Category: Technology

While in search of a solution for my laptop suspend problem I found out that the BIOS, which was initially supplied is very buggy and there is an update. My version was F11, while the latest one is F16. The only problem is the way HP supplies updates for this thingy: only for windows in form of executables.

Thanks to this article, I managed to create work around and flashed my BIOS for HP 6730b. If you run same laptop with version of BIOS earlier than F16, I strongly suggest updating.

The update didn’t fix my problem with suspend, but it did fix few glitches with video stuff.

Ok, it’s been few days now as I am using Fedora 15. More comments…

Hibernate

As I mentioned in my previous post, hibernate was not working on my laptop. Apparently, the problem is that I am using swapfile instead of a swap partition. Since kernel saves the state of the system into swap while going to hibernate, it needs to know from where to get the state on power on. To do so we need to know 2 things: the UUID of the partition, on which swap is sitting (in my case it is a / partition) and an offset of the swapfile. The first one can be found out from /etc/fstab or from /etc/grub.conf (the root=UUID=XXXXX) or by any other means that I won’t cover here. The second one is can be found by running filefrag -v <path to swapfile> and taking the values of the physical column of the first data row of output (In my case 129024).

Now, when we know on which partition and at which particular offset our swap is, modify the /etc/grub.conf file for kernel boot flags and add restore=UUID=<UUID if the partition found above) restore_offset=<swap file offset found above> and reboot the system. After that hibernate works as it should.

Note that this does not fix my problem with suspend yet. That I will try to fix later as I am going through different solutions now.

P.S.: Initially found the hint on hibernation fix from syslog line “PM: Swap headers not found” and then googling around to this Ubuntu forum post, which I just adjusted to my self (thanks guys).

NetworkManager (0.8.999-3)

Today I received an update of NetworkManager which failed to startup after boot. Running NetworkManager –no-daemon was giving errors while trying to parse /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<whatever> files. Deleting those files fixed the problem (but I lost the configurations of wifi spots I had before, which is though not a huge problem for me anyway).

KDE4

For a couple of days I decided to use KDE4, since it’s been a while I touched it and I thought it is unfair not to try it again. I managed to configure everything more or less in a way I wanted. The only thing which forced me to go back to Xfce4 today was that because of NetworkManager failure, the network manager plugin of KDE was not starting as well and the whole desktop was not loading, which looked very strange to me. I don’t wanna desktop environment which fails to start only because of the network failure (which kinda unrelated from DE anyway).

Will see how I go about it later as well.

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…