Fedora 9 wishlist

1. SmartTools doesnt configure all disks - yet I have to manually configure the .conf file
2. lm_sensors found only the cpu sensor - what gives ?? I see CPU, GPU, Memory, Chipset and Hard disk using the I8kfanGui tool by Christian Diefer

By the way incase you haven't used it - I recommend installing the I8kfanGui tool from http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html and SpeedSwitch tool from http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/index.html while you are on Windows XP. Ofcourse on Linux cpu_throtling does a pretty good job :)

Fedora 9 Issues

Ok finally got around to installing Fedora 9 and there seems to be more than the usual share of issues !!

1. Synaptic touchpad don't work out of the box installation - [UPDATE] check my later postings on this topic.
   
2. wpa_supplicant is still kicking in way after networking has started - I don't know why RedHat/Fedora still thinks WiFi is a optional add on network device.
3. Grub gets confused with which XP partition is primary - my second partition is flagged as bootable yet it configured grub.conf with hd(0,2)
4. mke2fs defaults to inode size of 256 - this is not backward compatible and more specifically it won't work with EXT2 IFS windows ext2 driver.
   

If your life depends on tapping on your touch pad - be ready to change configurations. This is an outstanding open issue https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439386

wpa_supplicant is still an issue as my post from Fedora 7 mentions. Do note it doesnt prevent networking from establishing or WiFi being unavailable. It is just irritating and it is definitely not the "right thing" to do. If wpa_supplicant starts after networking your wlan0 device will start and not finding the right device available will go to sleep and wait for it to return which happens whenever wpa_supplicant starts successfully.

The third point needs elaboration since my partition layout is a bit unusual. I have three entries - one linux and two NTFS - the second entry points to the third physical partition and the third entry is pointing to the second physical partition. Although common sense says trust the partition table and not the layout !!

Fedora 7 hangs trying to boot after installation

If you have a intel dual core CPU Fedora 7 is most probably going to hang trying to boot up.

This is a known bug in the release and they are still working on it.

You might want to keep track of it on this page
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=241249
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F7Common

Ideally you should have read the second URL before installing Fedora 7 but if you were one of them then you wouldn't have to wait for me to tell you that would you !! :).

UPDATE: It probably is too late for an update but for the sake of completeness this was fixed long back.

Feodra 7 & Intel 3945 WIFI

This is how I got my DELL E1705 to connect to my 802.11G wifi router.

1. Run the following to generate the wpa_supplicant.conf
   

   wpa_passphrase luke >> /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf



2. Edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and ensure no dummy session like this exists
   

   network {
   ...
   ...
   }



3. Ensure "ONBOOT=yes " in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0


4. Edit /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant and make sure these are the values set in it
   

   INTERFACES="-iwlan0"
   Driver="-Dwext"



5. Go to /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/ and do the following
   

   mv S12wpa_supplicant S09wpa_supplicant



6. Go to /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/ and repeat the above step


7. As root run the following
   

   chkconfig wpa_supplicant on
   chkconfig NetworkManager off
   chkconfig NetworkManagerDispatcher off

To summarize - this is what we are doing

1. Ensure wpa_supplicant is configured properly - this is the heart of the connection


2. Ensure the interface is started on boot up - we wont have a network without it ;)


3. Ensure wpa_supplicant enables the correct interface and uses the right driver


4. There is no reason why the wpa_supplicant should wait for networking to startup. We have all the reason for it to be ready before we try to enable any wireless interface.


5. NetworkManager is an alternate solution if you dont want to tweak with wpa_supplicant. You would use it you don't like touching configuration files nor do you care for having wifi as the only network available on bootup. Remember NetworkManager kicks in only after you log into your account.