FEDORA 12 LXDE SPIN

After reading about super effecient lxde and having xfce earlier, I was glad that fedora came up with lxde spin. After some trial and errors and lot of googling here is my personal installation guide for my dell xps 1210

-Download and install lxde spin for fedora 12. I used the 64bit spin on my dell xps 1210

-setup sudo
login as root and execute following
echo 'loginname ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

-disabled selinux. Though this provides great security, sometimes it is very irritating for home use.
sudo vi /etc/selinux/config
Change SELINUX=enforcing to SELINUX=disabled

-setup rpmfusion and fastestmirror
sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
run 'sudo yum install yum-plugin-fastestmirror'

-install apps that i like to use :-)
sudo yum install firefox mplayer gecko-mediaplayer mencoder gnome-mplayer java-1.6.0-openjdk java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin pidgin audacious audacious-plugins-freeworld* gpicview brasero

-Firefox tweaks
Installed following add-ons
firebug
firecookie
codeburner for firebug
colorzilla
downloadhelper
fastdial
http resource test
jsview
live http headers
measureit
modify headers
refcontrol
screengrab
Also set following params in about:config for better performace
network.dn.disableIPv6=true
network.http.pipelining=true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests=8
network.http.pipelining.ssl=true
network.http.proxy.pipelining=true
ui.submenuDelay=0
nglayout.initialpaint.delay=0

-install flash plugin
For 32 bit sudo yum install flash-plugin should do it, but since I have 64 bit dual core, I downloaded http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.42.34.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz and installed the plugin manually.
sudo tar -zxvf libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz -C /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins
[Well, make sure you get the latest version of the flash from this page http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html]

-install chromium instead of googe chrome
Download following rpm from http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F12/
v8-2.0.0-1.20091118svn3334.fc12.x86_64.rpm
chromium-4.0.252.0-0.1.20091119svn32498.fc12.x86_64.rpm

sudo yum install minizip nss-mdns
sudo rpm -ivh v8-2.0.0-1.20091118svn3334.fc12.x86_64.rpm chromium-4.0.252.0-0.1.20091119svn32498.fc12.x86_64.rpm

-install opera - seriosly page loads are faster than firefox
sudo yum install qt3
Download opera-10.10.gcc4.shared.qt3.x86_64.rpm from http://www.opera.com/download/
sudo rpm -ivh opera-10.10.gcc4.shared.qt3.x86_64.rpm

-install microsfot fonts.
Download the rpm created by at Mauriat. Many thanks to Mauriat Miranda for the rpm and notes at http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f12.html
run 'sudo rpm -ivh msttcore-fonts-2.0-3.noarch.rpm'

-remove unwanted apps
run 'sudo yum remove midori gxine lxmusic xmms2 abiword iok osmo'
I also removed lot of unwanted font packages. eg. I dont read arabic, chinese, japanese and many more so why install the fonts.
run 'package-cleanup --leaves' and uninstall the listed packages
run 'sudo yum update' to update all the installed packages.
Once done reboot system

-webcam, worked out of the box with cheese application
sudo yum install cheese


-Install skype
sudo gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 0xD66B746E
sudo gpg -a -o /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-skype --export 0xD66B746E
Add following to /etc/yum.repos.d/skype.repo and then call yum installed skype
[skype]
name=Skype Repository
baseurl=http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/fedora/updates/i586/
#gpgkey=http://www.skype.com/products/skype/linux/rpm-public-key.asc
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-skype
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Unfortunatly I found that this is the old version of skype. So I downloaded the new version from http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-fc10 and manually installed it
sudo rpm -Uvh skype-2.1.0.47-fc10.i586.rpm
Good thing with using the repo first was that the dependencies got installed and I need not manually hunt for those rpm packages.
Unfortunatly again, the new skype had issues with my webcam so i reverted back to the repo based skype version.

-Install Virtual box. I have win xp virtual machine in VirtualBox which I used for windows specific use eg. office apps.
Visit virtualbox site and check instructions for repo installation. But before that make sure you have following installed.
sudo yum install dkms gcc kernel-headers

-issue with touch pad. Scrolling and clicks did not work out of the box. I enabled click using following
sudo yum install xorg-x11-drv-synaptics
cp /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-synaptics.fdi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/
vi /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-synaptics.fdi
Remove the comments around the match section in the file.
Either reboot or run following to see if touchpad click works
synclient TapButton1=1
Now for vertical scroll To verify if it's on or off, do the following
synclient -l | grep -i vertedge
If it reports VertEdgeScroll = 0, try to manually enable it
synclient VertEdgeScroll=1
If above works then add following merge line in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-synaptics.fdi
<merge key="input.x11_options.VertEdgeScroll" type="string">1</merge>
Many thanks to Walter Francis for his post http://fedorasolved.org/Members/khaytsus/configuring-synaptics-using-hal/?searchterm=None

-issue with keyring. When I setup my wireless, keyring popup asked me for password and I set up one. Then on every reboot if promted me to enter it which was annoying. So went and deleted /home/bhupendra/.gnome2/keyrings/default.keyring. Next time I logged back in, left keyring password emty and chose unprotected keyring settings.

-remove wallpaper, modify slim background
Slim's login screen wallpaper is background.jpg in /usr/share/slim/themes/default. I removed the symlink and dropped my own plain wallpaper.
Next to remove wallpaper on desktop, I right clicked desktop, click desktop settings and unchecked wallpaper. Instead set background color to #1B144D which was close to my login screen background image.
I wanted to remove use of wallpaper to minimize system resource use.

-disable plymouth boot screen
The plymouth graphical boot in fedora is nice but I wanted to remove it and see the conole log.
Removed rhgb quite from /boot/grub/grub.conf to achive this.
If you just want to try out other plymouth theme eg. solar (I was using this for a long time even in F11)
sudo yum install plymouth-theme-solar
plymouth-set-default-theme solar
/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd

-easy vpnc setup
I need to use cisco vpn to connect to office network. Originally I was using vpnc package and configured the setup in /etc/vpnc/default.conf. But F12 comes with nice gui setup via network manager. Make sure you have following packages for cisco
sudo yum install NetworkManager-vpnc vpnc

-bluetooth
Since lxde does not have it's own bluetooth manager, I installed bluez and hoped it would work. It did work but few gnome specific packages were also installed. Atleast I was able to see my nokia n80's bluetooth.

-minor issue with gmixer and volume control buttons on laptop
Gmixer is good but by default it sets control buttons to my mic instead of speaker. I have to manually select HDA intel alsa mixer in the selection and then change volume

-connecting to tv
Miss the gnome system-config-monitor. Using monitor settings in lxde i.e lxrandr I could only change screen resolution. I wanted to replicate my laptop screen to tv when connected with svideo and came up with following scripts.
#tvconnect
xrandr --auto --output LVDS1 --mode 800x600
xrandr --auto --output TV1 --mode 800x600 --same-as LVDS1

#tvdisconnect
xrandr --output TV1 --off
xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1280x800

I had to change the resolution from 1280x800 to 800x600 since that was the correct fit for my big non hd toshiba tv.

With all of the above changes, my cpu usage has seldom crossed 20% and memory usage was always under 500mb under normal use. Think my F12 lxde xps 1210 is faster than better high end laptops running bloted win* :-)

Fedora 10 out and on my xps 1210

Fedora 10 went GA on 25th nov 08 and I was counting days for over a month. I was pretty happy with fedora 9 with few exception of system crashes when using skype. In any case I had to try out the new version. Believe me, I never had a troublefree all working linux before. Always something or other had problems. Audio, else video or flash or jdk.......but not this time.

-INSTALL
This time instead of downloading the dvd image, i decided to get the gnome live cd since the download times is less for this.
Booted through the cd, click the desktop item and the install started. If you have installed fedora before this should not be any different.
My wireless internet was easy to configure and less cranky than on fedora 9.

-POST INSTALL
no open office, no jdk
instead found abiword
Fine good for me, I prefer to install openoffice and jdk manually myself.
Here is the list of packages I removed/added:
yum remove pidgin
yum install empathy [bye bye pidgin and hello empathy - gtalk call support]
yum install vlc [for all my video needs]
I had xmms on fedora 9 but decided to use rythmbox going forward as it was already installed. There are radio channels in it. free music :-)
yum install gnome-applet-netspeed [I like to see how much bandwidth my comcast internet connection gives, I had to configure the applet on panel]
yum remove abiword
yum install wget
wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-fc7 [downloading skype rpm]
rpm -ivh skype-2.0.0.72-fc5.i586.rpm [after install, had to chage audio settings]
Also downloaded the rpm for adobe reader and flash player from adobe site and installed them. The flash plugin showed up on about:plugins on firefox and youtube was working without any headaches [really surprised]y
yum install gstreamer-plugin* [to add mp3 support to rythmbox]
For java and openoffice, I followed the install instruction on respective sites. [quite similar to my install on fedora 9 actually]

Ahh.....after a day, when I actually installed jdk1.6.0.10, my logmein on firefox did not work. firefox started hanging on remote connectivity. Suspecting java plugin issue, reverted back to the old version i had on fedora 9 which was jdk1.6.0.07. Everything works fine now.

oops few more days and I found that I am not able to connect my laptop to tv to watch youtube videos. After heavy googling, i came to know that something has broken in f10 and was forced to play around with randr
-to see connections run
xrandr
-to configure dual monitor
xrandr --output TV --mode 800x600 --set TV_FORMAT NTSC-M
-to stop replication to tv
xrandr --output TV --off

Though my entire 12 inch monitor is not correctly replicated on tv screen, it's sufficient to see youtube videos on full screen mode.

My personal Fedora 9 installation

I have dell xps 1210 and fedora 9 works superb with it.

-partition layout
2 primary partition one for winxp and one for linux. Third partition for data to be shared by both OS. First and third NTFS and formatted 2nd as ext3 using partition magic.

-Dual booting
My winxp was always present but i rarely use it. In order to experint with other OS (to name a few: FreeBSD and fedoras) I installed GAG boot manager.

-Install fedora 9
Download fedora 9 dvd for gnome preferably using torrent. Boot the dvd for install. Do not forget to "remove all linux partitions" (since we had preformatted 3rd partition using ext3) and select advanced boot loader configuration to install linux boot loader on first sector of boot partion instead of MBR.

-what to install
I did not select to install games and java or any other developer tools since i wanted to install them manually. Also do not install open office if you plan intall java manually. open office from software repo install jre 1.5. I wanted everything to run on jdk 6

-post installation
1. Firs thing i configured was my wireless network.
2. Once internet was available i got loads of software updates, of which i updated most using yum and ignored rest.
3. download EasyLife for fedora 9. This does most of the boring but much needed tasks like adding livna repo, installing skype, add flash support to firefox etc. Select whatever you like when you run the script, note that here also i selected not to install java since i wanted the complete sun version instead of almost perfect open jdk implementation.
4. configure skype
Go to skype options - sound devices. For my laptop configuration following works when earphones and mic are plugged in
sound in: usb device 0x46d:0x8c6 (hw:U0x46d0x8c6,0)
sound out:HDA intel (hw:intel,0)
ringing:HDA intel (hw:intel,0)
Play around with the options till you figure out which one is for you. I did the same.
5. install pidgin for all my yahoo/gmail/aol messenger needs using yum
6. installed xmms and vlc for all my audio and video needs
7. installed k3b for all my cd/dvd burning needs
8. I hated the default desktop on this one and even if i changed it, the same old image was appearing on logon screen. Seems some modifications are in plan and i had to use a hack to get what i want. I liked the sulphur wallpaper. So i went to /usr/share/background/waves and edited all the image paths in waves.xml to point to sulphur-on-waves.png located in same folder.

-Note though rpm provides easy interface for installing uninstalling packages, for developer tools i always prefer installing manually for 2 reaons:
1. I can intall latest version which may not be available in rpm
2. I have control over what to install and where to install.

-installing jdk
Downloaded and installed jdk-6u7-linux-i586.bin under /opt. Follow instructions for jdk install for non-rpm binary. It's really sweet.
I had to edit /home/bhupendra/.bashrc to have java_home and path available to bhupendra. However finally decided to add the path to /etc/profile so that it gets available to all users just in case.
As for java plugin for firefox, followed sun java instructions. In /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins made a symlink as follow:
ls -s /opt/jdk1.6.0_07/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so and restarted firefox.

-open office
for open office downloaded OOo_2.4.1_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz and followed install instructions on site
to uninstall goto /opt/open... and ./setup to start the uninstallation wizard.

-eclipse
downloaded eclipse-jee-ganymede-SR1-linux-gtk.tar.gz and moved to /opt
tar xvzf eclipse-jee-ganymede-SR1-linux-gtk.tar.gz
to run eclipse /opt/eclipse/eclipse or goto /opt/eclipse and ./eclipse
if eclipse is ran as user bhupendra, default workspace is created at /home/bhupendra/workspace which was fine with me

-Tomcat 6
downloaded apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz, copied to /opt
tar xvzf apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz
mv apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz tomcat6 (renames the folder)
goto /opt/tomcat6/bin and to start ./catalina start and to stop ./catalina stop
Also added CATALINA_HOME and tomcat's bin on PATH
I was root when i installed tomcat as mentioned above. Hence i always had to login as root to start/stop tomcat. Note if you do not want to start/stop tomcat using root then goto /opt/tomcat6 and change owner
chown -R bhupendra *

-RDBMS
I was in dilema to install mysql or oracle. Though I had installed and used mysql on windows before, i was using oracle in my office. Hence thought of giving it a try. Plus my friend madhav had already installed oracle on centOS so i knew it would work. After googling for some time, found an excellent writeup for oracle on fedora 9. Only modification i made was instead of having a new oracle user, i used my existing user id so that i could start stop oracle using same user. Also instead of installing to /u01/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1, installed at /opt/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1. Being a lazy bum i created scripts to start and stop oracle from desktop.
#-------------------------------------
#ora_dbca.sh (opens oracle database configuration assistant)
#-------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
/opt/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/bin/dbca

#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#ora_DB11G_start.sh (starts the DB11G database and listener)
#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl start
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart $ORACLE_HOME
emctl start dbconsole


#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#ora_DB11G_stop.sh (stops the DB11G database and listener)
#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
emctl stop dbconsole
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbshut $ORACLE_HOME
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl stop