Converted to Linux

[timwhit]

I decided a few days ago that I was bored with Windows, so I decided to install Linux on my main machine (HTPC will stay Windows XP for now). I chose Fedora 11 with KDE 4.2.x.

The process has been a lot easier than I imagined. I had trouble with the initial install, because the install tool on the Fedora live CD had trouble with my disk setup. I have 5 hard disks and it couldn't get passed scanning them. I eventually unplugged all the disks except the install disk and then I plugged them in after I was done installing.

The two things that caused me the most trouble after the initial installation were getting samba set up to share and getting httpd running properly. Both problems were caused either with the Firewall or with SELinux (which I still don't completely understand).

I've been able to find replacements for all the Windows applications that I was accustomed to and I'm so far happy with the conversion.

 

[timwhit]

I found this guide extremely useful during my setup process.

 

[mubs]

I would be interested in knowing why Fedora and not another distie like Ubuntu.

 

[timwhit]

I would be interested in knowing why Fedora and not another distie like Ubuntu.

I wanted to run KDE and everything I have read about Kubuntu sounded bad. I tried installing OpenSuse, but also had trouble with the installer. Also, the Unix sysadmin at work uses Fedora so if I have problems he is a good resource for me.

 

[Chewy509]

Glad to hear it all went well... :thumbright:

If you need any advise on what apps work well as windows replacements, I'm happy to offer suggestions, (considering my main home PC has not run Windows in any form for at 3 yrs now).

 

[timwhit]

Glad to hear it all went well... :thumbright:

If you need any advise on what apps work well as windows replacements, I'm happy to offer suggestions, (considering my main home PC has not run Windows in any form for at 3 yrs now).

I'm still trying to find a decent video player. On Windows I was using Media Player Classic Home Theater Edition. I'm currently using VLC, but I find the performance to be kind of crappy. I also installed KPlayer, but it doesn't seem that great either.

 

[paugie]

Have downloaded the live CDs and will try them on this old Latitude D500.
Will be monitoring this thread for new developments and tips.

 

[Chewy509]

I'm still trying to find a decent video player. On Windows I was using Media Player Classic Home Theater Edition. I'm currently using VLC, but I find the performance to be kind of crappy. I also installed KPlayer, but it doesn't seem that great either.

I find that mplayer (with gui frontend) does everything I need.

The one thing I have found is that many distro's don't enable hardware acceleration by default, to be on the safe side. Could always try compiling from source yourself to see if that makes a differencce.

 

[timwhit]

KPlayer is the KDE version of MPlayer.

I checked and hardware acceleration is enabled on both KPlayer and VLC.

 

[timwhit]

One thing I've found pretty annoying about Fedora is SELinux. I understand what it's there for, but it's extremely restrictive out of the box. I set it to permissive mode, so that it won't block anything outright, now it just gives me tons of various warning messages. I have a couple NTFS mounts that are shared via Samba and also serving files through httpd. However, you can't change SELinux policy on NTFS filesystems (or I can't figure it out).

So, now I have two options to stop getting annoying warnings:

1. Disable SELinux completely.
2. Use audit2allow to permit certain kinds of operations.

Option 2 is working for now, but the whole system is pretty much a pain in the ass. I have a feeling that most people that use one of the distros that include SELinux just disable it rather than deal with the annoyance.

 

[Chewy509]

I have a feeling that most people that use one of the distros that include SELinux just disable it rather than deal with the annoyance.

That sums up my experience when people run SELinux enabled OSes.

Even though I run Solaris Express (also called SXCE), it has all the Trusted Extensions enabled with SBD enabled, it doesn't take long to elevate your user permissions to allow most common desktop functions, while still maintaining the security benefits that come with the trusted extensions, (RBAC and MAC).

FYI: SXCE doesn't have a 'root' user like Linux/BSD, but a user called 'root' which is a member of the 'root' role, and can have it's role removed so 'root' becomes the equivalent of 'nobody', so if the box gets '0wned', they can root nobody... (Solaris uses RBAC + MAC instead of the traditional UNIX root design). Roles (and RBAC) are completely separate to group memberships as well...

In other news, SXCE will officially be phased out in October, to be replaced solely with OpenSolaris.

A quick lesson on Solaris Development.

1. Solaris 10 has the majority of it's code release open-source (under the CDDL license). Some parts are still closed source, as while Sun has a right to redistribute binaries, it doesn't own the source code.

2. SXCE is the development of Solaris 11. It still contains closed source components to maintain backwards binary compatibility with Solaris 7+.

3. OpenSolaris is the open source only version of SXCE, with the closed-source components replaced with open source equivalents. (eg motif/lesstif, being one example), or missing those components completely, (eg Adobe Flash support out of the box). The biggest notable difference between S10 and OS, is that the SYSV PKG system has been dropped in favour of a new packaging system, IPS. (IPS is very similar to the debian setup, with some tweaks+enhancements).

Sun's plan to to migrate what is to become Solaris 11 to a complete Open Source OS to the same level as Debian in the Linux world, except with exceptions for closed-source drivers (think tier1 nVidia support) and will be call "OpenSolaris".

 

[CityK]

Regarding video player -- I like SMPlayer and Kaffeine

Regarding video acceleration -- what video card/adapter are you using, and what driver are you using for it? ... makes a world of difference under linux (video acceleration is pretty ubiquitious under Windows, not so under Linux)

 

[Mercutio]

On my home machines I just disable SELinux. For functional servers I leave it on and work around it like I'm supposed to, but at home I'm not particularly worried.

re: Video players. I switch between (s)MPlayer and VLC. I don't like VLC's GUI very much but it tends to work on things that MPlayer won't play.

 

[timwhit]

On my home machines I just disable SELinux. For functional servers I leave it on and work around it like I'm supposed to, but at home I'm not particularly worried.

What if it's a home machine and a functional server? I'm using it as a development workstation and as an db/app/web server.

 

[timwhit]

Regarding video acceleration -- what video card/adapter are you using, and what driver are you using for it? ... makes a world of difference under linux (video acceleration is pretty ubiquitious under Windows, not so under Linux)

Video card: GIGABYTE GV-NX86T256H GeForce 8600 GT

I will have to check what driver I'm using when I get home tonight.

 

[Mercutio]

What if it's a home machine and a functional server? I'm using it as a development workstation and as an db/app/web server.

Learn to love prompts. They're for your own good anyway.

 

[ddrueding]

Learn to love prompts. They're for your own good anyway.

And if you find yourself not reading the prompts and clicking "OK" all the time, disable them. They aren't helping, anyway.

 

[timwhit]

And if you find yourself not reading the prompts and clicking "OK" all the time, disable them. They aren't helping, anyway.

That's what I figured. Plus, the prompts from SELinux look like absolute gobbledegook. I'll leave it running in permissive mode and then at least if something bad happens I can go back to the logs and try to find out what it was.

 

[CityK]

Video card: GIGABYTE GV-NX86T256H GeForce 8600 GT

I will have to check what driver I'm using when I get home tonight.

Okay, once you get the driver and apps set up you should be good to go.

If you haven't manually installed the (proprietary) nvidia driver yet (and it doesn't sound like you have) then you will be using one of the base 2D drivers -- nv, nouveau, vesa ... I believe that Fedora now uses nouveau by default with Nvidia cards.

The nouveau driver is still very much a work in progress ... it should give you solid 2-D, and does have Xv support (which gives you some acceleartion), but no 3-D and lacking in video acceleration.

[you can find out what driver your using with the command

grep Driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf

]

Install the nvidia driver. it has an acceleration api known as vdpau -- does mpeg2, VC-1, and AVC/h.264

then you'll have to tell the apps to use it (vdpau) for rendering.

edit your MPlayer config file (~/.mplayer/config) and add the string [FONT=Arial, sans-serif]

-vc ffmpeg12vdpau,ffh264vdpau,

[/FONT]

Afterwards, MPlayer will use vdpau for such file formats and fall back to Xv for other random types.

 

[CityK]

sorry, left out the others, so it should be:

[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial, sans-serif][SIZE=2]-vc ffmpeg12vdpau,ffh264vdpau,[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]ffvc1vdpau,[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial, sans-serif][SIZE=2]ffwmv3vdpau,[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]

 

[CityK]

double sorry
first, I left out the point of telling what video output your going to use
second "-vc blah blah blah " is appropriate for the command line, but not for the config file

on the command line you would specifically tell MPlayer to use vdpau on a h.264 with something like:

 mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau filename anyother_options

but for the config file you'd set it up like

vo=vdpau,xv,
vc=[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial, sans-serif][SIZE=2][FONT=Albany AMT, sans-serif]ffmpeg12vdpau,ffh264vdpau, ffvc1vdpau, ffwmv3vdpau,
setup your other desired options and fallbacks[/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]

and that way you wouldn't have to specify on the commandline all the time what you want used

 

[timwhit]

Okay, once you get the driver and apps set up you should be good to go.

If you haven't manually installed the (proprietary) nvidia driver yet (and it doesn't sound like you have) then you will be using one of the base 2D drivers -- nv, nouveau, vesa ... I believe that Fedora now uses nouveau by default with Nvidia cards.

The nouveau driver is still very much a work in progress ... it should give you solid 2-D, and does have Xv support (which gives you some acceleartion), but no 3-D and lacking in video acceleration.

[you can find out what driver your using with the command

grep Driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf

]

Install the nvidia driver. it has an acceleration api known as vdpau -- does mpeg2, VC-1, and AVC/h.264

then you'll have to tell the apps to use it (vdpau) for rendering.

edit your MPlayer config file (~/.mplayer/config) and add the string [FONT=Arial, sans-serif]

-vc ffmpeg12vdpau,ffh264vdpau,

[/FONT]

Afterwards, MPlayer will use vdpau for such file formats and fall back to Xv for other random types.

I already had the nVidia driver installed, here's what it says in X11.conf:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 8600 GT"
EndSection

 

[timwhit]

double sorry
first, I left out the point of telling what video output your going to use
second "-vc blah blah blah " is appropriate for the command line, but not for the config file

on the command line you would specifically tell MPlayer to use vdpau on a h.264 with something like:

 mplayer -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau filename anyother_options

but for the config file you'd set it up like

vo=vdpau,xv,
vc=[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial, sans-serif][SIZE=2][FONT=Albany AMT, sans-serif]ffmpeg12vdpau,ffh264vdpau, ffvc1vdpau, ffwmv3vdpau,
setup your other desired options and fallbacks[/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]

and that way you wouldn't have to specify on the commandline all the time what you want used

I tried adding this to the MPlayer config file, which I believe KPlayer is using, but I get an error when I try to open it with these options.

Otherwise, the performance and quality seem fine right now. I was complaining more about how long it takes to switch between movies in VLC. The amount of time it took to switch to a different video in Windows was much better with Media Player Classic (and VLC).

 

[timwhit]

I'm looking for a disk imaging backup solution. I've used Acronis for the last several years on Windows and was always impressed with it's ability to create a disk image without having to do a reboot. Does anything like this exist in the *nix world?

 

[Chewy509]

Does anything like this exist in the *nix world?

Highly dependent on the version of UNIX.

*BSD has a combination of dump/restore, tar and w/live CD methods.

Linux traditional DR (Disaster Recovery) is very similar to BSD solutions.

Solaris has several methods, like flash archiving ( http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/submitted/flash_archive.jsp ), in addition to the normal dump/restore and tar methods.

BSD / Linux / Solaris can also use Bacula for backups/disaster recovery. ( http://www.bacula.org/en/dev-manual/Disast_Recove_Using_Bacula.html )

 

[Fushigi]

I Googled "linux image backup" and the top result was the OSS Partimage.

 

[Bozo]

I just installed Fedora 11 and it also contains SELinux. It is just as bad as Vista UAC.
I disabled it.

 

[timwhit]

I Googled "linux image backup" and the top result was the OSS Partimage.

Looks good, except it doesn't support ext4, which is what Fedora uses as it's default filesystem now.

 

[CityK]

I tried adding this to the MPlayer config file, which I believe KPlayer is using, but I get an error when I try to open it with these options.

Otherwise, the performance and quality seem fine right now. I was complaining more about how long it takes to switch between movies in VLC. The amount of time it took to switch to a different video in Windows was much better with Media Player Classic (and VLC).

hmm ... it might be overiding it with its own config settings, but there might be a conflict in some way that causes the error. don't know that for sure, just speculating ...that might be the case with SMPlayer too ...anyway, SMPlayer has GUI configurable too ... SMPlayer is, in many ways, like MPC too, btw ... I haven't used KMPlayer in about 2 years, so I wouldn't know what its like now, but it was my estimation that SMPlayer was the much better of the two. I've never liked VLC -- too clunky. For DVDs I usually just use Kaffeine, and use SMPlayer for everything else (albeit DVB, for which I usually also use Kaffeine ).

just for kicks, check to see whether MPlayer itself has any problems using the commandline info provided above for such file playback via vdpau --- the output should be telltale and, as well, you can also monitor cpu usage (and many other things) with the command "top" (I actually use htop as I prefer it).

I'm looking for a disk imaging backup solution. I've used Acronis for the last several years on Windows and was always impressed with it's ability to create a disk image without having to do a reboot. Does anything like this exist in the *nix world?

there are a number of image solutions .. clonezilla might meet your needs ... here's some suggestions from a recent article I perused last month (I'm in the process of developing a particular backup strategy, so I was just starting to scratch the surface)
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=895 (comments section also lists a few end user type)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_cloning_software
and there are a number of others ... rsnapshot, DAR, KDAR, ransid, G4L, G4U, .. .

 

[timwhit]

A couple things have been bugging me lately.

1. Firefox seems slower than in Windows, If I open up a whole bunch of background tabs, everything slows down a lot more than in Windows. Firefox is configured exactly the same as it was in Windows (same version, all the same add-ons, etc). Any ideas?

2. Fonts everywhere are too big. When I open Eclipse, It seems as though I am using it at 800x600 (it's really at 1280x1024). I have the same problem with Firefox tabs, which look extrememly large compared to in Windows. I've tried playing with the font settings in System Settings, but not much I do seems to help. Does anyone know of a theme for KDE 4.2.x that fixes this issue?

 

[CityK]

A couple things have been bugging me lately.

1. Firefox seems slower than in Windows, If I open up a whole bunch of background tabs, everything slows down a lot more than in Windows. Firefox is configured exactly the same as it was in Windows (same version, all the same add-ons, etc). Any ideas?

My thoughts are:
- KDE 4.0-4.2, nvidia driver, and firefox ... have seen many posts about slow behaviour with this combination ... whose to blame? I don't know -- I suspect the linux code for firefox is the bastard child in comparison to the emphasis and focus on Windows; nvidia is proprietary, so who knows what sort of conflicting dragons lay beneath the surface; KDE4.0-4.2 well known to have many desktop speed parculiarities ... from what I've read, KDE4.3 has seemed to done away with a lot of bugs and is a lot speedier. I would suggest you install the packages for it (I'm sure Fedora would have a repo for it).

2. Fonts everywhere are too big. When I open Eclipse, It seems as though I am using it at 800x600 (it's really at 1280x1024). I have the same problem with Firefox tabs, which look extrememly large compared to in Windows. I've tried playing with the font settings in System Settings, but not much I do seems to help. Does anyone know of a theme for KDE 4.2.x that fixes this issue?

-I believe that tabs are slightly larger in Firefox linux, then Windows ... but not "extremely", as you have mentioned ... might be a theme issue or check about:config regarding tab sizes (just a guess on the last one)
- as per fonts: To be sure, fonts are a noticeable difference at first. My suggestion here is to find a font that is most pleasing to you and then, through time, I believe that you will become accustomed/acclimatized to it -- such that if you use Linux exclusively for a good while on that system, then, when you finally boot back into Windows on it, you may actually be struck at how horrid the fonts appear! --- I think I might have even written about this regarding my own personal observation/experience ... in other words, though the fonts issue is a common complaint in new Linux users, I believe that a large part of it is entirely perceptual and a case of being accustomed to something else and an inherent resistance to visual change. I believe that time breaks such perception and actually reverses them ... honestly, I now have a hard time with the fonts under XP, as I'm so accustomed to my setup under Linux
- see if Fedora has a firefox theming
- as mentioned above, try KDE 4.3 ... (note: I don't use 4 (I'm still using a 3.5.10), but the reviews on 4.3 are coming in positive and are indicative that its likely a good incremental step up from 4.2.x)

 

[timwhit]

My thoughts are:
- KDE 4.0-4.2, nvidia driver, and firefox ... have seen many posts about slow behaviour with this combination ... whose to blame? I don't know -- I suspect the linux code for firefox is the bastard child in comparison to the emphasis and focus on Windows; nvidia is proprietary, so who knows what sort of conflicting dragons lay beneath the surface; KDE4.0-4.2 well known to have many desktop speed parculiarities ... from what I've read, KDE4.3 has seemed to done away with a lot of bugs and is a lot speedier. I would suggest you install the packages for it (I'm sure Fedora would have a repo for it).

Yeah, I did some searching and found everyone basically saying the same thing. Firefox on Linux is just not as well supported as on Windows. I just installed Opera and it is vastly faster. I opened up fifteen tabs in a row, all pretty big pages with lots of JavaScript and experienced almost no slowdown. I'm pretty sure the nVidia drivers I have installed are fine.

KDE 4.3 is not in the regular Fedora repositories yet, they're out in the test updates, but I think I'll wait until they release them to the regular repository to upgrade. I'd rather have a stable install, than the absolute latest and greatest. Fedora already is pretty fast about putting out updates.

 

[timwhit]

Had some real fun tonight when I rebooted my system and found that it would no longer load X. Turns out I had installed a kernel update awhile back and hadn't rebooted since then. This new kernel wasn't compatible with the version of the kmod-nvidia driver I had installed.

This should be relatively easy to fix by going into GRUB and booting from the previous kernel, but the GRUB timeout is set to 0 seconds by default in Fedora, so it wasn't possible to get into the menu. After doing a bit of reading I was able to boot from a live cd and modify grub.conf to get into the menu and boot the previous kernel version. I was then able to remove all traces of kmod-nvidia and install akmod-nvidia which will build the driver at boot for your kernel. This seems like the way to do it from now on.

KDE 4.3 is also now available in Fedora, so I installed that. Seems a bit snappier overall, most of the other changes are relatively minor.

 

[CityK]

Had some real fun tonight when I rebooted my system and found that it would no longer load X. Turns out I had installed a kernel update awhile back and hadn't rebooted since then. This new kernel wasn't compatible with the version of the kmod-nvidia driver I had installed.... I was then able to remove all traces of kmod-nvidia and install akmod-nvidia which will build the driver at boot for your kernel. This seems like the way to do it from now on.

the out of kernel proprietary modules (both ATI & Nvidia) get built against a specific kernel. Any time you update your kernel, those former modules will no longer work. The same goes for other types of modules you add in yourself (you build/compile them against a specific kernel).

Anytime you do a kernel update, either
(a) boot into console mode first, log in as root and uninstall the nividia driver ("nvidia-installer --uninstall"), then simply rebuild and install it against your new kernel [cd to the place you hold your nvidia driver download, then "sh nvid...(tab to auto complete)....pkg -q" ... then follow the rabbit]. ... there's the -k option thingy too for the package installer, but I forget the specifics
or
(b) before you reboot, drop into init 3 ("sudo init 3", or "su init 3"), you will then have to log in again as root ... then uninstall the driver ("nvidia-installer --uninstall") ... when you reboot you could go straight to console and reinstall/build against the new kernel ...or you could proceed at your leisure, as you will be able to boot into X (as you should now be using either the nv, nouveau or vesa driver module).

the above steps are based upon a manual installation of the driver ... kmod-nvidia and amod-nvidia sound like the distro supplied nvidia drivers. if amod does what it says, then that sounds like the easy route to go ... not that what I mentioned above is difficult (2 -3 minute task tops).

This should be relatively easy to fix by going into GRUB and booting from the previous kernel, but the GRUB timeout is set to 0 seconds by default in Fedora, so it wasn't possible to get into the menu. After doing a bit of reading I was able to boot from a live cd and modify grub.conf to get into the menu and boot the previous kernel version.

hmmm... I wonder if holding the e key (edit grub boot line) would work even if the timeout is specified as 0.

KDE 4.3 is also now available in Fedora, so I installed that. Seems a bit snappier overall, most of the other changes are relatively minor.

thanks for the feed back.

 

[Mercutio]

What's wrong with GNOME, again?

 

[Chewy509]

What's wrong with GNOME, again?

Nothing that I'm away of, considering I use GNOME as my default desktop? (Actually I use JDS - Java Desktop System, which is a Sun rehash of GNOME, but for all purposes it is GNOME).

But some people like the tweakablity of KDE vs GNOME, and KDE tends to be "prettier" than GNOME due to that tweaking ability.

 

[timwhit]

What's wrong with GNOME, again?

Nothing. I just prefer KDE. I will check out GNOME 3.0 when it's out next year.