Mandriva 2009.1 on Dell Mini 9 - More tweeking required

Only while trying to play a video did I realise that there was no sound coming from the speakers. So a quick search revealed the solution.
I had to add the following line into /etc/modprobe.conf
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=dell

Reboot, open the mixer and turn up the volume for the channel Speaker. There will be a loud buzzing noise after you do this. To stop it, disable the channel Capture 2 (untick the checkbox).

So far, I've tested the boot speed versus Ubuntu MID, It is actually quite fast to boot & only ends up being < 10 secs slower due KDE4's longer startup time.

Power consumption has also been quite good, averaging about 3 hours. I could get 3.5 hours from Ubuntu MID, so I'll definitely have to see what I can tweek to make this better.

Mandriva 2009.1 on Dell Mini 9

I got my hands on a Vostro A90 (Black clone of the Dell Inspiron Mini 9) from a friend in the states. It came with Ubuntu MID 8.04.1 preinstalled with the custom Dell launcher. I've been using it for a while now, it works perfectly as expected since the distro was heavily customized.

Lately I decided to try out something else on it. Since I've always loved Mandriva, I decided to give it a go, I knew it wouldn't be so simple.

From the LiveCD boot, it was already clear that WiFi and Bluetooth both did not work. I installed it anyway into an SD card & proceeded to try various things to try to make it work.

But whatever I did, nothing worked. I booted back into Ubuntu MID to check the setting there, nothing much helped. I rebooted into Mandriva again, but this time everything magically worked.

Bluetooth & WiFi was detected & worked nicely. The only thing I couldn't do was use my Bluetooth stereo headset. This is mainly down to kdebluetooth4 being still quite new. It had worked in Ubuntu, but it's no big loss.

Most of the important shortcut keys worked, namely brightness & volume control. Keys that didn't work are, Sleep, Wifi toggle, Battery Status & Toggle VGA. Of these, I only cared for the Wifi toggle.

To make Wifi toggle work, I needed to install aircraft-manager. Unfortunately, this was only available as a deb. I extracted the files out the deb & tried to figure it out.

It was basically written in python, so it wasn't too hard. This is roughly what I needed to do:

1. Extract the data.tar.gz out of the deb

2. Extract the data.tar.gz into /

3. Move portio.so from /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages to /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages

4. Install (through rpmdrake) python-dbus, pygtk2.0-libglade and gksu.

That's it, after that you can simply use KDE's System Settings -> Input Actions to configure a shortcut for running aircraft-manager.

You might see this message when booting the system:

Configuring wireless regulatory domain nl80211 not found. [FAILED]

This can be fixed by commenting out the line CRDA_DOMAIN=XX in /etc/sysconfig/network

The intel driver will exhibit some artifacts especially if you are using kwin effects. This can be solved by adding the line:

Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

to the Device section of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

That's as far as I got for now. I'll update as I go along.

Mandriva 2009.1 - Smoothing things out

I posted last time that I went back to using Kwin effects with the UXA workaround for xorg. However, I have since switched back to using compiz with EXA instead. Why?

Because Kwin with UXA was causing performance issues. The CPU usage of Kwin will hover at around 30-40% all the time, this was sucking the battery dry & causing my laptop to heat-up. Kwin with EXA is still the same, it will freeze 2-3 times a day. Compiz won't run at all with UXA, so I had to go back to EXA to use compiz.

So far compiz is performing very well. CPU usage is low, video playback is smooth and battery life is acceptable. The IaOra theme is still broken, the titlebar still dissapears, so I'll be using Ozone for while.

Mandriva 2009.1 - Working out the kinks

I've made some discoveries and found some weird problems here & there with my newly installed Mandriva 2009.1. So I'm documenting my findings and fixes/workarounds as I needed.

1. Kwin effects when enabled will make X freeze up intermittently . There is already a bug report on this issue & it seems to be caused by the intel driver. The workaround is to change the default Render acceleration mode from EXA to UXA. This is done by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding the following line into the "Device" section:

Option "AccelMethod" "UXA"

This did solve the freeze problem, but video playback was a little choppy when using some desktop effect. I can live with this since it's about the same on compiz as well.

2. The default IaOra window decoration had a display bug when using compiz on KDE4. Whenever the window was maximised, the titlebar would disappear. (It actually became tranparent). I saw this bug when I used compiz instead of Kwin during the time I was still investigating the Kwin bug. I did not find this bug reported, I asked around, but no one else had this bug. It might be caused by residual config from my old compiz. (I didn't do a clean install) Anyhow, this problems goes way then I use a different window decoration theme. So I've switched to using Ozone.

3. I didn't like any of the plasmoids for system monitoring. I was very used to using superkaramba's cynapsys theme. I found that I can still install & use superkaramba & run my favorite sys_mon theme. This is a pleasant surprise. I also found the yaWP and ktorrent plasmoids to be very useful.

4. Virtually all the hotkeys on my laptop worked out of the box. Volume control, media playback control, LCD brightness control & wireless switch are all working perfectly and with OSD to boot. The only one that didn't work was the 'launch media player' key, which I've never used anyway.

That's all I can remember for now. These are all very minor issues, overall this release has been awesome.

Mandriva One 2009.1 Spring

Wow. It's be a while since my last blog.

I was holding out upgrading to Mandriva 2009 because I found KDE4 to be not functional enough for my everyday use. But a few weeks ago Mandriva 2009.1 Spring was released & I just had to give it a test drive.

I bit the bullet & immediately upgraded my laptop to 2009.1 from 2008.1. This was skipping a release, so I thought wise not to do an online upgrade, but simply to format the root partition & reinstall fresh, but keeping my old home partition.

This ran into a snag as I was installing from LiveCD & it did not manage to migrate my KDE3 setting & left me with a very messed up desktop. To fix it. I had to logout, delete my old .kde directory in my home & login again.
This fixed everything up but also managed to wipe out all my KDE settings. Which I believe is fine because KDE4 should not be using them anyway.

Overall I found Mandriva 2009.1 to be another solid release. I'll still be holding out for my main desktop cuz I have alot of custom hacks that I need to research b4 bitting the bullet.

Setting up a Linux Practice Lab (Part 4)

6. Setup PXE boot server
Link the source location to the web server:
# cd /var/www/html
# ln –s /install install

Install & enable tFTP server & DHCP server:
# yum install tftp-server dhcp
# chkconfig tftp on
# chkconfig dhcp on
# service tftp start

Install Kickstart Configurator:
# yum install system-config-kickstart

Download & install system-config-netboot to configure the PXE (This tool is not shipped with RHEL5)
system-config-netboot-0.1.45.1-1.el5.noarch.rpm
system-config-netboot-cmd-0.1.45.1-1.el5.noarch.rpm

Install the packages:
# rpm -Uvh system-config-netboot*.rpm
(If there are any listed dependencies like alchemist or gnome-python2, install them with yum)

Configure Kickstart
# system-config-kickstart
Configure these options:
Basic configuration – Perform Installation in interactive mode
Installation Method – HTTP Server: 192.168.1.100, Directory: install
Display Configuration – 24bit, 1024x768, Start X on boot.
Save as ks.cfg in /var/www/html

Configure the PXE Boot:
# system-config-netboot
(If starting the Network Booting Tool for the first time, select Network Install from the First Time Druid. Otherwise, select Configure => Network Installation from the pull down menu, and then click Add.)

Configure these options:
Operating system identifier: RHEL5.1
Description: Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 U1
Selects protocol for installation: NFS
Kickstart: http://192.168.1.100/ks.cfg
Server: 192.168.1.100
Location: /install

Configure DHCP Server:
# vi /etc/dhcpd.conf

Insert the following contents:
ddns-update-style none;
allow booting;
allow bootp;
default-lease-time 21600;
max-lease-time 43200;

option routers 192.168.1.100;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name "training.com";
option time-offset -18000;
subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.1.7 192.168.1.20;
}

class "pxeclients" {
match if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9) = "PXEClient";
next-server 192.168.1.100;
filename "linux-install/pxelinux.0";
}

# Repeat the following section as necessary for every student machine used in the class

host machine1 {
hardware ethernet 00:0b:db:e9:77:54;
fixed-address 192.168.1.1;
option host-name "machine1.training.com";
}

Save the file.

Start the service:
# service dhcpd start

That's it for the PXE installation server. I went on to configure more NFS and Samba shares for the students to practice on. It is all very simple, so I'll end this topic here. Cheers.

Setting up a Linux Practice Lab (Part 3)

4. Creating the Yum Repository
Install the yum repository builder.
# cd /repo/Server
# rpm –ivh createrepo-*.rpm

Create the repository.
# cd /repo
# createrepo -g repodata/comps-rhel5-server-core.xml Server
# cp /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release Server

5. Setup web server to host the repository
Make sure you've installed the web server during installation, then proceed with these.
# cd /var/www/html
# ln –s /repo/Server server
# chkconfig httpd on
# service httpd start

Open the browser & browse to http://localhost/server to check that the web server is running (you should see the rpm files listed)

Now to setup yum to point to the new web repository
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
# cp rhel-debuginfo.repo trainingserver.repo
# vi trainingserver.repo

Modify the file to look like this:
[trainingserver]
name=Red Hat Enterprise Linux Training Server
baseurl=http://192.168.1.100/server/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://192.168.1.100/server/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release

Save the file. :wq
# yum update

Note: You can get the students to copy the yum setup to their systems with this command:
# scp root@192.168.1.100:/etc/yum.repos.d/trainingserver.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

That's it for making your local yum repository. Next I'll talk about setting up the server for PXE boot installations.