Getting Fedora 13 going

I thought it is the time to use a Linux systems for my day to day work. I have used Linux enough for testing and office work, but never as my desktop. Since I did not work on Linux lately, it was a good way to keep up with new developments. All the distros looks good and solid, so selecting one was not an easy task! I considered Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora. Ubuntu was probably the most user friendly system and it has the live CD (boot from the CD and get a fully working Linux system). Suse is from Novell, and Fedora from Redhat. Since Redhat is stronger in the server market, it made sense for me to use Fedora. There was a good comparison of distros at http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major.

Took a while to download the 3.5 GB iso image, which consumed a considerable chunk of my data allowance. Installation was smooth and basic things were working. But the graphics/media support was not very encouraging. There was no flash player so youtube was out, and the highest screen resolution was 1024x768 with the Radeon x1300 card I had. It was a project to get them going. With my monitor set to native resolution of 1680x1050, it was like a stamp!.

ATI (AMD) does not seems to be supporting Linux well, there were discussions all over the web on this. The drivers provided by ATI are as-is, there were no fixes or updates. Many others who had this issue seems to solve it with mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package. The post
http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/howto-install-ati-drivers-mesa-3d-dri-experimental-on-fedora-12-linux was very helpful. I decided to try the Fedora 12 version instead of the newest. Installing it with yum with the following command line was trouble free.

yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental

Though the installation was error free, there was no change. When try to change the screen resolution, it was always giving 3 options, highest being 1024x768. Suggestions to look at the /var/log/X11.0.log was a good advice, since this shows what files it is using for configuration. Based on the information found in the net, next step is to look at the configuration file, /etc/X11/xorg.conf. This was not possible since there was no such file!

The command

Xorg -configure

suppose to create the file xorg.conf, but it didn't. However, doing this after shutting down the XWindows with

su
init 3

did create the file.However, trouble was not over - still it was showing the same resolution options, and looking at the newly created xorg.conf revealed that it did not contain entries for higher resolutions. New resolution parameters can be inserted to the file, but it should contains specific sync frequencies etc. That's where the command gtf comes in! When run with the desired resolution, it outputs the correct modeline command.

[Krish@kr-fedora ~]$ gtf 1680 1050
# 1680x1050 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 65.22 kHz; pclk: 147.14 MHz
Modeline "1680x1050_60.00" 147.14 1680 1784 1968 2256 1050 1051 1054 1087 -HSync +Vsync

This modeline entry has to go to Monitor section of xorg.conf. Then the resolution to the Screen section.

Section "Monitor"
Identifier   "Monitor0"
VendorName   "Philips"
ModelName    "Brilliance 200w"
ModeLine     "1680x1050_60.00"  147.14  1680 1784 1968 2256  1050 1051 1054 1087  -HSync +Vsync
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device     "Card0"
Monitor    "Monitor0"
SubSection "Display"
 Viewport   0 0
 Depth     24
 Modes "1680x1050"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Other than this, some values in device section also modified (Videoram, depth etc.) but again not sure if that's necessary.

Something else I noticed was my Philips monitor takes 1680x1050 and 1400x1050 both as native resolutions, but the former is better than latter. The latter looks little smudged.

Good part of the day is already gone but still it did not work! Out of options, I just selected a lower resolution to see how it looks like. Then when I went back to set it higher - bravo, here I have my native resolution listed! Looks like going to a new resolution triggered a refresh.

Getting flash going was difficult too. Installing the package from Adobe site didn't work, but using

yum intall flash-plugin

installed it correctly. However, still it does not work with Chrome, but works well with FF.

Start searching for a solution for Chrome. There was a very good wiki page at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash. They gave precise instructions to get it going. Basically, by copying (linking) the firefox plugin to chrome plugin folder.

- on 32-bit, create a symbolic link that tells Chrome how to find the 32-bit plugin:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins/libflashplayer.so

- on 64-bit, create a symbolic link that tells Chrome how to find the 64-bit plugin:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so

After restarting Chrome - everything is working! for the moment :-)