site but all in all Fedora 13 looks very promising to me...

--bornagainpenguin

[oupsemma]

You could try the .rpm packages that already exist for Mandriva or OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS.

[bornagainpenguin]

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You could try the .rpm packages that already exist for Mandriva or OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS.

I thought about trying the Mandriva package, but not the OpenSuSE ones. I've had some success with getting Mandriva packages to install in Fedora but never OpenSuSE packages, those are too different. What holds me back is the ones available were the old 0.9.4 hacked versions which never really worked very well for me in the past any way. I'll be waiting until there are working versions of the 0.9.6 version available for Fedora and try again then.

--bornagainpenguin

[oupsemma]

If you're interested in building rpms, I've stored a few bookmarks .

[bornagainpenguin]

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If you're interested in building rpms, I've stored a few bookmarks .

Not so much interested as much as willing if you get my meaning? I need to install the latest release of eee-control for Fedora, and if I have to go through the work to make it happen on my eeepc, why not share the results with the rest of the community? Many hands make light labor as the popular saying goes...

Thanks for the links I'll read through them after I manage to get Fedora on my testing box rather than wear out my SSD with multiple installs on my eeepc!

--bornagainpenguin

[oupsemma]

Well, couldn't resist, so I've installed Fedora 13 Lxde.
Once installed, plugged an ethernet cable to download the updates, then added RPM Fusion free and non-free repositories, installed rt2860/akmod rt2860/kmod rt2860; rebooted, modprobed rt2860sta and configed ra0 up, and wireless was working tip-top.
Yeah!