The Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems has generated a lot of excitement over the last months. It also generated a lot of uncertainty and fear about the future of some the popular open source projects sponsored heavily by Sun  – such as the great NetBeans IDE, the GlassFish Application Server and the VirtualBox virtualization software. I use all them to some extent in my day-to-day work, so I was very happy when I found this document, stating Oracle’s intention to keep supporting all those projects in the future.

So if you were curious to try any of them, but were holding back, because you were not certain if the projects will exist tomorrow – now is the time to give them a shot. I promise you, that you won’t be disappointed.

The driver selected by default by Fedora 11 is not appropriate for Xerox Phaser 3117 – it will not print with it. However there is a very easy solution to the problem.

Go to System -> Administration -> Printing (In GNOME at least, in KDE it’s probably something similar). Right click the Xerox Phaser 3117 printer icon there and select “Properties” from the menu. Then in the “Make and model” section choose change and then select Samsung ML-1710.

After you apply the change you’ve just made, you can start printing with your Phaser.

By default a lot of stuff is disabled in Chromium/Google Chrome – support for plugins(Flash, Java, Real Player, etc.), support for extensions, support for user Greasemonkey scripts. Though there are not a lot of Chromium extensions around and few people use user Greasemonkey scripts, most people would not mind some plugin support. So, here we begin.

To enable plugin support start Chromium in this manner(executable file name is google-chrome for Google Chrome):

chromium-browser --enable-plugins

To enable support for extensions use:

chromium-browser --enable-extensions

And finally for user scripts you can start Chromium like this:

chromium-browser --enable-user-scripts

Of course you can combine them all in one mighty:

chromium-browser --enable-plugins --enable-extensions --enable-user-scripts

(this is the way I run Chromium).

If you use the official Fedora build – the Chromium launcher added to your menu uses all of the above options. In Ubuntu, however, you’ll have to add them by hand to your startup string.

Most people have been in a situation requiring them to change one or more of the parameters passed to the JVM on top of which JBoss AS is running. For instance – you may need a bigger heap, bigger perm gen size or something else. The best place to put these parameters is probably the following file:

$JBOSS_HOME/bin/run.conf

where $JBOSS_HOME refers to the directory in which you’ve unpacked the JBoss AS distribution.

Look for this section:

if [ "x$JAVA_OPTS" = "x" ]; then
JAVA_OPTS=”…”
fi

All you have to do now is adapt it to your needs.

Chromium is the open source web browser project on top of which the Google Chrome is built. I personally think that the project is nothing short of fantastic and I’ve been using Chromium/Google Chrome ever since Linux builds became available. In Fedora 11 it’s really easy to get a hold of them by simple adding two yum repositories.

For Chromium you need to perform the following:

As superuser(root) create the file

/etc/yum.repos.d/chromium.repo

Enter the following content in the file

[chromium]
name=Chromium Test Packages
baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F$releasever/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

And finally execute this command(assuming you have configured sudo, that is):

sudo yum install chromium

After its completion you’ll see the Chromium icon in the Applications->Internet menu.

The procedure is largely the same for Google Chrome. First create the file that will house the definition

for the Google RPM repository:

/etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo

Then add this to the newly created file:

[google]
name=Google – i386
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/i386
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

And in the end simply run:

sudo yum install google-chrome-unstable

Google Chrome should now appear in the Applications->Internet menu.

Enjoy!

When you have applications, whose configuration is as complex as that of Emacs it’s always a good idea to store that configuration under version control so you can easily share it

between multiple computers. You can always set up some version control system yourself, but it’s a lot more convenient(and much more reliable) to use an already existing code hosting solution such a GitHub. I have created a small repo there

housing my humble Emacs configuration(.emacs, some custom stuff) and share it on all the computers that I work. You may have a look at my Emacs repo here.

In case you’re wondering why there is no file named .emacs in there – my .emacs actually consists of only one line:

(load “~/emacs/dot-emacs.el”)

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?

One of the things that I don’t like about the default Eclipse settings for Java
development is that in the package explorer all Java files appear in the
same manner(with the same icon). There is no visual distinction between abstract and concrete classes, enums, interfaces… Luckily for us Eclipse supports such a distinction and all you have to do is enable it.

Go to

Window -> Preferences -> General -> Appearance -> Label Decorations

and mark the check box saying “Java Type Indicator”. I’ve tested this on Eclipse 3.5 only, but I guess it is included in previous releases as well.

Eclipse, though not as feature rich as IntelliJ IDEA, offers a lot of features that one has to find for himself.

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.

I’m very fond of the ability to insert a new line below the line I’m currently at, and to position the cursor at the beginning of that new line, offered by most IDEs, such as IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse. It’s usually bound to  Return(Enter)+Shift. Emacs(as far as I know) doesn’t have a function that does this thing by default, but one can easily create one, combining several well known functions in the process and bind that new function to the desired key combination. Here’s the snippet one might have in his .emacs(or other) “configuration” file:

;; insert an empty line after the current line and position the cursor on its beginning
(defun insert-empty-line ()
 (interactive)
 (move-end-of-line nil)
 (open-line 1)
 (next-line 1))

(global-set-key [(shift return)] 'insert-empty-line)