Quote:There have been a number of bugs reported in Red Hat bugzilla againstX which have recently been tracked down to 3rd party video drivers being

the culprit behind the problem the user was experienced. In many of the

cases however, it wasn't obvious that the 3rd party drivers were at

fault because the user was actually using the Red Hat supplied drivers,

and not using the 3rd party driver that they had previously installed.

 

Since I've wasted at least 6-8 hours in the last month diagnosing issues

of this nature which have later turned out to be caused by proprietary

drivers having been "installed" on the system, wether they were actually

being *used* or not, I thought I should write a short useful

informational email on the topic to the lists to try and inform people

of some pitfalls you may encounter if you even _install_ 3rd party

video drivers.

 

Both ATI and Nvidia, and perhaps even other 3rd party drivers out there

come in some form of tarball or equivalent form from the particular

vendor. Most users seem to favour the hardware vendor supplied drivers

directly, rather than using more sanely packaged 3rd party packages that

contain the same drivers. This is very unfortunate, because installing

these 3rd party tarball driver installations is very harmful to your

clean OS installation.

 

Both ATI and Nvidia's proprietary video driver installation utilities

replace the Red Hat supplied libGL library with their own libGL.

Nvidia's driver installs a replacement libglx.a X server module,

removing the Red Hat supplied X.Org module in the process. ATI's

driver may or may not replace libglx.a with it's own, I haven't checked

(but if someone could confirm that, I'd appreciate knowing for certain).

 

Once you have either of these drivers installed on your system, you

can no longer use DRI with any video card. So if you install the

ATI fglrx driver, while you should still be able in theory at least

to use the Red Hat supplied radeon driver, you may no longer be able

to use DRI with the radeon driver, because ATI's driver has blown away

critical files that come with the OS that are needed for proper

operation.

 

If you install Nvidia's driver, and later decide to install an ATI

card, and still have Nvidia's driver installed, bang - you will not

be able to get Red Hat supplied DRI 3D acceleration to work. You must

remove Nvidia's driver completely from your hard disk, and completely

reinstall all of the xorg-x11 and mesa packages, and ensure they are

all intact by using:

 

rpm -Va

 

Another problem being reported by a few people, is they are unable to

get DRI to work because mesa libGL is looking for the DRI drivers in

the wrong directory. The claim is that mesa is looking for the DRI

drivers in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules.

 

On a fresh OS install however, my findings are that mesa's libGL very

much is not looking in /usr/X11R6 for it's modules. It is looking in

the proper location of /usr/lib/dri for the modules. Why then is it

looking in the wrong place on some systems?

 

Answer: Because of fglrx having been installed. If you have had a

previous OS release installed, and have installed ATI's fglrx driver

from tarball, it has removed the OS supplied libGL et al and made

backup copies of them aparently. Now you do an OS upgrade which works

properly and installs everything in the right place. Then you uninstall

ATI's fglrx with whatever script or whatever they supply, and now you

try to run X, and get no DRI!

 

Well, since you don't have fglrx installed at all, it must be our

OS at fault right! Wrong. the uninstall script has put the OLD

libGL it backed up (from FC4 or whatever) back in the system,

overwriting the new FC5 supplied libGL in the process, and since

ATI's fglrx driver is DRI based as well, it looks for the DRI

modules in the wrong place now.

 

Conclusions:

If you are going to use any 3rd party proprietary drivers, please do

yourself and everyone else a huge favour, and at least get your

drivers from reputable 3rd party rpm package repositories such as

livna.org which packages both the nvidia and ati proprietary drivers

in rpm packages which install the drivers sanely without overwriting

Red Hat/Fedora supplied files. These 3rd party packages install

the files in alternative locations, and configure the X server et al.

appropriately so that everything works. Since they do not blow

away OS supplied files, you can use the OS supplied drivers still

by reconfiguring xorg.conf. Also, if you decide to uninstall the

3rd party drivers via rpm, they just go away and cause no further

harm to the system. So PLEASE USE THIRD PARTY RPM PACKAGES if you

_must_ use 3rd party drivers. It helps create world peace.

 

If you choose to install ATI or Nvidia tarball/whatever drivers

directly from ATI/Nvidia (or any other vendor for that matter), your

system is 100% completely and totally unsupported. Even if you are

using _our_ drivers, your 3rd party driver installation may have

blown away our libGL, our libglx.a or any other files that have been

supplied by our OS. As such, your system is not supported.

 

For those who encounter a bug of any kind whatsoever while using

3rd party video drivers, completely remove the 3rd party drivers

from your system, and then perform a full "yum update" to ensure

you have the latest Fedora Core supplied X packages installed. After

doing this, do an "rpm -Va" of your whole system, in particular the

xorg-x11-*, mesa-* and lib* packages. If there are any discrepancies

found in any of the Fedora supplied packages, in particular in libGL,

or the X server packages, remove them and reinstall them and reverify

that the files installed on your system are the ones shipped by

Fedora.

 

If you are able to reproduce the problem you are having after having

performed these steps, and having ensured that you are neither using

3rd party drivers, nor even have them installed, then feel free to

file a bug report in bugzilla.

 

By doing this small amount of pre-diagnosis of your own system if

you are using 3rd party drivers, you will save yourself a lot of

headaches, and will save other people, including developers such

as myself from wasting endless hours trying to diagnose problems

which turn out to be bogus. Hours which could have been spent

fixing legitimate bugs that are present in bugzilla.

 

As an additional note - if anyone is using proprietary drivers and

has any problems which they believe might actually be a bug in

Xorg and not in their proprietary driver - file such bugs directly

in X.Org bugzilla. X.Org has an nVidia (closed) component specifically

for the proprietary driver, and Nvidia engineers get those bugs and

will investigate them over time.

 

Anyhow, I hope this helps people understand at least some of the

problems that can occur when you opt to using 3rd party drivers,

present some alternatives, and to help people diagnose their own

problems which might be caused by having installed 3rd party

drivers.

 

Thanks for reading.

TTYL

 

 

P.S. Feel free to forward this email on to any other lists or

people whom you think might benefit from it. Also, if anyone thinks

this information would be useful to have on the Fedora Wiki or

somewhere else, feel free to copy my email into a wiki page, or

paraphrase, etc.

 

 

 

--

Mike A. Harris,

Systems Engineer, X11 Development team,

Red Hat Canada, Ltd.

Program Installed: Photoshop 7.0

 

I would like to create a launcher on my desktop to run Photoshop. What would an example command 'syntax' for doing this?

 

I've tried:

 

wine
/.wine/____/ ____/
photoshop.exe


/.wine/____/____/
wine
photoshop.exe


 

When I double click on the new launcher, it seems like it's trying to do something (the hour glass shows up) but it never opens photoshop.

 

Help?

 

*The blank lines (_____) just represent the directory folders that lead to the one containing photoshop.exe.

Hello all! I'm Derek!

 

/********QUICK REFERENCE FROM SIG***********/


 

//MY PC SPECS


 

OS = Ubuntu 6.06 (Switchted from Suse 10.1)


Sony Vaio VGN-FE550G Notebook

Intel

How do I extend my mainbar to cover the entire bottom of my screen? (instead of just being snapped to the right) IF it was extended I would be able to have more windows minimized. (instead of browsing through fluxbox1 fluxbox2 fluxbox3)

If you don

official announcement here

 

[/url]https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-anno...y/msg00059.html

 

Quote:Announcing Fedora Core 5 Test 3 

* From: Jesse Keating <jkeating redhat com>

* To: fedora-test-list <fedora-test-list redhat com>, fedora-devel-list <fedora-devel-list redhat com>, fedora-announce-list redhat com, fedora-list <fedora-list redhat com>

* Cc:

* Subject: Announcing Fedora Core 5 Test 3

* Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 10:02:42 -0800

 

Forty-four years ago, John Hershel Glenn Jr. is successfully launched

into space aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first orbital

flight by an American astronaut. Russia had already sent two cosmonauts

into orbit at this time. In the many following years Russian and

America race each other for space superiority. Much later Russia and

America have finally started cooperating in Earth's adventures into

space. Competition is good, but collaboration can by so much better.

 

Today, Open Source stands as one of the ultimate examples of

collaboration. No boundaries, no borders, no barriers. As an example

of this collaboration, we are proud to announce:

 

Fedora Core 5 Test 3 Now Available

==================================

The Fedora Project announces the third release of the Fedora Core 5

development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64

architectures. Beware that Test releases are recommended only for Linux

experts/enthusiasts or for technology evaluation, as many parts are

likely to be broken and the rate of change is rapid.

 

http://fedora.redhat.com/About/schedule/

Final is scheduled for release March 15. This aggressive schedule makes vitally

important your help in testing, reporting and suggesting fixes for bugs.

Please direct bugs to http://bugzilla.redhat.com, Product Fedora Core,

Version fc5test3. As always, be sure that your bug is not already fixed

by updates and search for existing bugs before filing.

 

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/ReleaseFreezeProcess/

During the continual freeze process, very few changes will be

introduced. This is to prevent new bugs from surfacing and to ensure

that Fedora Core 5 is the best release we can make it. Rawhide reports

over the next three weeks should be very sparse. Please do test the few

updates extensively.

 

Thanks to all in the Fedora Project who have contributed to this

release. Your continued efforts are what makes Fedora possible.

 

Downloads

=========

DVD, CD and network installation are available.

Please read the Important Warnings below in this announcement for more

details.

 

http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

The recommended method of download is via BitTorrent from this site.

 

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html

HTTP, FTP, and RSYNC downloads are available from Fedora Project mirrors

listed above. Note that not all mirrors may be synced at this time.

 

Notable Features of FC5 Test 3

==============================

* Xen, now with x86_64!

* Package selection within the installer has been reenabled.

* Rebuilt again on later gcc4.1 snapshot for performance and security

* Hibernate should be functional on a wide variety of hardware again

(use pm-hibernate to test)

* PPC Install CDs are bootable once again

* Unified SRPM set instead of one per arch

* Lots of bugfixes from Test 2 release testing

* 1600+ Extras packages conveniently available via yum

 

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/

Latest version of release notes are available from here. (not yet

uploaded, will be soon.

 

Important Warnings

==================

[url=http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Test3CommonProblems]http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Test3CommonProblems

Please see this page for an updated list of important notes for FC5test3

in order to avoid common problems and troubleshoot problems that you may

see.

 

Have fun testing this release, and enjoy the collaboration

of Linux.

 

--

Jesse Keating

Release Engineer: Fedora

 

Attachment: signature.asc

Description: This is a digitally signed message part

Hi,

 

We have SLES Server on our premises and we are planning to set up gforge as the project management for the students and have thus been able to set up the gforge site. However we need to also setup a authentication via LDAP for the students as this would oterwise become a very tedious job.

 

If nay ne knows of a way to do this, please reply asap.

so help a guy out, and DIGG it

 

[/url]http://digg.com/linux_unix/Evolution_of_Fedora_Core_Linux

 

cheers

anyweb

 

[url=http://digg.com/linux_unix/Evolution_of_Fedora_Core_Linux]http://digg.com/linux_unix/Evolution_of_Fedora_Core_Linux

please check it out

 

The unabated development of Fedora Linux

 

cheers

 

anyweb

Before I start this guide, I need to point out that I'm a linux newbie myself, and I have very little experience with it. I have a passion for computers though, and learning new stuff is something I enjoy very much.

I made my Wireless Network Interface Card (Hereon NIC) work on a HP ZE2247EA laptop. I'm running Fedora Core 4, from a standard, out of the box, installation.

 

The following guide needs to be performed as root.

 

The first step, is to identify your NIC, and what chipset it is. When this is done, figure out what drivers WINDOWS would use to make it work. An easy way to do this, if you are running a dualboot, is to check the driver details in windows. When I did that on my computer, I found that my driver is called bcmwl5.inf.

 

My first attempt at using this driver turned out bad. I had downloaded a 64bit windows driver, but Fedora was kind enough to tell me that I needed a 32 bit, so my search for the correct driver continued. Finally stricking luck, at [/url]http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List , I downloaded the correct file and proceeded installing ndiswrapper.

 

In Fedora, this was a simple task. Something as easy as typing yum install ndiswrapper would be sufficient *if you have a wired internet connection*. Allthough, the kernel needs to support ndiswrapper aswell, so to implement this in the same command, simply type: