VirtualBox 3.0 in Fedora 11

How to get VirtualBox 3.0 installed with USB support on Fedora 11.

We need to install a little something to get the module to actually build before we install Virtualbox.

As root:

# yum install dkms kernel-devel make automake autoconf gcc

Then install VirtualBox:

32bit:

# rpm -Uhv http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.0.0/VirtualBox-3.0.0_49315_fedora11-1.i586.rpm

64bit

# rpm -Uhv http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.0.0/VirtualBox-3.0.0_49315_fedora11-1.x86_64.rpm

Right, now for the usb part. Got to find out the Group ID for vboxusers now. Go to Administration -> Users and Groups.

Remember the Group ID of vboxusers

Select the vboxusers group and press properties, add yourself to this group.

Add yourself to this group

Now we just have to add this little line to /etc/fstab

none /sys/bus/usb/drivers usbfs devgid=501,devmode=664 0 0

note that 501 was the Group ID for vboxusers, which you are a member of, this grants you usb inside VirtualBox.

Now, reboot and try out your virtual boxes!

Thanks to readysleep for the fstab info!

Fullscreen flash in firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5 crashes when trying to view a flash video in fullscreen.
Not to worry, for there is a workaround.

in /usr/lib/firefox-3.5.1pre/firefox.sh

EDIT: the path on Fedora 11 is: /usr/lib/firefox-3.5/run-mozilla.sh
you add export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so.1 at the beginning of the file, but underneath #!/bin/sh

So it looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
#fix the goddamn flash bug.
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so.1

# Firefox launcher containing a Profile migration helper for
# temporary profiles used during alpha and beta phases.

…

Save, and try out some flash video in fullscreen.

This should work for Archlinux, Fedora and Ubuntu. The path to firefox.sh might vary though.

Workaround taken from https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/333127/comments/13

Amarok 2.1 and Fedora 11 KDE

Howto get Amarok 2.1 to see your “iTunes” share, or mt-daapd in this case, also known as firefly.

Obviously we begin by installing Amarok .

I installed a bunch of stuff trying to get this to work, most of it avahi-related, but the thing that got it working was nss-mdns.

Install a bunch of stuff:

`yum install avahi-qt4 avahi-dnsconfd avahi-compat-libdns_sd kdnssd-avahi avahi nss-mdns libopendaap`

EDIT: you only need nss-mdns, double checked.

Don’t forget to open the port in the firewall.

open port 5353

Fire up Amarok and listen away! Takes a while before you see your share, but it will show up.

Fedora 11

This is a short howto get the Nvidia drivers and multimedia stuff installed on your new Fedora 11.
I assume you have a newly installed system before following this. The first thing you want to do before you run

`yum update`

is to install yum-presto:

`yum install yum-presto`,

and save some time and bandwidth. Next up is to install dkms and the devel package for your running kernel,type in

`uname -r`

in your terminal, and if there is no PAE in there install kernel-devel:

`yum install kernel-devel`

Otherwise install kernel-PAE-devel:

`yum install kernel-PAE-devel`

Then run  yum update, and when that’s done, reboot.

Nvidia drivers, for this we need to enable the RPMfusion repositories:

`rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm`.

Then install the driver, I use the akmod-nvidia package which builds the required module on reboot:

`yum install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i586 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64`,

then reboot.

When you get back you can go to http://www.adobe.com and download the yum flash-plugin for fedora, or click here and install:

`http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/thankyou/?installer=Flash_Player_10_for_Linux_(YUM)`

The multimedia stuff is next:

`yum install flash-plugin  gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-freeworld gecko-mediaplayer`

That’s that, you should now be able to enjoy all of the webs offerings!

Credit where credit is due: Leigh on fedoraforums for an excellent Nvidia howto: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=204752

Got to stop…

..My seemingly endless distrohopping.
If anyone’s got some tips how to stop hopping, please do share them!
Anywhoo I’m back to Ubuntu.
Gnome with Dust Sand theme. Still need to install vmware server 2 on the laptop, so I can study Windows servers + networking and AD and WSUS and Exchange and all the other buggy stuff. Vmware server 2 is good in the sense that it actually shares the NAT between virtual machines, unlike VirtualBox. Otherwise I’d use that. Vmware server 2 is fast run through a local net too, no mentionable lag as I first suspected there would be. Anyhow I’m just rambling, I’ll get back to my whiskey on the rocks now.
Thanks for reading.

Debian & Enlightenment = elive

I was looking for something new in linux desktops. Ubuntu and it’s deriatives never really gave me what I wanted from a desktop and they always felt a bit slow on this system at least. I installed Archlinux and discovered the speed I was missing, but it’s too much tweaking neccesary really, ( Archers, please don’t kill me! I like Arch! ) but the point in bringing up Arch, it is where I rediscovered the enlightenment window manager! Installation is easy in Arch:

`pacman -Sy e17-svn e17-extra-svn desktop-file-utils`

and you’re done! Easy. But still, if you really want to enjoy enlightenment you have to check out elive. It is the most beutiful system you will ever see.

It is built on Debian testing, “Lenny”, the 2.6.26.8 linux kernel, and the enlightenment wm.

Thunar is the default filemanager, wich you might know from Xfce. It does a great job, but fails to browse network shares, as in samba. I have yet to find an replacement, I do not want nautilus eiter, so I’m stuck with sftp through the console for now.

Iceweasel 3.0.3 with the iFox theme is the default web browser, and has

Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124

Java 1.0.6

Mozilla-mplayer

Google Preview

Installed as plugins.

I removed mozilla-mplayer and replaced it with the newer gecko-mediaplayer, wich can play the movie trailers on Apple.com without any problem. Mozilla-mplayer cannot.

The installation of gecko-mediaplayer is not that easy, a simple `aptitude install gecko-mediaplayer` will not do, as it is not in the repos. It can be found, however, in the unstable, or “Sid” repos of Debian. You need to get the dependancys too:

For gecko-mediaplayer_0.9.3-1_i386.deb:

gnome-mplayer_0.9.3-1_i386.deb
libdiscid0_0.1.0-1_i386.deb
libmusicbrainz3-6_3.0.2-1_i386.deb

Install those, and the movie trailers works! yay!

So far I have been very pleased with elive. More to follow in the few days, when I’ve been using this system for a longer time.

This is the development release of elive, not the stable one. the stable download requires a small payment, but the development version is free of charge.

It comes with multimedia codecs and drivers for Nvidia ( probably ATi too ) installed by default. My nvidia 6200 was detected and resolution was correct on boot.

My pretty much default desktop:

My Desktop

Now, go GET IT!

Switching to Ubuntu, an adventure.

Found this great review of Ubuntu. AshPringle has a plan:

The plan: Ring in the new year by switching over to Linux for a week, documenting each day of the transition.

A very humoristic review too.

segmentation fault….50%

Today i got a segfault from aptitude on Ubuntu 8.10. This is caused by corrupted files in /var/cache/apt/ and is usually caused by bad hardware like harddrives and such, I discovered a bad memory module when I ran memtest.
The corrupted file in /var/cache/apt stops you from updating and installing packages, which isn’t very nice now is it? Here’s a fix for you:
run this in a terminal
sudo rm /var/cache/apt/*.bin && sudo aptitude update

Then I would suggest you run memtest86+ and check for memory errors to be on the safe side.

Thanks to Dean Lee for solving this and the guys and girls at ubuntuforums too.

Fedora 10 Multimedia

This post is to help set up multimedia on your freshly installed Fedora 10. What we want to do is get all of the webs multimedia to play on our system and install the necessary drivers for our graphics card. I have an old Nvidia 6200 card here, so I’ll use that one as an example.

First we need to enable the repository for RPMFusion.org as it contains everything we need.

Paste this in the terminal:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

That command installs the RPMFusion repository for you.
Now the codecs we need:

yum install gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-good
gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly
gecko-mediaplayer mozilla-vlc xine-plugin xine-lib-extras
xine-lib-extras-freeworld libquicktime x264 xvidcore

Adobe's Flash Plugin:
su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'
yum install flash-plugin

Nvidia driver:
yum install kmod-nvidia
(not necessary as the 6200 is supported outofthebox™ it seems)

All done!

Flash 10 64bit Linux Alpha

Howto install the new alpha of Adobe’s Flash 10 on 64bit Ubuntu 8.10.

Download the plugin and extract it somewhere.

Uninstall flashplugin-nonfree and nspluginwrapper using Synaptic “Mark for Complete Removal“.

Then copy the libflashplayer.so you extracted earlier to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/ .

Edit: Gentoo users should copy to /usr/lib64/mozilla-firefox/plugins/

That should be it!