Chris Moates' adventures in the land of Mox » Fedora

Installing Fedora 11 on a Gateway LT3103u

cmoates — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:17:19 +0000

I’ve seen people searching and looking for information on this netbook and Linux, and I know how little is out there, so I figured I’d get this post started, even if it is a bit premature.

I just finished installing Fedora 11 using the Install DVD. Unfortunately, I failed to get the OS to install using the Net Install CD. It would fail halfway through, though I have a suspicion that it was my external DVD drive, and not necessarily the netbook.

After the initial install, the wireless sees networks but can’t connect to my WPA network. I’m doing a yum update now (453 packages!) and once that’s done, I’ll take a deeper look. There’s a post somewhere that says you need the latest ath9k driver and a patch for the synaptics touchpad to make scrolling work, but so far my scrolling is working fine, so perhaps that’s been patched already.

I’ll update this post once I get further along in making all the hardware work well. Then I’ll go on to do the same thing with Ubuntu.

Editing ISO’s in Linux

cmoates — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:50:37 +0000

I’m building a custom Live CD for a friend, it’s basically an automated custom Linux installer. Anyhow, after the disc has been created, I needed some files on the ISO filesystem (not inside the squashfs filesystem). There’s a program for windows called Power ISO I think, that can do this, but I wanted to do it in Linux.

Turns out, Andrew Smith has written an app called ISO Master. I guess it was originally Linux only, but he now offers a Windows port as well. Editing the ISO image using his application is a piece of cake. You can even edit text files inside the ISO on the fly (great for poking at the syslinux.cfg, for example). It’s the perfect open source app; it work well, does what it advertises, and doesn’t try to do a bunch of other things.

According to his web site, he charges $20 for the Windows version, but the Linux version is free of charge. If you’re in the market to muck around with ISO’s (putting your serial number on a CD, for example) I’d highly suggest you check ISO Master out.

Change is hard

cmoates — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:51:16 +0000

After mucking around all morning with Fedora 11, I ended up putting Ubuntu 9.04 onto a disk so that I’d have something to work with tomorrow.

It’s not that Fedora 11 is bad, but it’s different. Different in that way where you switch which cabinets have the cups and plates, and you’re just annoyed that you keep looking in the wrong place for something. I didn’t erase the Fedora 11 disk, so I’ll try it out some more some other weekend, but I needed a workable system for tomorrow, that wasn’t causing me grief.

In other news, I purchased Left4Dead on Steam, and I see why people like it. It’s a bit gory for my tastes, but man, it’s just a lot of fun to knock down wave after wave of zombies with an assault rifle.

Maggie (my wife) finally figured out what pictures she wants in frames, so I spent half the day cropping, printing, and framing. Now we just have to decide how they go on the wall.

So many tasks, so little time

cmoates — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 06:54:57 +0000

I spent a good chunk of today finally repairing some WPC driver boards that have been sitting around since Thanksgiving of last year. The parts I needed arrived, and I was able to get them off my plate. Being that most pinball machines owned by individuals these days were at one time on a location on a route, there’s some significant “hacking” that takes place on some of these boards. One of the boards today was no exception. I’ve seen worse; I have a board in my hands that was on fire. Short of that though, this is pretty close.

Since I’ve a failing drive in my “work” workstation, I decided to replace it and reinstall today. We’re using Fedora 10 on the VM box, so I thought I would give Fedora 11 a try. While I’ve no major problems (a few niggles not worth complaining about) it’s really funny to me how easily you get used to your desktop being a particular way, and Fedora’s defaults are definitely nothing like Ubuntu’s. Fonts, window behavior, it all just feels a little “off” and that’s frustrating.

Maggie bought me a Korg nanoPAD for Valentine’s day. It’s a slick little device. Using Hydrogen (a drum sequencer for Linux) the device worked out of the box, with no configuration required. How’s that for user-unfriendly? If you’ve ever wanted to play around with drum sequencing on a computer, the nanoPAD can’t be beat. The price is right, at $59, and it’s USB, so you don’t need MIDI adapters or anything like that.

Left4Dead is half price this weekend on Steam. While I don’t have time to play it yet, it seemed like a good time to pick it up. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends who play Team Fortress 2 with me play Left4Dead quite a bit as well, so hopefully it will appeal to me.

Being a good OSS contributor

cmoates — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:38:43 +0000

While I realize that it’s not within everyone’s means, working on open source projects means you want to help others. Helping others includes doing at least some work to test across platforms (especially 32 vs 64 bit, where appropriate).

Why isn’t there a distro out there that makes it trivially simple to set up VM’s of all the various popular Linux (and perhaps Solaris/*BSD?) distributions, for the purposes of testing?

I’ve been working with my friend Todd for a few days now to set something like this up. We’re using Fedora 10, Cobbler, Koan, OpenLDAP, Puppet, and a big honkin’ box. So far, so good.

I should add that the first box purchased to do this included an Intel Q8200 quad core processor. Now, being a reasonably new processor, those of us who aren’t hardware news junkies would think that this CPU would support the VT flag which allows for things like KVM to work. Not so! Apparently the entire Q8xxx line has been castrated in this manner. So, I returned that machine and picked up a Phenom X4 instead. It runs like a champ, and being my first AMD purchase in awhile, I’m not disappointed.

I’m hoping to find the time to document some of what we are doing to get all this running. Stay tuned and cross your fingers.