Fedora 7 Test 4

First Impressions (Continued)

May 6, 2007 — As I mentioned in the previous page, the installation and first boot all went well. I like the new look and feel and life is good so far. I then decided to shut down and do my usual ritual, install ndiswrapper and the ATI drivers.

Wireless Driver

I booted into init 1 by halting the booting process and appending 1 to the end of the kernel line in grub. Then boot into the command line as a single user. I disabled the built in bcm43xx driver by moving it to bcm43xx.old (see here for details). I then built the ndiswrapper driver and loaded it using modprobe. The blue wireless light lit up satisfactorily and I was off to the races with a slight issue. When I brought the driver up, it acquired an IP address just fine but I could not ping any site. Turns out the /etc/resolve.conf did not get populated automatically. Well, I rebooted the network a couple of times and then seemed to do it; the nameservers were picked up correctly and then I could ping. This gave me my wireless connection so that at least I could update the system after I reboot the whole system. So far so good. Again, no hitches, this has become a routine for me as I have mentioned before.

ATI Proprietary Drivers

next I proceed to install the ATI fglrx drivers. This is where I hit my first snag. I compiled the drivers just fine by running the command

sh ati-ati-driver-installer-8.36.5-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Fedora/F7

This command succeed just fine and the drivers got built as well. The problem in the past was that in Fedora 7 test 1 the driver would not even compile. Then Michael Larabel from phoronix (see resources) made the changes necessary so that we could build the fglrx drivers. So, it was working fine with F7T1. Now the drivers compiled fine again and then after installing the drivers I rebooted. Now came the first hint of trouble. The graphical boot would not come up and I after that X would not boot and I was thrown into the command line. after examining the /var/log/Xorg.0.log I noticed that I had a version mismatch for Xorg. It seems that the xorg-x11 server declares itself to be of version xorg-x11-server 1.3.0.0-3 while the fglrx is looking for version 7.2. Poof - no more 3d acceleration since the open source radeon driver has been broken for a long time for this video board. (In case you have not been following this site, the board is ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955). The last I looked this issue will not be solved till later drivers.

Firefox

I use the 64 bit version of firefox which is more than enough for my needs. One cannot do without flash plugin however. So, I proceeded to install nspluginwrapper so that I could use all the sites with flash. Since there has been no change in the version of firefox that is loaded with F7 - that is it uses version 2.0.0.3, this was not at all an issue. I downloaded the flash plugin from Adobe and loaded it. Nspluginwrapper found it just fine and I was able to watch flash movies on NBC and YouTube etc. However, there was no sound. This was rectified by installing the i386 version of the esound drivers. Turns out that flash uses this to play sound and does not rely on the browser or the underlying OS to provide this service, go figure.

Other Software

Anyway, despite the lack of 3d acceleration, I proceeded to test out other parts of the system. Since the open source radeon driver is broken - here is the message in the logfile (has been there a long time)

(--) RADEON(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)" (ChipID = 0x5955)
(--) RADEON(0): Linear framebuffer at 0xc8000000
(II) RADEON(0): PCI card detected
(II) RADEON(0): Direct rendering broken on XPRESS 200 and 200M
(II) RADEON(0): Detected total video RAM=31744K, accessible=131072K (PCI BAR=131072K)

you are not going to get any of the desktop effects and indeed if you try to turn them on, you will get a message that it cannot be turned on (See screenshot).

Since there are no repositories that are available for F7 yet (except for atirpms), I used the Fedora 6 repositories on Freshrpms to load xine etc. Note that due to licencing issues, you cannot play mp3 music on Fedora by default. Neither can you watch movies. However, you can download the gstreamer-plugins-good, bad and ugly from freshrpms to get Rhythmbox functional. You can do the same for xine to watch movies as well.

Bottom Line

Lot of progress in terms of installation. Broken 3d, no desktop effects yet and we will have to wait for the majore packagers to starting providing for F7 before we can give it a clean bill of health. In future installations, when F7 is formally released, we will talk about installing the various software we need to make it fully functional, at least from my point of view.

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