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Linux Books

Of course the Internet along with the help of Google is a great source of information. You can answer almost any question you have about Linux and find many tutorials, guides and help. However many people prefer reading this information on a printed book accesssible even when they are not online or don't have a computer in front of them. I've received many e-mails asking me to propose them a few good books regarding Linux commands, administration and for specific distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora etc. So, I've search for a few good books. Here they are. Happy reading!

Linux Books

Ubuntu guides

Ubuntu is a free Operating System based on Debian GNU/Linux. It has been rated as the most popular Linux distribution amongst Linux users according to Distrowatch. As it happens every six months a new version of Ubuntu has been released. Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is here! Below you can find some helpful tutorials for old and new users!

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Post Installation Guide
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Post Installation Guide
Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Post Installation Guide
How to install Ubuntu Linux on Windows using VirtualBox

Fedora 12 Installation Guide

Fedora 12, codenamed Constantine, is released! Just for the info, Fedora is an RPM based Linux Distribution, an Operating system in other words, developed by the community supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora contains only free and Open Source software. Some of Fedora's 12 new features are Gnome 2.28, KDE 4.3, better web cam support!, and many others.

Fedora 12 Installation and Post-Installation Guide
Fedora 11 Installation and Post-Installation Guide
Fedora 11 Installation and Post-Installation Guide in Chinese

Article Index
Fedora 10 Installation Guide
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
Page 8
Page 9
Page 10
Page 11
Page 12
Page 13
All Pages

24. Plymouth Graphical Boot

Plymouth is the new Graphical Boot of Fedora 10 which replaces the old RHGB. It requires kernel modesetting (KMS) support to work properly. KMS is currently supported on most ATI Radeon chips; anything from the Radeon 9500 and newer should work. Intel KMS support is in development, but is not yet supported. For all other graphics hardware, the text plugin is used. If you see only a scrolling bar when booting to Fedora you can try to force your Hardware into graphics mode without using KMS support. To do so reat below at the Graphical Boot Problem. However you could first try and change this theme to another one to see if it works without any changes to your grub.conf.

* Plymouth Themes

By default only the solar and text themes are installed. To add additional plymouth themes type:

su -
yum install plymouth-plugin-{fade-in,pulser,spinfinity}
Now you can try any theme you want like this. Just replace pluginname with one of the following: solar, fade-in, pulser, spinfinity, text.
 
su -
plymouth-set-default-plugin pluginname
/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd
After that just reboot your computer.

* Graphical Boot Problem

While booting in Fedora 10 you might have seen a blue scrolling bar loading instead of the grub's graphical boot screen. This has happened because of the modesetting option of the kernel that Fedora 10 uses. In order to see the graphical boot you must edit grub.conf and add a vga resolution to it. Here it is how:

su -
gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf
Here you must add your framebuffer resolution at the end of the kernel line. Something like this:
 
title Fedora (2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686)
root (hd0,9)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 ro root=UUID=a61c8338-e373-4389-ae00-32942185f7c2 rhgb quiet vga=792
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img
vga=792 stands for 1024x768 resolution with 24-bit colours. You can find the resolution you like from the table below.
Colours   640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
--------+---------------------------------------------
256     |   769     771      773      775       796
32,768  |   784     787      790      793       797
65,536  |   785     788      791      794       798
16.8M   |   786     789      792      795       799
If the resolution you want isn't among those open a terminal and type vbetest as root. You will see a list like this:

[352] 1280x800 (256 color palette)
[353] 1280x800 (8:8:8)
Add 512 to the number you see inside brackets. For example if you have a 24bit widescreen with 1280x800 resolution add vga=865 (512+353).

25. xorg.conf is missing

Many Fedora users complain that xorg.conf is missing in Fedora 10 and cannot find it in its usual location /etc/X11/xorg.conf to make some changes on their own. Well this is not bug, this is a feature of Fedora 10. But here is how to create xorg.conf if you really need it. As root open a terminal and type:

Xorg -configure :1
This will create a default xorg.conf in /root/xorg.conf.new which you can copy to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

If you are using Radeon or Nvidia drivers from rpmfusion repository alternatively type:

su -
yum install system-config-display
system-config-display

This script will automatically create an xorg.conf in its correct location.

I hope this guide was useful for all Fedora users, old and new ones! If you think there is something that should be added on this guide just leave me a comment below! Please do not use the comment function to ask for help! If you need help, please use our forum .

26. Enable GUI root login

Fedora 10 by default doesn't allow someone to login as root through GDM. Instead you have to login as a normal user and become root through your terminal. However many users still want to login as root. Although I don't approve this here is how to do it. Don't forget that once you login as root its easier to damage your system so don't do the following unless you are sure what you are doing.

Open a terminal and type:

su -c 'gedit /etc/pam.d/gdm'Here find the following line

auth required pam_succeed_if.so user != root quietand comment it like this
#auth required pam_succeed_if.so user != root quiet
Save the file and logout. Now you can login as root.

27. Fedora Books

I have received many emails asking me to advise for Fedora and Linux books. Here are some good books you can read and enhance your knownledge on Linux and Fedora. I hope you will find them useful!

** Note: Because of the many sites that are direct linking to my guide I face heavy traffic. If you wish to help me pay for the hosting and bandwidth you can make a donate. Thank you!




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Comments (42)

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Preupgrade cannot work today!
your preupgrade paragraph doesn't mention which version of preupgrade you used.
As of today, Nov 26, the last official version of preupgrade for F9 is 0.9.3-3.fc9. Running preupgrade will not give you the possibility to choose F10.
We have to wait till a new release of preupgrade is available.
betsubetsu , November 27, 2008
...
Yes, you are right betsubetsu. However preupgrade a little time ago was updated to version 1.x and Fedora 10 upgrade is available! So, there is no problem now! smilies/wink.gif
axel , November 27, 2008
offline mode
not sure about other people but firefox in F9 and F10 is defaulted to offline mode for me. solved this by:
about :config in firefox and
toolkit.networkmanager.disable
browser.offline; false

not sure if this problem is common enough to warrant including this in the guide
genex , November 27, 2008
...
I searched google for the offline mode of Firefox and as far as I understood this is either a problem of Network Manager or a problem that occurred when upgrading Firefox from one version to another.

Thanks for the heads up genex. I think I might add this somewhere in the guide.
axel , November 27, 2008
Very Well.
Thanks for this guide.
Gracias!
sn.linux , November 27, 2008
...
Yes. Thank you very much for this nice guide smilies/smiley.gif
Tomek , November 28, 2008
bittorent
Azureus is another bittorent client. Tons of features and a bit bulky but I think its worth mentioning.
jjcf89 , November 29, 2008
...
Incredible guide! Thank you very much! I got my fglrx driver working too smilies/cool.gif
Streamreader , December 01, 2008
Non upgrading install CD
This is not really a request for help but an advisory for any one upgrading from F8 to F10.
I downloaded and attempted to use the install DVD to upgrade my F8 install. After a few complaints from the installer about my method of mounting partitions (I haven't been using disk labels just mount device) the updater went into upgrade without complaining. Ten minutes later wow that was fast please reboot. Ok so reboot where the hell did my home folder go. It seems there are still problems with the installed up grader. All the up grader does ruin your fstab file. As I'm waiting for the net install to complete (Yours as described here) I though Id just mention that problem.
Ray Ward , December 01, 2008
...
Hey Ray Ward. Thanks for the post. Well, it's not advised to update directly Fedora 8 to Fedora 10. It's best to go 8 -> 9 -> 10. I should have made this clear in the Upgrade part of the guide.

When you finish with the install tell us how if everything is working fine.
axel , December 01, 2008
Fedora 8 to 10 upgrade
Install completed although it did take rather a long time and so far I can report as successfull. Every thing seems to be working although I have not yet updated the Nvidia driver. I stopped Selinux as I found the constant messages about most things irritating. I havent finished browsing all your neat howto's yet but if the Selinux configuration is not there perhaps you will consider a Selinux repair/ base configure howto. I'm going to fix the "Graphical Boot Problem" now.

Regards
Ray
Ray Ward , December 01, 2008
Fedora 8 to 10
Things to look out for.
1) Nvidia drivers may not move from 8 to 10. It seems that the upgrade looks for packages in the 10 release to upgrade but if in doubt leaves the original or puts both packages in place. You may get OpenGL warnings and things like glxgears won't run, unable to switch on Beryl and games like Urban Terrror will refuse to run. I found quite a simple cure for this after googling around.
Yum list will probably show you still have F8 libs and drivers installed. Remove all the kmod packages for Nvidia and reinstall using yum install package where package is the latest Nvidia kmod package. This will install the correct drivers and libs. Make sure the xorg.conf file has Driver = "nvidia" and reboot.
2) You may find that there are a number of packages still on f8 that prevent updates. Uninstall them and reinstall from the f10 package list. I have to mention that Netpanzer 64bit is still not working correctly any body seen an F10 i386 version around?

I hope you find this of some use .

Regards
Ray
Ray Ward , December 02, 2008
...
I am glad you figured everything out with your update!

For Netpanzer, sorry I can't find any package for Fedora 10.

Regards,
axel
axel , December 02, 2008
...
Thank you very much for the guide! I used to configure my F9 with your previous guide, and I'm glad you're continuing with advising Fedora Users ;-)
Keep it up!
Regards
M

PS. I recommend Deluge as a torrent client, it's great and user friendly and fast.
M , December 02, 2008
...
Thank you jjcf89 and M. I have included Azureus and Deluge torrent clients in the guide. smilies/smiley.gif
axel , December 02, 2008
How to upgrade downgraded ATI drivers
Hi Axel! Many thanks for this guide. A lot of problems gone in an hour smilies/smiley.gif

Nevertheless, can you add an upgrade guide (after the downgrade guide), because now, it seems that Fedora team fixed problem with ati driver, but I don't know how to update libdrm and xorg packages to their previous state (e.g. state before downgrading).

Thanks.

Please, help!
Alexey , December 04, 2008
...
you missed "exaile" in music players
and brasero in cd/dvd burners

Cheers
asp1rin , December 06, 2008
...
Hey Alexey,

what is the fix that the Fedora team has come up to for the ATi driver? I can't find something. smilies/sad.gif

asp1rin

I will add both programs. Thanks. smilies/smiley.gif
axel , December 11, 2008
Excelent work!!!
Thanks for putting together such a nice document together that works.
praveen , December 14, 2008
Suggestions
Axel,

I'm back to Fedora after a long time using Ubuntu. Thank you for the awesome tutorial. I would like to suggest a few of additional topics you might want to cover, in case you find them helpful:

1) For laptops in general, a guide to enable the function keys (Fn) that control brightness, volume, etc. I, for one, have not figured how to get these to work in Fedora 10. Ubuntu 8.10 had them working out of the box.

2) For Thunderbird, integration with PGP using Gnu-PGP and Enigmail

3) Enabling PAE, for those with 4+ GB RAM

4) Setting up a latex environment using the TexLive packages

5) Setting up a development environment for Java: Eclipse and/or Netbeans and/or ...

Thanks for the great work! smilies/smiley.gif

Demian
Demian , December 21, 2008
...
Hi Demian,

I really liked your proposals! I will sure publish some guides for them. If you have any notes on those topics could you send me an e-mail with some info?

I don't have 4+ GB RAM and I haven't used latex as well (although I should smilies/tongue.gif )

Regards,
axel
axel , December 22, 2008
asd
hi!
first of all, thanks for your excelent work! i used both this and fedora 9 guides to set up my system and almost everything went well smilies/cheesy.gif
anyaway, this time i had a problem.
i have an ati mobility x1400 card on a lg laptop wich worked good with f9, but with f10 after installing drivers, when I type glxgears or glxinfo or something similar, i get this error:

X Error of failed request: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 143 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 19 (X_GLXQueryServerString)
Serial number of failed request: 14
Current serial number in output stream: 14

anyone had this problem or anyone knows what my problem is?
flpmorais , December 28, 2008
...
@ flpmorais,

You downgraded libdrm right? Do you have a 32bit or 64bit installation? Take a look again at the ati installation part of the guide. Rebuild initrd as mentioned there and reboot. This might solve your problem.

@ Alexey

I have included instructions on how to undo all changes made while downgrading libdrm.
axel , December 28, 2008
Brilliant!
Great guide Axel...pretty complete and easy to read. I'm a big fan and thanks for helping me get Fedora 10 up and running flawlessly and quickly. Ubuntu has been back-seated smilies/cool.gif

cheers,
Biogrrl
biogrrl , December 31, 2008
...
Heh, welcome to the Fedora community. smilies/cheesy.gif
axel , December 31, 2008
suspend problem with nVidia fixed
Hi,
I fixed the problem with Nvidia suspend
You should check this:
http://www.clasohm.com/blog/one-entry?entry_id=56860
konstantin , February 04, 2009
...
Thanks for the link Konstantin! I don't have a laptop at this time to check, but suspend/resume should work out of the box at some time.
axel , February 05, 2009
Java
This really helped me get Sun Java going, Thanks.......

The only thing I found is that with build 1.6.0_12-b04 the default directory for the firefox plugin is /usr/java not /opt.

I am no expert and It could just be something with my system but if it is the default now I just wanted to let you know.
Mike , March 05, 2009
...
Thanks for the info Mike. I will take a look and update the guide. smilies/smiley.gif
axel , March 06, 2009
firefox offline mode
In response to genex:
Firefox (and many other applications) use NetworkManager to get the state of the network connection. If you have a pppoe connection (like me) then NM doesn't know that you're online so it displays an offline message and the programs that rely on NM (including firefox) start in offline mode.
NM is good on laptops that use wireless networks.
My solution to this was to disable NM.

Thanks for the guide, it covers most of the things to be done when upgrading/installing FC10.
mirceamic , March 27, 2009
...
Thanks for your comment mirceamic. smilies/smiley.gif
axel , March 28, 2009
RollBack GDM to gain more ability.
I thought you may want to add this, especially for FC9/10 users who want FC8 GDM functionality again (themes, etc).
leigh, Administrator of fedoraforum posted this:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=193067
I'm currently running through what he posted, get back to you in a while when its done for verification.
EntityReborn , May 03, 2009
...
Yeah, one small freeze when selecting System-Tools/New Login, but other than that, all good!
EntityReborn , May 03, 2009
...
Thanks for the info EntityReborn. A lot of people are asking about themes in GDM so I am gonna add it to this guide. smilies/cheesy.gif
axel , May 04, 2009
...
No worries. One thing, there a downloadable version of this?
EntityReborn , May 15, 2009
...
A downloadable version of this guide you mean? Sorry, but no.
axel , May 16, 2009
unable to get graphic driver to work
i am using a laptop with Fedora 10 install.... totally new to linux system, i tried to get my graphic resolution & wireless network to work properly. I am having an ATI mobility Radeon 9700 gfx chip on a Pentium M 725 chipset (802.11 b/g).

Not knowing where to start, i tried to install anything and everything using the guide from the "unofficial fedora FAQ" website -> http://www.fedorafaq.org/#yumconf

Not too concern about the wireless connection at the moment as the gfx resolution is getting me crazy. It keeps giving me the following:

=> No package kmod-fglrx available.
=> No package xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-libs.i386 available.

even though i have followed the instructions to get the latest packages:

=> package livna-release-1:1-1.noarch is already installed
=> package rpmfusion-nonfree-release-11-1.noarch (which is newer than rpmfusion-nonfree-release-10-5.noarch) is already installed

and i got this when i tried to install : su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org...oarch.rpm'

=> rpmfusion-free-release >= 11 is needed by (installed) rpmfusion-nonfree-release-11-1.noarch

Thanks for taking time to help. smilies/smiley.gif

Calvin

Calvin , August 01, 2009
...
Hi Calvin. Try to uninstall the rpmfusion-nonfree package and then reinstall first the free and next the nonfree package.

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org...noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org...oarch.rpm'
axel , August 06, 2009
Change the Background color of plymouth themes
how I can change the background color?
erick , December 03, 2009
...
Thanks for posting the Plymouth info, very useful.
Ben , December 05, 2009
...
erick,
I haven't tried it but here is a link on how to change plymouth boot splash image

Ben, thanks. smilies/smiley.gif
axel , December 05, 2009
gpk-application
Long time no Speak.
I have a question regarding the package manager gpk-application.
Some how I managed to spam the authentication dialogue for gpk-application so downloading packages or using the package installer no longer asks for the root password. I know that it is profile specific as I can use another login without any problems. I was wondering if you know where the config is stored.
I think changing the machine name whacked it.
Ray Ward , July 06, 2010

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