Fedora

by Jemimus, on Flickr Another brand new toy. After my last trip to the UK for bikesoup I decided that it was about time to get a proper laptop. So far I only have a netbook, which is very convenient when size and weight matter. But for getting work done it is just to small, the main problem is the screen size and resolution. I had a look around for good full sized laptops and the only brands producing something with the quality I had in mind were Apple and Lenovo. The advantages of the Apple over Lenovo are better built quality, battery life and easy to buy locally. I choose the Lenovo, because you can order it with more gadgets, swappable batteries and mostly because it isn't an Apple as I despise where the company is going and I already had bad experiences with Linux and iPods. This is the configuration I finally got. Intel Core i7-620M 15.6" FHD Display 1920x1080 4 GB UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad) with Fingerprint Reader 500 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (3x3 AGN) Integrated Mobile Broadband (Gobi 2000 3G with GPS) First thing I did was to install Fedora 14 on it. I used the install option to shrink the Windows partition to 50G and used the rest for Linux. I am probably going to replace the hard-disk with a SSD in the future, but it was a bit too expensive for now. The install was amazingly boring. I was expecting all kind of problems with the hardware, but everything just worked. Even the fingerprint reader allows you to login after configuring it with a nice tool. The only tweaks I needed so far, are these: The UMTS card needs a firmware and loader, I used these instructions from the CentOS list. I don't really need it, because mobile broadband via bluetooth is also very easy to set up and works just as fast. I haven't tried the GPS yet, but I seem to be inside of buildings most of the time anyway if you enable VT-D (whatever that is) in the BIOS, hibernate / suspend to disk won't work for some reason some of the preferences don't work for the touchpad, but you can enable those and more with the synclient tool. For example "synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1" Battery time is a bit disappointing, with either a 6 or 9 cell battery. Some of it seems to be the fault of the Linux software, but PC hardware always seems to be rubbish in that department. The build quality is also not on the level of a MacBook pro, but much better than any Dell, Asus or whatever they are called. I will comment on this post in case I make any new discoveries.

I treated myself to some nice new toys and I am very happy with them, so here comes a short review. Logitech G9x Laser Mouse I already have a G9 at home, which is the best mouse I ever used. It is really a gamer mouse, but the high resolution laser, free rolling scroll wheel and the cable make it perfect for programming and desktop use. It also comes with adjustable weights, which helps to make it feel just right. I just bought a new one because I wanted to replace the G5 I had at work with this one. The G9x is pretty much the same with a better case and higher resolution. The new colour scheme also goes better with the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (which is the only Microsoft product in my house). As the G9 and G9x are the same price, the choice is really easy. With the G9x you can also adjust the colour of the LEDs and as everyone knows: a gadget is not a gadget if it has no blue LED. Nokia microSD/HD map 16GB MU-44 This is a memory upgrade for my Nokia N79. And when did memory get so small? The size of this is just silly, you can breath it in if you are not careful. SHARKOON SATA QuickPort PRO The main reason for this order. I needed another USB backup drive, because I want to make a backup before I do the Fedora 13 upgrade. I looked around for 2TB external USB drives or NAS, but they are all much too expensive. I also usually have some old hard-disks around that are leftovers from computer upgrades and needed a use for them. The Sharkoon is a dock where you can insert "naked" Sata drives directly. You connect it with e-sata and/or USB to your computer and that is it. It also acts as a USB hub with two ports and has a slot for SD/MMC/MS memory cards. It also has a switch to turn it off when not in use, which is a lot better than the usual external drives. It is also bloody fast over e-sata (they do a simpler version which just has USB). And that is it already. I am backing up everything now so Fedora 13 is next.

After hearing again about many QA tools at the 2009 PHP Barcelona conference I decided that it would be nice if these would be available through packages on Fedora (and through EPEL on RHEL). Turns out that the most important ones were already packaged, some needed a new packager, some were waiting for review and a few still need to be packaged. Here are the once already available, with the packager name: php-phpunit-bytekit (llaumgui) php-phpunit-phpcpd (llaumgui) php-phpunit-phploc (llaumgui) php-pear-PHP-CodeSniffer (cdamian) php-pear-PhpDocumentor (cdamian) php-pear-PHPUnit (xulchris) (this will soon be renamed to php-phpunit-PHPUnit) These are waiting for review: php-pdepend-PHP-Depend (cdamian)php-phpmd-PHP-PMD (cdamian)These don’t seem to have packages at all: php-phpunit-phpdcd php-phpunit-phpUnderControl php-phpunit-PHP_CodeBrowser phpanalysis padawanarbit Because EPEL is limited to the rather ancient PHP version of RHEL it sometimes contains older versions of the packages available in Fedora. It might be time for a community supported repository for PHP 5.3, for people who don’t want to live on the bleeding edge with Remi. Another thing missing is a package for a continuous integration software like Hudson, arbit or CruiseControl. The reason for this is that they are either really difficult to install or package or are still very much in a alpha version. We are using hudson at work and they do provide a RPM, but it is less than perfect. Arbit looks promising, but probably needs a few more months to be at least in a beta stage. Give me a shout if there is a package I missed. Sources: Pear Packages in FedoraSebastian Bergmann: Quality Assurance Tools for PHPQuality Assurance in PHP Projects: Tools

Fedora now has been out for a few weeks and I can summarize my experience with it a bit. I have installed it on four machines: - netbook (Eee PC 901) new install with a 32bit live USB stick - media centre (ancient custom AMD Duron) upgrade with the 32bit DVD - home PC (AMD Phenom 9350e) upgrade with the 64bit DVD - work PC (Dell Intel) with 64bit preupgrade I would have preferred the preupgrade on all machines, but I am using RAID on some of the machines and preupgrade doesn’t like /root being on RAID. But the upgrade went smooth in all cases, so I don’t really mind. I also changed the graphic card in my work PC to an ATI HD3450, so I can finally use the desktop effects with an open source driver. What works out of the box Desktop effects on the netbook, home and work PC, with either the ATI card or Intel on-board graphic chips. Pulseaudio with USB or bluetooth headset. I use it mainly with Skype, which is the only non open source software left on my computers (I blame peer pressure). PHP 5.3.1 and MySQL 5.1.40, which meant I have stopped using the Remi repository for now. Automatic bug reporting for program crashes and kerneloopses. This should make the quality of future releases even better, even though bugzilla is pretty much swamped with bug reports now. But I think it is always better to have more information than less. CPU speed scaling finally works. I had to fiddle with the BIOS settings a bit to enable Cool and Quite and some other power management settings. What doesn’t (or didn’t work) I had some problems with pulseaudio crashing after installing the ATI card, but putting a “blacklist snd-hda-codec-atihdmi” into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf fixed it. I found the fix on bugzilla. I am still not able to play my Homeworld 2 CD with either Wine or VirtualBox, I think the drivers are still not good enough to support the OpenGL needed for the game. It also crashes after a while in VirtualBox. Radeon bugs currently hold the top spot at kerneloops, which makes a fix more likely. If you use an Eclipse (or Azureus), which didn’t come with Fedora some of the GUI buttons don’t work. This is caused by a change in GTK and a workaround is to set GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true before you start eclipse. This is also mentioned in bug 540956. I bought a D-Link DWA-547 Wireless N PCI Card for the media centre in my effort to upgrade the flat to 802.11n, which I just can’t get to work. It is either slow or crashes the whole machine without any way to get to the kerneloops. I probably have to find a different card to get it working. But wireless cards always have been a problem. My Bit I am also trying to contribute more to fedora by building packages and doing package reviews. After the Barcelona PHP Conference I decided to build RPMs for the PHP QA packages by Sebastian Bergmann and others. Turns out that most of them are already available or up for review, so I applied as co-maintainer and did a package review. Remi has a good overview of PEAR packages in Fedora. The other big project which will probably take a few more years is the odyssey of packaging symfony, this turns out to be difficult because symfony bundles a lot of libraries and they need to be separated into their own packages. The good thing is that this will bring these libraries into Fedora (and eventually EPEL) too. So far I managed to get Doctrine in and the Swift Mailer is up for review. Symfony itself won’t get into EPEL, because it requires a newer PHP, but it will work with the Remi bits. You can find a list of my packages in the Fedora package DB and also of the ones I co-maintain. Still rather short list at the moment :-) Summary Probably the best Fedora upgrade and usage experience I had so far. The main problem is still the hardware, the software itself works perfectly and for my usage I don’t really need anything more at the moment. Finally a rather boring screen shot of my desktop:

One of the traditions of celebrating the New Year (besides getting drunk and making a fool of yourself) are of course the resolutions for the next twelve months. So here are mine: loose weight as a rule this always have to come first and I don’t want to be the one breaking it. As I think I am eating healthy enough and I am probably not going to be able to change much of it this has to be achieved with more exercise, so more cycling and the gym. I will also reduce the amount of alcohol I consume. use my motorcycle more I haven’t used it at all in 2008, which is a pity. Every time I do use it I get a smile on my face. It also means that it will be better maintained and keep the traffic wardens happy, which towed Cats scooter because it was not moved for eight days. It doesn’t make much sense to use it in Barcelona though, so I will have to do some weekend trips. sort out my music collection I already started deleting all my mp3s where I don’t know the origin and started ripping all my CDs again. Next step will be the organising the mp3s I got through podcasts or from mix bootlegs. And the last will be digitizing my audio tapes, which will probably take the rest of the year. travel somewhere new Two trips are already planned to Laax and Amsterdam, but these are old favourites and I want to see some new places. Maybe a motorcycle trip to the south of France or Italy or a city break to somewhere else in Europe. do more programming As with the motorcycle this always brings a smile to my face and I just don’t do it enough. I have started some small projects at home now and I am trying to get more in Fedora, though my first simple package submission is going extremely slow. I also have to spend more time on Python to learn faster. I think five resolutions are probably enough, maybe one last one: I should use this blog more often.