Fedora 8 Test 3 on a dv8000
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Wireless
October 11, 2007 —
The first thing I did was to get the wireless network going. I am aware that F8 ships with a new
driver ssb which is supposed to be a replacement for b43 which in turn is a replacement for
the bcm43xx driver which is now termed the legacy driver. I had the ndiswrapper tar file on
the home partition of my other hard drive (which runs Fedora 7) and so it was an easy matter to copy
that over to this hard drive. Moreover, when F8 boots, it recognizes the other hard drive and automatically
adds all the partitions from my F7 drive to the fstab of the F8 drive. I installed ndiswrapper
and loaded the windows drivers. For a write up on this, see my other articles on how to do that. Once I loaded the ndiswrapper module, I had to disable to
drivers that comes with F8. To do that I did
cd /lib/modules/2.6.23-0.214.rc8.git2.fc8/kernel/net/mac80211/
mv mac80211.ko mac80211.old; mv rc80211_simple.ko rc80211_simple.old
cd ../..
mv drivers/ssb/ssb.ko drivers/ssb/ssb.old
mv net/wireless/b43/b43.ko net/wireless/b43/b43.old
etc. Note that you have to do that every time you update the kernel. Yeah, it is a pain. But then it is worth it.
Updates
Once, I had wireless going, yum immediately informed me that some 180 packages
were available. I ignored that since there was one more important step that needed to be performed
before I could get into the upgrade path. I had to get rid of all the "duplicate" packages inhabiting my
system. Like F7, F8 still loads a whole lot of i386 packages even though this system is
a 64bit system. Considering that I was still in first boot, this was an excellent opportunity to rid my
system of these packages. To this, I did
yum remove \*.i?86
That got rid of all the i386. I know that if I do need any of those packages again, yum will
pull them from the repositories and reload them anyway. So this was not a big deal. This went uneventfully.
This also erased 341 packages. So, you see from the 1425 packages loaded in the beginning, I am already
down to 1084 packages. I can understand that some applications are only available
in i386 version, but why load the system with duplicates of rhythmbox or even
firefox? If someone feels an intense desire to run these side by side, hey more power to you. But,
in general, I still don't get it.
Now, that I had erased these packages, I was ready to run an upgrade. And there were upgrades galore!
Running yum update resulted in an update for 180 packages totalling 341 Mbs! Of course, that
resulted in a new kernel update as well and so i repeated the cycle of reinstalling the ndiswrapper and
hence my wireless card.
Working with F8 Test 3
ATI Fglrx
Now that I had the wireless working and my system was up-to-date. I next decided to see if I could run
all the software that I am used to. So, I tried to install the ATI fglrx driver version 8.41. Needless to
say, it did not compile and failed to created RPMs for F8 and even for F7 when I tried that. So, using the
ATI drivers is out of the question with this version of the OS. However, I noticed that when I checked for direct rendering, the current
radeon driver is capable of direct rendering with my video card which is an ATI Xpress 200M. The
current driver does strangely give me a warning that it is an Xpress 200 card. So, for example if I do
glxinfo |grep direct
I get the output
Warning, xpress200 detected.
direct rendering: Yes
Well, well, we now have direct rendering with the native open source driver. I checked out glxgears and it
does give me close to a respectable number of 1060 FPS. Not bad for the open source driver and also this
is another first for this driver. This is definitely good news and I was raring to try out the AIGLX
support. This would definitely allow me to try out compiz or beryl
which I am able to get on F7 (a topic for another discussion) using Xgl. However, I am unable to get
beryl working on this laptop. I guess the radeon driver is unable to give me beryl
support. I will report further on this.
Next, I will report on how I got sound, video and flash working on F8 test 3 working. Stay tuned.
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