Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov … mammoth cave …

So, as most of the problems solved and all stuff working fine, I still have couple of issues.

Xfce4 keyboard layout switcher (xfce4-xkb-plugin)

This is a small handy plugin to change keyboard layouts and show current layout flag in the panel. All works fine, but sometimes it looses the setting for key sequence that should change layouts. Nothing dramatic here and can be readjusted, but a bit annoying. Strange thing is that the problem appears randomly.

Suspend and Hibernate

Ohhh, this is an old story. I had problems with suspend since Fedora 13 through Fedora 14 and up to now. In Fedora 14 my laptop was not suspending properly in most of the cases. My thoughts about it were mostly related to NetworkManager, since the chances of proper suspend were increasing if I disconnect all my connections.

In Fedora 15 my laptop suspends very fast and with no visible problems, but it fails to recover on resume. The monitor stays blank (as if there is no power given on it at all) and nothing recovers except for the keyboard lights and other LEDs on my laptop.

Hibernate didn’t work before and is still broken. When I try to put laptop into this mode, I see some attempts to do something (like network connections being disconnected and screen is locked), but then nothing happens and I am getting connected back and that’s it.

I bet this has to do with a particular hardware (have HP 6730b laptop), since for other people things work well.

Video Drivers

As my laptop has Intel graphics chipset, I see some misbehaver. Sometimes screen is not properly refreshed. Other times when I boot up a system to login screen – it is not shown (just black screen) and I need to switch to text TTY and then back to X server for it to be displayed correctly. Don’t know what exactly is going on here, but pisses me off quite a bit.

Other

One more tiny thing which is still not fixed is IOMMU. I had the intel_iommu=off flag in /etc/grub.conf since Fedora 14 and still have to keep it there, though things are getting better. In previous release my laptop wouldn’t boot at all without this flag, while in Fedora 15 the absence of such flag just causes a lot of warnings during the boot time.

I also removed the vga=792 flag from grub.conf. Used it in previous versions to set proper resolutions of text mode, but it gives some conflicts, related to framebuffer and my guess is that it has to do with kernel mode setting. I can use vga=792 only if I put nomodeset flag, but then my X server resolution is getting lost.

Meanwhile I have also played around some other window managers and desktop environments (just to see whats available) like LXDE, E16 (Enlightenment) and Openbox. Still think that Xfce4 is the most suitable for me at this time.

After playing enough with Gnome3 I decided to move to Xfce4.

I have tried it many times and I do like it since it reminds me of old KDE 3.x. It is very fast and light, it has all I need (panels, system tray, desktop icons, applets, whatever). And it has a standard design concept (unlike recent weird design ideas by Gnome and KDE).

Didn’t use Xfce4 as a main desktop environment since I was pretty happy with Gnome2, but now things have changed :)

Update: screenshot attached to see how a desktop should look like ;-)

Just upgraded to Fedora 15. Can’t say much yet, but just a bit:

Upgrade process

After preupgrade downloaded all the packages and asked for the reboot, Anaconda didn’t start correctly and I had to do hard-reset, which booted back Fedora 14. Run preupgrade again, it checked for all packages to be downloaded. After second try of rebooting from preupgrade everything went fine

YUM update stuff

Running yum update from Fedora 15 gave me some troubles with duplated packages. Fixed that by running

yum update | grep duplicate | cut -d ' ' -f 6 > duplicates.txt
yum remove `cat duplicates.txt`


Note that you should review what is being deleted, not to erase something that should stay. I had to exclude few rpms from the duplicates.txt file

Some repos also didn’t work for F15, so I had to disable them for a time being…

Gnome 3

Looks fancy and nice, but need to get used to it. Need to find a way to customize things around

System Services

As Fedora switched to new system services startup system, chkconfig and other tools I am so used to do not work fully now, instead there is a systemctl thingy which I need to look into more deeply

Will post some more later on as I will be finding things…

I’ve been hearing about DropBox for a while now, but somehow never checked it out until few days ago. The service is really nice, easy to use and pretty handy. While starting to use it, I was moving a lot of my staff under the directory which is being synced with the server and decided to clear up the mess around my home directory, which was gathering there for a long while.

It all went into major clean up. Deleted old and obsolete documents, all media content (movies from mobile camera, pics and so on) which is already uploaded to one of those services like Flickr or YouTube. Deleted everything that I haven’t touched for few years and won’t probably need any more as well as content which is freely available on the internet and can be redownloaded easily.

After all of this, I went to all my IM lists and cleaned old contacts, removed all obsolete passwords from my password managers (use KeepAssX for this). Finally – went through few of my servers and removed old websites that were not used for ages and there is no need for them any more.

Now I feel better and I am waiting for release of Fedora 15 today…

P.S.: DropBox is running an offer where if I invite someone there, both of us will get +250MB of storage, so if you are not using DropBox and you are thinking to try it – let me know, so I can send you an invite (instead you directly registering) and we can all benefit ;-)

Update: thanks to Chris Ergatides for pointing out the direct referring link on DropBox, so if you want to register there, referring to my name, click this link (thanks in advance) ))

Though I am not coding in C++ and my experience in these languages is minor, I am ofter asked to help students with the studies in the subject. So was the case recently, so I ended up writing two small programs: one has to do with link lists and few functions to work with them like push, POP, insert, remove, sort, print, search and the other one is a classic thing with drawing triangular from star (or any other) symbol.

Just in case someone is learning C++ now, you can download the code and go through, hope it will help or give an idea.

So here is the link_list.cpp stuff and here is a star.cpp.

BTW, those who are using Windows and something like DevC++ often can see a call to system(‘PAUSE’) which is really bad and works only on Windows. While doing link list thing, I did a function called user_wait(), which does the same, but  in more natural way, here it is:

  /* waits for user to press Enter. Good replacement for system('PAUSE') which works only on Windows */
  void user_wait ()  {
      char blah;

      std::cout << std::endl << "... Press Enter to Continue ..." << std::endl; // print msg
      std::cin.get(blah); // wait for Enter
      std::cout << std::endl; // put newline
  }