You can vote for your favourite name at https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/about/relnamef16 but I can’t see how anything can beat the beef!

See: Fedora 14 Currently Supported EC2 Images

The only issue currently stopping me is that Fedora boxes need updates all the time, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad with a minimal image!

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