Fedora 13 update: A month and a half or so in

OK, so this turned out be long ...

I'm not going to make this a long entry because it's Labor Day weekend and I'm laboring plenty already.

I've been running Fedora 13's Xfce spin on my new Lenovo G555 laptop for about a month and a half now, and I'm very much impressed with the performance, functionality and aggressive update policy even in an already aging (by Fedora standards) release.

By "aggressive," I mean new versions of apps with bug fixes, new kernels (not always a great thing given my ATI video, which broke in 2.6.34) and easily installed RPMs from the Koji Build System that are not in the main repo just yet.

My hardware issues at the moment (thought I would be done with these now that I have new hardware, but no ...) are Linux-wide, meaning I'm getting video issues in everything post-2.6.33 and audio issues in, well, everything.

By this I mean my ATI Radeon HD 4200 video, which has been great in just about everything but which started to look all blurry and wavy, some describing it as a vertical and horizontal sync issue, in 2.6.34 and later kernels in Fedora and Ubuntu. I also had a similar problem in PC-BSD 8.1.

Just like my Intel video problem with the old laptop everybody told me was too old to use (and now that I have a new laptop and the same kinds of problems ...), the problems with the ATI video have everything to do with the dreaded kernel mode setting.

Yep, kernel mode setting for ATI has come to the Linux kernel, and I sincerely hope somebody is benefiting from it, because as in Intel video on my 2002-era laptops, it's killing me on my 2010 laptop with ATI video.

And with the open-source ATI driver, in my case anyway, passing nomodeset or radeon.modeset=0 to the kernel at boot time doesn't clear it up. And I lose that cool boot screen between Grub and GDM.

And the problem is happening in the current Fedora 13 (with 2.6.34, not 2.6.33, which is perfect as always), the Fedora 14 alphas and the Ubuntu 10.10 beta.

I found my own "solution" to the problem in Fedora 14. I'm not deliriously happy with the hack, but here it is:

I installed the proprietary ATI driver, which a) added radeon.modeset=0 to the boot line and b) actually provides perfect video, too.

So I lost that cool post-Grub, pre-GDM boot screen, but I do have usable video in the console (which is no longer using the framebuffer, which I also miss, by the way) as well as in the GUI. And with the proprietary driver, for some reason the 2.6.33 kernel doesn't work anymore, although having a working 2.6.34 kernel is enough to stanch that psychic wound.

I wasn't able to install the proprietary ATI driver in the Ubuntu 10.10 live environment, so I can't confirm whether or not the same fix will work in Maverick.

However this all shakes out, there's still Debian Squeeze, which has a 2.6.32 kernel and works great on this Lenovo laptop.

Now on to sound. Also failing in all Linux and BSDs is the Conexant 5069 sound chip in the Lenovo G555. Not failure exactly. It sounds great, mic input seems pretty good, but plugging in a headphone jack does not mute the speakers, and that sort of limits the laptop's ability to a) allow me to listen to audio without disturbing other people and b) enable me to pipe analog audio out of the laptop in Linux without audio from the speakers bleeding into my recordings.

And yes, I am using this laptop as an analog audio source for podcast production. It's just easier to pump audio out of one PC and into the mixer on our main Audacity-running rig than to mess around with multiple audio sources in an all-digital environment. I'm just not that good, and for our purposes a little analog makes up for a multitude of digital sins.

So unfortunately when I need to do this one task, I boot into Windows 7 where plugging something into the headphone jack actually mutes the speakers.

There are all sorts of tips out there on how to trick ALSA into muting the speakers in Linux, but thus far none of them has worked for me and a) I've tried them all and b) doing so is a huge pain in the ass.

And yes, I've filed bugs on this. I'm a huge bug-filer now. So don't bug me, so to speak, because I've filed a bug in Fedora on this very issue, which is a total upstream problem, by the way ... and I guess I should look into ALSA and what the bug situation is for this issue up there.

But back to Fedora. I got my workflow back on track with gThumb 2.11.90, which I got from the Build System, I was able to not just output but also input MP3 audio with the audacity-freeworld package (loved finding out during production that I needed this ... but it was easy to get).

Audacity has been performing very, very well in Fedora 13 on this hardware (and runs just as well in Windows 7, which I'm still dual-booting and will continue to dual-boot until I and the rest of the world figures out the speaker-muting issue). Performance-wise it blows our Apple Macintosh G5 with dual CPUs out of the audio-processing water. No crashes, plus render times that are way less than half (and probably about a quarter) of what the G5 can do. Even with the annoying headphone/speaker mute issue, I've still been using the Lenovo as an Audacity workstation for podcast production.

I'm not happy that the dreaded oauth change at Twitter broke Pino, and I hope a fix is forthcoming.

As I detail above, the 2.6.34 kernel did break my video, but I'm back again with the proprietary ATI driver.

Xfce is working great. I'm not happy that Gigolo can't seemingly handle FTP connections, so I'm using FileZilla instead. But Thunar otherwise has been great.

I'm still using Mousepad for much editing, but more often than not I'm using Geany. The syntax highlighting, ability to have multiple files open, plus more search/replace options are very helpful.

Firefox has been great. I don't run into any of the problems I've had on my older hardware in terms of speed. I'm not happy with the amount of CPU the 32-bit Flash player (in the 64-bit wrapper) is eating up, but it's manageable. Java performance in my sole use of it (a photo-upload helper) has been great.

I did install the Chromium browser (from Spot's repo), but I have yet to figure out how to do the symlink for Flash (and if it will even work with the wrapped 32-bit Flash Player), so I haven't really used it. Truthfully I don't really need it.

As I mention in an entry below, I used the GIMP to create a hackergotchi (small cutout PNG image of my head) for planet-type blog aggregators. I'll tell you if I actually get "aggregated" anywhere.

While gThumb wasn't doing IPTC very well, I did install Wine and the Windows-based image editor IrfanView, which is running great. But now that gThumb is working again for IPTC in 2.11.90, I really don't need IrfanView. On that topic, Wine wouldn't install IrfanView from the .exe installer. Instead I followed a tip and just dragged the IrfanView folders onto a thumb drive and then moved them into the Windows C drive portion of my Wine installation in Fedora. I also got the mfc42.dll file from my Windows box and dropped that into Wine.

For the podcasts I'm producing, we really need to start using voice over IP, and while we've experimented with Google Voice, it looks like Skype is what we are going with due to its ubiquity and relative quality. I'm not happy thus far with the choices for recording a Skype conversation, but I'm living with it.

I'd love to figure out how to record Skype in Linux. If anybody has any tips/how-tos in that regard, please send them my way. I promise that when I have this all worked out, I'll do a full "this is how I podcast" series of entries. (FYI, these are the new shows I'm building out: Inside UCLA Podcast and The JV Show.)