Find out quickly which package provides a certain library with YUM

One of the most dreaded things that you can see while trying to run some application or trying to install an rpm package is a message saying that some required library is missing.

Generally this is not a big problem, because most often the library that you miss is packaged in a package named similarly to the library. Sometime however this is not the case… Suppose for example

that you’re trying to install IBM JDK 5.0 on a Fedora 11 box. You’ll most likely get the following error message:

error: Failed dependencies:
libstdc++.so.5 is needed by ibm-java2-i386-sdk-5.0-9.0.i386

and there is no package named libstdc++ that you can install, so how can you find out which package do you need?

The answer is simple:

yum provides libstdc++.so.5

And you get:

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-66.i586 : Compatibility standard C++ libraries
Repo        : fedora
Matched from:
Other       : libstdc++.so.5

Pretty neat, eh?

Praise for Fedora 11 “Leonidas”

I finally decided to dump my Radeon HD2900 video card and X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card, because of the sorry state of the Linux support for them. It’s true that the situation with the Radeon drivers is constantly improving, thanks to the released documentation from AMD, but not as fast as I would have liked. Anyways I got myself a new GeForce 9600GT video card, which is known to be well supported by the free Nvidia nouveau driver and an Asus Xonar DX sound card, also known to be well supported under Linux thanks to the excellent Oxygen ALSA driver.

You might be wondering why I came to install Fedora 11 since I’ve only recently started enjoying an Ubuntu 9.04. Although I was very impressed by 9.04 I decided to try out Fedora 11, because of its much better integration with the nouveau driver(its the default driver for newer Nvidia cards) and the inclusion of ALSA 1.0.20 by default, which contains various improvements in oxygen since 1.0.18(the ALSA version bundled in Ubuntu 9.04). Fedora Core 2 was also the first Linux distribution I’ve ever used so it will always have a special place in my heart.

• Installation

I downloaded the Fedora 11 32bit edition DVD image and burned it. It booted into the familiar, nice looking and fairly intuitive Anaconda installer program, which we all know and love The installation went smoothly, nothing fancy about it. The only bothersome thing was the partitioning – although ext4 is the new default file system, it seems that grub cannot boot from ext4 filesystems. The workaround is pretty easy – simply create a small /boot partition to house the Linux images and bootloader files – a couple of hundred MB should be more than enough. I’ve selected for the installation most of the office and productivity tools, some development tools and a couple of database servers. Overall the package selection available with the DVD is excellent. The installation finished in about 15 minutes on my Pentium Dual Core @ 1.8 GHz wtih 4GB DDRII RAM and 500GB SATA2 HDD. Luckily for me Fedora installed a PAE(Physical Address Extension technology extends the address space of 32bit CPUs that support it to 36bits) enabled kernel automatically and I was able to enjoy the whole amount of memory. This was much better that what Ubuntu does(you have to install the server kernel if you want PAE support). The installer properly detected my Win XP installation on the same drive and set up a GRUB entry for it.

• First impressions

I rebooted my computer after the installation to find that not so much had changed since Fedora 10. The plymouth boot loader looked exactly the same, the initial GDM login screen and the GNOME theme are the same as well. The only difference in the artwork is the wallpaper. This is not an issue though – I personally find the Fedora 10 artwork very appealing.  The boot time was more than that of 9.04, though not by much. The new unified volume control is simple, but functional. Though I personally hate PulseAudio and think it is one of the biggest errors in the Linux history it worked remarkably well on Fedora 11 with my new card. My biggest gripe with it being that it doesn’t support more than stereo output and that it’s so tightly integrated into the distribution that its removal is a rather complex process. All in all I doubt that there is a distribution on which PulseAudio works better than on Fedora. The nouveau driver worked pretty well and for now I plan to stick to it. Video playback with it(even HD) is pretty good, at least on my setup. The update manager had a minor facelift and looks pretty good as well. The addition of newer versions of software such as Firefox 3.5 and OpenOffice 3.1 deserves nothing, but praise. Overall my initial impressions of Fedora 11 were mostly positive.

• Post installation setup

Fedora bundles only free software by default, so you want in it stuff like proprietary audio/video codecs, flash, adobe reader, ati and nvidia binary drivers, sun java and so on. They are easily acquirable though. There are also things like setting up sudo, zsh, emacs…   I recommend everyone to have a look at this excellent site I’ve been consulting for years. I want repeat what the guide states, but all you need to get Fedora 11 filled with all the goodies that you probably require is add the rpm fusion repository and issue a couple of yum install commands.  I was a little disappointed to see that Fedora 11 does not have an Emacs 23 package, so I had to build it from source, but this probably want bother a lot of people.

• Conclusion

Fedora 11 is a solid release full of innovation. Yes, there are some rough edges in this release, but you get to use the newest and coolest technologies the open source world has offer. And you get to use some really nasty stuff like PulseAudio, but nobody is perfect I’d heartily recommend Fedora 11 to every casual Linux user and every professional as well, though I’d suggest total beginners to turn to Ubuntu 9.04 instead.

P.S. I did some tests with Fedora 11 on my ThinkPad T61 laptop and have a few things to report for laptop users. First of all the fingerprint reader support in Fedora 11 is simply fantastic. It is basically as good as the one you’ll find in Windows. In the past I’ve used the rather clumsy thinkfinger solution, but what the Fedora developers offers us now is light years ahead of the competition.

Second – the nouveau driver does not support suspend, so if you need suspend you’re out of luck – you need the proprietary binary driver from nvidia.

Third and last – I have no sound which is particularly strange since I had sound on the same laptop with Fedora 10. My sound chip gets detected. When I start some playback the app doing the playback shows in sound preferences, but there is no sound. I assume that maybe pulseaudio is incorrectly outputting to the digital out or something like that, but there are no settings I can change. The old sound settings panel had the option to configure such stuff.

Generating X Logical Font Descriptions(XLFD) for Emacs with xfontsel

Emacs prior to version 23 was unable to use TTF fonts. The type1 fonts that it uses are described by a XLFD line containing all the info about the font – its family, slant, weight and stuff like that. Guessing all of these while trying to find the perfect font for Emacs is boring and the process can the eased substantially with the help of the xfontsel application, which is generally available by default on most Linux installations with X.

The xfontsel application provides a simple way  to  display  the  fonts
known  to  your  X  server, examine samples of each, and retrieve the X
Logical Font Description (“XLFD”) full name for a font.

In other words you simply fire it up, select the properties of the font you need, see a preview of you selection and receice  XLFD line that you can pass to an Emacs Lisp function set-default-font for instance.

I myself am a fan of the terminus font and the XLDF line that I generated with xfontsel looks like that:

“-*-terminus-medium-r-*-*-20-*-*-*-*-*-*-*”

Ubuntu 9.04

As most of you probably know I generally use Arch Linux, at least at home. Recently the Arch Linux developers decided to drop the support for the ATI Catalyst proprietary video driver and I happen to own a RadeonHD 2900PRO so I was not very happy about this decision. So I thought I might give Ubuntu another try and installed the latest and greatest version 9.04 hot off the press. Here are some quick thoughts of mine about that release.

The installer was very polished. No issues, no complaints. I’d like however to see someday the option to select packages in the default installer.

The boot time was fantastic. Great job, Ubuntu team. I was pleasantly surprised by it. The new artwork looked great as well. Especially the New Wave theme which I simply love(except the issues it has with non-native GTK applications such as firefox, thunderbird). I found the new OSD notifications system good, although it seemed pretty much stolen from OSX As Pablo Picasso once said – “Good artists create, great artists simply steal”

The default software selection was decent enough. And there are the rich Ubuntu repos in which you can find almost everything. No worries here.

PulseAudio with OSS is still problematic, but I guess this is to be expected since probably only X-Fi owners use OSS. Flash performance is terrible on the 64 bit version at least. Skype 64bit is buggy as well. This is no fault of the Ubuntu team however. Video performance was satisfactory with Catalyst, though Desktop Effects are still almost unusable with it in the long run.

The overall experience with the system has  been overwhelmingly positive so far. I hope it’ll remain in the same general area. Stay tuned for further updates.

Ubuntu 8.04 and X-Fi

Finally I’m enjoying quality sound from my X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card under Linux(Ubuntu 8.04). Unexpectedly the credit this time goes to OSS, not ALSA. The guys from the OSS project were the first to provide a working free driver for the X-Fi family of sound cards and I have to thank them for that.

If you have a X-Fi yourselves you might wanna check out these two articles – setup OSS on Hardy and configure apps to use OSS.

Enjoy.