Raskas’ blog

These screenshots confirm that it is possible to have aiglx on your FC6 box.
I won’t be available by a default install, but with installing some extra packages and changing some config it should work. I guess in a couple of months there will be some howto’s to get those effects working. (Maybe I even post some guidelines to get it working).

On this page all FC6 graphics are gathered (and you can download them in several formats). In another directory of the same users webspace you can find the graphics for RHEL5 which will be released in a couple of months.

Fedora Core 6 will be released in 2 weeks (11 october). I wanted to see what the new FC has to offer. The Fedora Core 6 Tour and the Fedora Core 6 Release Summary give some information about the upcoming FC release.

The video and slideshow on the Fedora Core 6 Tour page showed mainly the installation process, which hasn’t changed much. But I noticed they added, at least, 2 features. The first one is the ability to choose where you want to install from (cd, http, …), the other feature will let you add repositories during the installation.
I saw the first one somewhere on the video, but can’t find it anymore.

Watching the screenshots and video’s showed the new grub-bootscreen, login-screen and default background. It is now mainly black (a bit too dark, but that’s only my opinion) with the fedora logo on the right side. This time the logo is caught in a DNA string.

The performance of the package installation is improved and they added an applet which notifies you when new updates are available (This was already available in Ubuntu, it’s nice to have it now in FC).
The imap support in evolution is improved, maybe it’s time to take another look at evolution… if they also improved the calendering part.
They say something about AIGLX framework and compriz and Xorg7.1. I, at least, hope my laptop-screen can be shown on a beamer without any problems and can use dual head. I also hope the wobbly effect will be possible, but with the current specification I don’t know if it will be possible with a standard install.

The Virtual Machine Manager is also in the list of new packages. This seems a very nice tool to maintain Xen images. With this tool it is possible to install a virtual machine from a cd, it is also possible to whatch the screen through an embedded vnc-client. In the overview of you virtual machines you can see the resources used for every instance.

This is only a limited list of new features in Fedora. There are more items listed on the fedora wiki and I guess even that list won’t be complete. We just have to wait and see what has changed.

Today I tested an APC Smart-UPS 750.

Both the serial and usb cable are connected to my laptop, no devices are taking power of the ups.
I first tried the PowerChute from APC, It installed correctly but it doesn’t want to connect to the ups. It seems it can only connect over ttySx but even when that cable is in place I still got some strange errors in my log files.
I unplugged the power cable of the ups to let it run on battery, no changes appear in those log files.

At that moment I noticed this:

FC5 recognised the ups through usb.

Google took me to the site of apcupsd. The project looks nice, let’s test it.

[root@raskas ~]# yum install apcupsd
[root@raskas ~]# /etc/init.d/apcupsd start
[root@raskas ~]# /etc/init.d/apcupsd status

CABLE    : USB Cable
MODEL    : Smart-UPS 750
UPSMODE  : Stand Alone
STATUS   : ONLINE
LOADPCT  :   0.0 Percent Load Capacity
BCHARGE  : 100.0 Percent
...

… nice

Again I unplugged the power cable of the ups.
I got this in my console:

Broadcast message from root (Fri Jul 14 14:30:16 2006):
Warning power loss detected on UPS raskas.ocean.be

Broadcast message from root (Fri Jul 14 14:30:22 2006):
Power failure on UPS raskas.ocean.be. Running on batteries.

and this in my /var/log/messages

Jul 14 14:30:16 raskas apcupsd[15487]: Power failure.
Jul 14 14:30:21 raskas apcupsd[15487]: Running on UPS batteries.

After connecting the ups to the power i got this message:

Broadcast message from root (Fri Jul 14 14:32:23 2006):
Power has returned on UPS raskas.ocean.be...

and this in my /var/log/messages

Jul 14 14:32:22 raskas apcupsd[15487]: Mains returned. No longer on UPS batteries.
Jul 14 14:32:22 raskas apcupsd[15487]: Power is back. UPS running on mains.

You can define and fine-tune the actions from apcupsd in /etc/apcupsd/. In the file /etc/apcupsd/apccontrol you can find all states and all actions, in the /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf file you find the main configuration.

Fedora Core 5 has been released for a couple of months, but there is still no sign of it on the site of rpmforge.
If you look close enough you will find the rpmforge-release package for fc5 in dries’ repository. You can download it directly through this link.

I finally found the time to install FC5. ok, I didn’t have the time but I was convinced I needed an upgrade. It seemed that sleep and suspend was working and there were several improvements in the i810 driver (for intel graphical cards). For example when you closed the lid (of your dell latitude d610 laptop) in FC4 the screen went black, when you opened it, it stayed black. With FC5 this is solved.

The resolution is default 1024×768. For FC4 you have to compile and install several programs, for FC5 the fix is extremely easy.
The only thing you have to do is to put following 2 lines in comment in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

   HorizSync    31.5 - 90.0
   VertRefresh  59.0 - 75.0

You find these 2 lines in the Monitor section

A week ago I bought myself a Nokia HS-26W headset. After using it a couple of days in the car I wanted to use it as a headphone. I found the bluetooth-alsa project which is exactly what I need.
I followed the steps described on the page, had a bit problems with the dependencies, but everything compiled and loaded succesfull. The test described on that page was the first sound i heared through my headset (at least coming from my laptop).

Now the real work…
Let’s try it with vlc (VideoLanClient), the first sound came through my laptop speekers, so I need to change the output module (Settings >> Audio >> Output modules). Off course we need ALSA. Now let’s select the device… only default is availble… refreshed a couple of times and “BT Headset: BT SCO PCM” showed up.
Wow… I heard my mp3 playing through my headset.

I directly noticed that playing music with a lot of beats wasn’t nice to listen to. Another song, without any beats, came through very well. I tested the quality when I went to another room, it dropped. When I was out of reach, the music off course stoped.
The btsco daemon was killed when I was out of reach, after restarting the daemon the music was back.

I recently bought a new cell phone, the Nokia 6822.

I tried to connect my cell phone with my laptop. I first succeeded sending files from my laptop to my phone with bluetooth, sending files from my phone to the laptop also worked without any problems.
When I tried to browse my phone with my laptop, it didn’t work. It makes connection, my phone asks permission and the pairing code but then the connection is closed.

Google brought me to this bugreport of redhat: Bug 160676 – dbus_pin_helper crashes hcid. In that bugreport is a little workaround, commenting out dbus_pin_helper.

I tried it.. and it worked. The pin_helper section of my /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf is now:

# PIN helper
pin_helper /usr/lib/kdebluetooth/kbluepin;

# D-Bus PIN helper
#dbus_pin_helper;

I can now browse my phone from my laptop, also using gnokii now works