bobpeers -> blog

After installing Fedora 10, Network Manager correctly identified my network interfaces as eth0 for wireless and eth1 for wired. However my wired connection used to be my default connection named Auto eth1 so Network Manager would connect on start up and this is the way I prefer.

Since installing Fedora 10 my eth1 connection is now called System eth1 but it is not set to connect automatically. I also cannot change this setting since, when I try to edit my connection, the edit button for System eth1 is greyed out and so not available.

The workaround was easy enough, I just created a new wired connection with exactly the same settings as the System eth1 but set to connect automatically. So now I have entries for System eth1 and Default eth1 that are effectively the same. My point is, why can’t I edit the System eth1, and if that’s the correct set up, what’s the point in this connection?

I posted a very similar article using Fedora 9 but it seems that things have changed between Fedora 9 and 10.

The old instructions mentioned adding the DNS servers to your /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf file but this file does not even exist on Fedora 10. It turns out that you need to add the lines to /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0 (change eth0 to the connection you wish to edit) as shown here, my file now looks like this.

# Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T
DEVICE=eth1
HWADDR=00:00:00:00:00:00
ONBOOT=no
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
USERCTL=no
PEERDNS=no
IPV6INIT=no
NM_CONTROLLED=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
# add these lines with your DNS servers
DNS1=208.67.222.222
DNS2=208.67.220.220

Rstart your networking to see the changes. If you’re using NetworkManager and right click on the applet to edit the connections you will see that the IPV4 tab now says ‘Automatic (DHCP) addresses only’ with the DNS servers listed in the box below.

I’ve noticed that I’m getting a strange problem with text boxes and textareas in Firefox. For some reason they are greyed out and exhibit a bad tearing issue when pages first load, when another window is dragged over them or they are scrolled in and out of the visible screen.

It didn’t look like this using the same version of Firefox on Fedora 9 so I’m wondering what has changed. I even downloaded the version from Mozilla but it looks exactly the same.

On a brighter note this is the first time I’ve been able to log into my webbank (that requires Java) without installing Sun Java. In the past the open Java that shipped with Fedora didn’t support secure sites but OpenJDK worked out of the box. Having said that it did crash Firefox 4 times in a row yesterday so maybe I’ll still be using Sun Java.

I downloaded and installed Fedora 10 on Wednesday evening so it’s time for my first impressions.

My first problem was that I always boot from the hard drive to avoid burning disks, plus it’s faster, but a change in Anaconda meant that my disk image could not be found. Turns out that you have to copy the images/install.img file from the ISO and place it in the same directory as the ISO file. I’ll have to update my instructions for Fedora 10.

Apart from that the install went very smoothly, no problems at all and at the end my system appeared to function perfectly. I had Apache and MySQL running very quickly plus my file systems set up in fstab.

There are a few irritations though, the first one being a boot message:

Could not detect stabilization, waiting 10 seconds

It seems this is a pretty common problem but to be honest it only slows my booting time but doesn’t have any other adverse affect so it’s not a show stopper. The bugzilla report is here.

The other one was that I had backup up my /home directory to an external usb drive formatted using ntfs. When I reconnected the drive to copy the data back one of the directories showed no contents. Running ls -l in the terminal gave and I/O Error, so the data was there but I couldn’t read it.

Looking at /var/log/messages showed these errors.

Nov 27 21:09:44 localhost kernel: sdb: rw=0, want=312576705, limit=2359296
Nov 27 21:09:44 localhost kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device

and these from the ntfs-3g driver.

Nov 27 20:52:14 localhost ntfs-3g[3035]: Actual VCN (0xaef30fce1d8901e6) of index buffer is different from expected VCN (0x2) in inode 0xdd4.

My solution was to copy the data to another laptop and then copy it over to a FAT32 formatted flash drive before reformatting the usb drive. I’m not sure if this is a Fedora problem or a corrupted NTFS file system but windows had no problem reading the contents.

I’m also getting a kernel panic on an internal FAT32 partition that causing it to become read-only, pretty annoying when my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles are stored there so I can use the same profile between Linux and Windows. The message log looks like this.

Nov 28 21:08:01 localhost kernel: FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda2)
Nov 28 21:08:01 localhost kernel:    clusters badly computed (89 != 88)
Nov 28 21:08:01 localhost kernel:    File system has been set read-only

I’ve repaired the file system so hopefully there’s no more errors, it seems OK so far.

Compared to my problems with Fedora 9 it seems that Fedora 10 is a vast improvement, but I hope these corrupted file system problems are just a coincidence. Overall for a fresh install of a very new release I’m very happy with Fedora 10.

I hope to add some more posts very soon, it’s not that there’s nothing happening but rather a bit too much going on.

At work I’m involved with a project in SAP that takes all my time, I’ve also written some webpages in ASP.NET using C#, something I’ve never done before. I’ve also got a new work laptop, a HP 6930p so I’ll write my impressions on that soon.

Personally I’ve had an old schoolfriend visit who now lives in Melbourne, Australia plus I’ve just come back from a week visiting family in England so spare time is in short supply right now.

On top of all that Fedora 10 comes out in 12 days!