Linux-related materials
After my EeePC 901 decided to take a nap during software upgrade via:
# yum update
I ended up dealing with broken dependencies and such even after running things like
# yum-complete-transaction
So after some digging turns out I’ve got double entries for many packages having their pre-update and post-update versions seemingly installed at the same time. Looks like solution was pretty simple:
# yum install yum-utils
# package-cleanup –cleandupes
I was trying to set up a laptop with Fedora 16 & LXDE to have alternative layouts and it turned out LXDE was pretty spartan when it comes to such things. So back to Xorg setup. On-the-fly change:
$ setxkbmap -option ” -option grp:switch,grp:alt_shift_toggle ‘us,ru(phonetic)
and a bit more permanent solution is (obviously) in /etc/sysconfig/keyboard :
KEYTABLE=”us”
MODEL=”pc105+inet”
LAYOUT=”us,ru(phonetic)”
OPTIONS=”grp:switch,grp:alt_shift_toggle”
With addition of LXDE applet via
“Right click on the panel → select Add / Remove Panel Items → Add → select Keyboard Layout Switcher and click Add
use the Up and Down buttons to move the plugin to the desired position.
You can now switch layouts by using the keyboard shortcut or by clicking on the xkb plugin”
Today, out of the blue my box decided to do the RAID check on my MD devices. I can’t remember seeing it before while I was running Gentoo, but now with Fedora things feel somewhat different. Fedora does automate quite a few things out of the box – the things I have omitted in my previous Gentoo experience.
What have caught my attention was both high load on machine (out of the blue) and:
# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] [raid0] md126 : active raid1 sdc6[1] sda6[0] 308793280 blocks [2/2] [UU] [========>............] check = 40.7% (125758464/308793280) finish=43.7min speed=69702K/sec
which lead me to a nearby Google outlet where I immediately borrowed some wisdom on a somewhat related subject: disks and S.M.A.R.T.:
# smartctl --health /dev/sdc smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-2.6.38.8-32.fc15.x86_64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED Please note the following marginal Attributes: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 053 040 045 Old_age Always In_the_past 47 (2 51 47 25)
so after enjoying rather interesting feature (smartctl that is) I have also checked around and found out that in some configurations it’s an “automatic behavior”. Which lead me to further discoveries this time from Ubuntu-land and ended up in glorious discovery of “magic device” in my posession:
# cat /etc/cron.d/raid-check # Run system wide raid-check once a week on Sunday at 1am by default 0 1 * * Sun root /usr/sbin/raid-check
…back to sorting out the rest of my Gentoo -> Fedora migration…
After successfully installing Fedora Core 15 on my home box I am moving all my stuff from Gentoo to Fedora. I’m still questioning my move, but lately I have less and less time to dedicate to proper maintenance of Gentoo, not to mention that at work I run RedHat servers so I’m much more familiar with RedHat insides than Gentoo’s at the moment (wasn’t like that a year or two ago). I still think Gentoo is a brilliant distro and taught me a lot about inner workings of things; I didn’t want to go Ubuntu (I really does piss me off how it gets in my way all the time) so Fedora was more like a happy medium between Gentoo and Ubuntu and it would provide some learning grounds for my office use of RedHat. Prior to my home move I moved my office machine with no problems whatsoever, but then my office setup was not as elaborate as the one at home. I have already tried migrating to Fedora at home once and failed thanks to LiveCD’s. This time I’ve got a system that works and doesn’t show too many signs of instability. Another thing is to keep Gentoo around in a VM just in case I have to fall back to it for some apps/functions.
Plan of actions:
Couple of interesting hurdles/glitches:
So here’s the story so far…
Installing flash I ended up with 32bit Adobe crap bolted via nsplugin-wrapper (lightspark turned out to be quite unstable in Fedora). But at least it works…
To know where my problems start you’d have to know where am I coming from. So on my Gentoo box I’ve been using ReiserFS for quite some time now due to effectiveness of it on systems with lots of small files. I also have a NAS where most of my stuff lives (or is synced to) mounted over NFS.
After installing F15 on a fresh new partition[s] and making sure install is functional it was the time for migration of the systems. Couple of problems I ran into on the first go:
First one was easy – SElinux operates in “permissive” mode now and I slowly collect it’s reports and combine fixes either into a policy or fix contexts etc. on-disk. Very tedious task. Couple of really useful tips:
from Dan Walsh:
If he had the te files from the previous run, he could use audit2allow to add rules to the te file.
# audit2allow >> myexim.te << /var/log/audit/audit.log,
I haven’t realized that every time I ran “audit2allow -M” it was leaving .te file for me in root’s home directory. So instead of generating gazillion tiny policies I ended up buffing up one generated by audit2allow further and further. Cuts down on clutter and keeps things neat.
Fedora SELinux pages have quite a bit of info too and were quite helpful in understanding what I’m dealing with so far.
My NFS shares from NAS mounted ok as root, but when I got to user access I discovered that I can’t view anything on NAS. Which naturally pissed me off. Then it dawned on me that NAS has groups out-of-sync with my workstation so I have to create nas-like group on my machine and get myself into it. So after simply adding;
nas_users:x:102:me,myself,myfamily
to /etc/group and re-logging in things started to look bit better.
Next punch was delivered by systemd – it clearly gets ahead of itself and tries to mount MD RAID/LVM volumes prior to their initialization. So my first attempt was to get mounts into systemd-like form by crafting things like that:
$ cat /etc/systemd/system/mnt-gentoo.mount # This file is part of systemd. # # systemd is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it # under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. [Unit] Description=Gentoo root After=dev-md124.device Requires=dev-md124.device [Mount] What=/dev/md124 Where=/mnt/gentoo Type=ext3 # Options=bind
which looks and feels as an abomination to me. So it took me some time and effort and my last (but not least hackish) attempt looks like this: we initialize all MD/LVM devices from boot string via dracut – truly a strike of evil genius:
title Fedora (2.6.40.3-0.fc15.x86_64) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.40.3-0.fc15.x86_64 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_gamer-rootfs rd_luks=0 rd.dm=0 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us nodmraid nouveau.modeset=0 rdblacklist=nouveau rd.md.uuid=61111111:11111111:11111111:dd6f447f rd.md.uuid=21111111:11111111:11111111:3ac2a021 rd.md.uuid=f1111111:11111111:11111111:96e591a2 rd.md.uuid=f1111111:11111111:11111111:bb65be89 rd.lvm.vg=rvg rd.lvm.vg=vg_gamer rd.lvm.vg=backup initrd /initramfs-2.6.40.3-0.fc15.x86_64.img
If that doesn’t look evil – I don’t know what does…
I’ve been using Fedora on my workstation at the office for quite a while and was pretty happy with it but when it came to install on home machine I was never able to complete setup for one reason or another.
What really surprised me is how flaky LiveCD’s were when it comes to my system and setup. I had installer crash on me in random places and overall quality of installed system being below what I have on my workstation at the office. After multiple failed attempts and aggravation caused by Fedora’s inistance on renumbering of my MD devices which causes annoying inconvenience booting Gentoo back, I have arrived at a setup option that looks workable: Install from DVD. Not liveCD! Fedora didn’t make it an apparent choice – it’s burried in their download screens under “alternative media”. Installing F14 I used that option which explains why I never had problems with that install. Now after using F15 Installer DVD I think it should’ve been the default option and liveCD should be a fall-back.
Here’s the difference – liveCD already has a pre-installed version of the OS that you may or may not agree with and apparently some settings there didn’t quite agree with my system design. Now that I went through full install and was able to customize system at install time (not to mention net install option where you install up-to-date system) things look much brighter.
