As I use ffmpegthumbnailer for PS3 Video thumbnails I needed to find a solution to this.

If I had the time I’d knock up a .spec file & rpm, but for the time being I thought I’d post my bodge…. NUMBER ONE, if you’ve never typed “configure;make;make install” before you need to install the development tools.

sudo yum groupinstall “development tools”

Next pick up a couple of extra dependencies…

sudo yum install libpng libpng-devel ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

You should now find that, if you download the source, unpack it – gunzip ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0.tar.gz;tar -xvf ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0.tar and cd ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0 hopefully you can complete ./configure without any errors.

If you try make at this point it’ll probably fail with errors, this is how I fixed that….


cd /usr/include/ffmpeg/
ln -s libavcodec/avcodec.h ./
ln -s libavformat/avformat.h ./
ln -s libswscale/swscale.h ./
ln -s libavformat/avio.h ./


Now you can… get back to the build


cd ~/ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0
make
sudo make install


If all has gone well you should have a working install

add Option "XkbOptions" "altwin:super_win" to the InputDevice section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf

It works every time. I’ve logged in and out of my laptop a few times over the last couple of days and had no problems since.

Thank you Ruben

I need to get some colleagues to run coretemp for a while to see if my laptop is broken or if it’s normal for this model of latop to run hot; in the meantime I thought I’d post some tips on what I’ve done to cool my laptop down. I’ve managed to get Fedora to idle at around 58ºC which is much closer to my windows base-line.

CPUSpeed is a service/daemon which controls what the processor is doing, i.e. if you’re not running a lot it scales down the processor to run slower and use less power, thus runs cooler. I found that my daemon was actually crashing at boot up….

#/etc/init.d/cpuspeed status
cpuspeed dead but subsys locked
#

The config file for cpuspeed is /etc/sysconfig/cpuspeed, I’ve changed the govenor from blank (default: auto detect) to GOVERNOR=ondemand which seems to have solved my crashing issue. The second thing I’ve changed is IGNORE_NICE=1 (default: 0) which is now restricting which processes can scale up the CPU. The only performance impact I’ve seen is that this setting now stops VMWARE from consuming my CPU, and since I’m a patient man this is no bad thing

Whilst comparing my windows temp to my linux one it occurred to me that it wasn’t entirely fair, in linux I’ve got compiz graphics enabled, and a load of gnome applets which tell me information about networking, cpu speed, cpu temperature, the weather etc…. since windows has none of these it’s fair to say that my linux desktop should run a little hotter…. so the “other” trick I’ve done to bring the temperature down is to renice the applets to a lower priority…

ps ax | grep "applet" | grep -v grep|cut -c 1-5|xargs sudo renice 1

This seems to have done the trick, anything called “applet” now runs at nice 1 rather than 0, the net effect is these processes are queued up behind the “important” ones rather than continuously scaling up the processor.

I’m happy with the results so far, the desk is a lot cooler!

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=5527

A big thanks to mwiriadi for this!

As with all fedora installs it’s always two steps forward and one step back, my reasons for upgrading were:

• Evolution 2.12
• Pam & Network Manager Integration and a Network Manager Upgrade
• Compiz included

Unfortunately so far I’ve had a couple of issues (my steps back),

• Network Manager won’t connect to my Hidden SSID
• RHGB doesn’t seem to work with encrypted drives
• … and I haven’t had a chance to look into why vpnc crashes when I try to configure it !

It’s a shame that beagle still doesn’t index my evolution exchange account other than that all looks good, the wallpaper that changes on the time of day is a neat feature; I recommend the following resources to anyone looking to upgrade or use fedora.

• Fedora 8 install guide (aka perfect install)
• Fedora FAQ

I’ve had a chance to fix some annoying bugs with my laptop/life, and thought I’d share them here, they’ll pop-up in delicious when I get a chance to go thought my shared list, but until then here are some links….

Fedora: Java Clobbers/Breaks File Associations in Gnome/Nautilus
Gmail: Can’t enable IMAP, because it’s not available in UK English.
WMA to MP3: Converted some old tracks I found in a backup.
Gnome: Changed the colour of tooltips as doing it in the theme file didn’t work
Eye Candy: Fixed my CPU Temp Gauge (by typing sensors-detect, and following the instructions!)

Enjoy!

I stumbled across this the other day, I’ve no idea why the fedora team would go to the effort of making a really nice theme for the lock dialogue for gnome screen saver then leave it “disabled by default”. After a quick google I found the ubuntu guys have been up to something similar, so here a quick how to enable the fedora art work on the gnome-screensaver lock screen.

To enable paste this into a terminal (NOT root, as your normal user).

gconftool-2 -s --type=string /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_dialog_theme system


To switch it back:

gconftool-2 -s --type=string /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_dialog_theme default


The only “downer” is that your avatar isn’t shown, but for my work laptop I prefer this theme, much cooler fedora advocate when I’m not at my desk

It is now possible to limit yum to install security updates only. To do so, simply install the yum-security plugin and run the following command:

yum update –security

Hopefully this will allow fedora users to have the option of running a “stable” install

These are the steps I ran through to enable usb networking between my nokia n800 and my fedora 7 laptop.

First we’ll start with the basic setup… I’ll assume you’ve read a getting started article similar to mine and already have root & xterm. By default n800 has a usb interface configured, you just need to enable it, so on your n800 type:

sudo gainroot
insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.18-omap1/g_ether.ko
ifup usb0

The default settings add an interface with a static ip of 192.168.2.15/24 with a default gateway of 192.168.2.14.

Now lets set up something similar on Fedora, you need to create a file in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts called ifcfg-usb0 with the following…

DEVICE=usb0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.2.14
BROADCAST=192.168.2.255
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.2.0
ONBOOT=no
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=no

Now plug the usb cable into both devices, and on your fedora box (as root) type

ifup usb0

You now have connectivity, of course if you have a default fedora install pinging 192.168.2.15 will fail because of the firewall, it is probably best to temporarily disable the firewall (/etc/init.d/iptables stop) to see if it works, if so move onto configuring your firewall correctly (/etc/init.d/iptables start starts it again) You may also get usb conflicts, you can try

rmmod uhci_hcd

but it will disable any USB devices, you have been warned.

With this basic connectivity setup you’ll have two issues; you only have connectivity between fedora & n800 nothing else works, and opening any application on n800 causes it to try and connect to your wifi, so lets look at those….

I’m going to assume you used system-config-securitylevel to configure your firewall, its worth noting that any changes you make now will be overwritten by any future use of system-config-securitylevel so it’s probably best to take a backup of /etc/sysconfig/ipatbles now and later when you’re finished.

So as root type:

iptables -I RH-Firewall-1-INPUT 2 -i usb -j ACCEPT
iptables -I FORWARD 1 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
iptables -I FORWARD 1 -s 192.168.2.0/24 -j ACCEPT
iptables --table nat --append POSTROUTING --out-interface eth0 -s 192.168.2.0/24 -j MASQUERADE
/etc/init.d/iptables save

This will allow all connectivity in from the usb interface allowing the n800 to send packets into the fedora box whilst the firewall is running, it will also NAT any traffic from the usb network hiding the n800 behind fedora so that you get onward connectivity. To get the NAT to work you need to enable ip forwarding, this allows fedora to pass pakets between interfaces, to do that type

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

and to get it to survive a reboot update /etc/sysctl.conf with

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

The final part is to enable name resolution (DNS), on n800, I updated /etc/resolv.conf with the opendns servers…

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

All things being equal you should now be able to ping www.google.com from your n800

To get applications to connect, I found on the latest version of ITOS that the DUMMY IAP didn’t work, so I stumbled across this solution.

Create an “ad hoc” wifi connection with static IPs… anything it doesn’t matter, and when that’s connected in xterm (as root) type ifconfig wlan0 down , you should now be able to connect to the web with your browser / skype etc over your usb network… sweet!

I’ve updated my repo for fedora 7, so.. yum install weather-wallpaper should do the trick

Edit: Hidden yum transation behind more tag.


[nick@localhost SPECS]$ sudo yum install weather-wallpaper
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
livna 100% |=========================| 2.1 kB 00:00
LINICKX 100% |=========================| 951 B 00:00
primary.xml.gz 100% |=========================| 1.4 kB 00:00
LINICKX : ################################################## 2/2
fedora 100% |=========================| 2.1 kB 00:00
adobe-linux-i386 100% |=========================| 951 B 00:00
updates 100% |=========================| 1.9 kB 00:00
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package weather-wallpaper.i386 0:0.1.0-1 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: python-pymetar for package: weather-wallpaper
--> Restarting Dependency Resolution with new changes.
--> Running transaction check
---> Package weather-wallpaper.i386 0:0.1.0-1 set to be updated
---> Package python-pymetar.i386 0:0.12-1 set to be updated

Dependencies Resolved

=================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
=================================
Installing:
weather-wallpaper i386 0.1.0-1 LINICKX 122 k
Installing for dependencies:
python-pymetar i386 0.12-1 LINICKX 37 k

Transaction Summary
=================================
Install 2 Package(s)
Update 0 Package(s)
Remove 0 Package(s)

Total download size: 159 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
(1/2): python-pymetar-0.1 100% |=========================| 37 kB 00:00
(2/2): weather-wallpaper- 100% |=========================| 122 kB 00:00
Running rpm_check_debug
–> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
—> Package weather-wallpaper.i386 0:0.1.0-1 set to be updated
—> Package python-pymetar.i386 0:0.12-1 set to be updated
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: python-pymetar ######################### [1/2]
Installing: weather-wallpaper ######################### [2/2]

Installed: weather-wallpaper.i386 0:0.1.0-1
Dependency Installed: python-pymetar.i386 0:0.12-1
Complete!