Category: Uncategorized

Customizing Fedora 9

digitaleagle Compiz/Fusion/Beryl, Desktop, Fedora, Uncategorized 1 Comment

Now that my 3D driver is working, I can play with making things look nice (or, at least different).  Here are some of the things I did:

Installed the Zekton font.  To do so, I downloaded the tar file.  I unzipped it into my Download directory and copied the files to /usr/share/fonts/zekton.

I installed Emerald and got it working.  I lost track of the steps that I went through, and so, I am not the best resource for how to do this.  But, basically, I installed the emerald package from yum along with the compiz-fusion packages.

One package that was very helpful was the ccsm package.  It provided a menu by the clock that would allow me to pick Emerald as the Window decorator or restart it if something broke.  It also had a quick link to the emerald settings and the compiz settings.  To get it to start automatically, I had to add “fusion-icon” to the session (System > Preferences > Personal > Sessions).

Next, I downloaded and installed the Smoke theme.  I used the Emerald Theme Manager to install the theme, and then, I tweaked it a little:

  • Changed the Title/Text Font to “Zekton Bold | 10”
  • Changed the Minimum Title Bar Height to 9
  • Vertical Button Offset to 2
  • Horizontal Button Offset to 4

I tried to update the login screen, but that proved to be a little more difficult.  Here are some links that might help, if you want to try it:

Resources

Gnome-Look.org

NVidia Drivers for Fedora 9 Update

digitaleagle Fedora, Laptop, NVidia, Troubleshooting, Uncategorized 4 Comments

Ok, Fedora 9 was released yesterday, and the driver issue was not fixed.

As far as I can find on the Internet, Xorg 7.4 is supposed to come out this month (May 2008).  An exact date is not mentioned anywhere.  I read somewhere that NVidia will wait until Xorg releases the version before releasing their driver.

In the meantime, RandR is my goal.  I want to take advantage of this new feature:
Xorg RandR 1.2 howto

Resources

The Progress of X.Org 7.4

Email on Fedora’s Involvement

X.Org Website

Nvidia Drivers for Fedora 9

digitaleagle Fedora, Laptop, NVidia, Uncategorized 8 Comments

This will probably be fixed by the time Fedora 9 is released, but I had trouble getting the NVidia drivers to work.

I tried the rpm packages from AtRPMS, but I couldn’t get them to work.  First of all, they forced me to downgrade to the kernel version 2.6.25-1 (I was at 2.6.25-8).  Then, they didn’t install the nvidia-settings program and didn’t update xorg.conf.  Finally, when I tried to update xorg.conf, XWindows wouldn’t start.

So, I decided to manually install the drivers.

The latest version that I found on the website was:

NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1.run

I had to update to the latest kernel release again because I couldn’t find drivers for the one that I was on.  And, when I tried to compile it, I got an error.  Looking in /var/log/nvidia-installer.log, I found:
/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/nv/nv-vm.c: In function
‘nv_flush_caches’:
/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/nv/nv-vm.c:364: error:
implicit declaration of function ‘global_flush_tlb’
make[4]: *** [/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/nv/nv-vm.
o] Error 1
make[3]: *** [_module_/tmp/selfgz5981/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.12-pkg1/usr/src/n
v] Error 2
make[2]: *** [sub-make] Error 2
NVIDIA: left KBUILD.
nvidia.ko failed to build!
make[1]: *** [module] Error 1
make: *** [module] Error 2

Then, I found an FTP link where later drivers were listed.  I tried the 173.08 version.  After manually deleting a broken link created by the previous install (/usr/lib/xorg/modules/libwfb.so), it compiled without a problem.  But, I could not start the XWindows.

Here is what I got:
(EE) module ABI major version (0) doesn't match the server's version (1)
(EE) Failed to load module "glx" (module requirement mismatch, 0)
================ WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING ================
This server has a video driver ABI version of 4.0 that this
driver does not officially support. Please check
http://www.nvidia.com/ for driver updates or downgrade to an X
server with a supported driver ABI.
=================================================================
dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libwfb.so: undefined symbol: miZeroLineScreenIndex
(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libwfb.so
(EE) Failed to load module "wfb" (loader failed, 7)
(EE) NVIDIA(0): This video driver ABI is not supported.
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Use the -ignoreABI option to override this check.

The best information that I can find so far, is that NVidia does not support the latest version of XWindows yet.

Conclusion

So far, I have determined I have to wait for NVidia to update their drivers.  I am hoping they will have it done in the next couple of weeks only because Fedora 9’s release dates is in 14 days.

Resources

Thread pointing to the latest drivers

Thread on incompatibility

Advanced Driver Search

Another Thread

Creating a SourceForge Project with Eclipse

digitaleagle SourceForge, Uncategorized 1 Comment

I have been wanting to try my hand at an open source project. The new project is ContactDB.

First, I had to create my SSH key. I followed the OpenSSH instructions here.

This is the command that I used to create the key:

ssh-keygen -t dsa -C "myusername@shell.sourceforge.net"
  • Remember to replace the “myusername” with your actual user name.
  • I used the default location to save the key (/home/myuser/.ssh/id_dsa)
  • I entered a passphrase.

Once I had the key generated, I opened the file in a text editor: /home/myuser/.ssh/id_dsa.pub and copied the new line that I just created. On my account page at SourceForge, under the section “Host Access Information”, I clicked “Edit SSH keys for Shell/CVS”. I pasted the line that I copied into the large textbox and clicked update.

I couldn’t do the initial import in Eclipse for some reason.  So, from the command line:

 CVS_RSH=ssh; export CVS_RSH
 export CVSROOT=:ext:myusername@contactsdb.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/contactsdb
 cvs import -m "initial project files" contactsdb initial start

In Eclipse, I created a new workspace. Then, I created a new project (File, New Project …). For the type, I chose CVS, Projects from CVS.

Next, it asked me for the repository location information (remember to substitute contactsdb with your project name):

  • Host: contactsdb.cvs.sourceforge.net
  • Repository path: /cvsroot/contactsdb
  • User: you user name
  • Password: the password you set in the SSH key generation
  • Connection Type: extssh
  • Port: Use default port

Next, Eclipse asked me to select a module. I chose the “Use specified module name”, and I chose my project name for the module (“ContactsDB”).