Linux 3.4 Released

"This release includes several Btrfs updates: metadata blocks bigger than 4KB, much better metadata performance, better error handling and better recovery tools. There are other features: a new X32 ABI which allows to run in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers; several updates to the GPU drivers: early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 'Kepler', support of AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and support of Intel Medfield graphics; support of x86 cpu driver autoprobing, a device-mapper target that stores cryptographic hashes of blocks to check for intrusions, another target to use external read-only devices as origin source of a thin provisioned LVM volume, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new 'Yama' security module."

Fedora Utils

Fedora Utils lets you install codecs and additional software, fix problems, tweak and cleanup your system, view system information and much more with just few clicks. This littile tool allows you to add additional repositories and install application that are not available in the main fedora repository. It adds the RPM Fusion repository which contains

gstreamer-plugins-bad-free
gstreamer-ffmpeg
gstreamer-plugins-bad
gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Which should make totem play audio and video for any file format in Totem -- the default media player shipped with Fedora.

Can be installed by running the following command in terminal.

su -c "yum localinstall http://fedorautils.sourceforge.net/fedorautils-latest.noarch.rpm"

Fedora Utils Features

---

• Add current user to sudoers
• Enable autologin for current user
• Set yum to keep cache
• Install yum tidy-cache plugin
• Add repositories - RPMFusion, Google, Adobe, Chromium, Skype
• Enable touchpad clicks
• Install multimedia codecs
• Install Adobe Flash
• Install Java Runtime Environment
• Install wine with gecko
• Install Google Talk plugin
• Add colors and fortune messages to Terminal
• Set SELinux in permissive mode
• Install Microsoft fonts
• Install Jockey driver installer (From Parsidora repo)
• Install essential software
• Fixes - Fix font smoothing, Fix bad theme in root apps, Fix rpmdb error, Fix gnome keyring, Fix picasa not starting, Fix anaconda causing revisor not to start, Fix MPlayer driver error, Fix ntfs-config not starting
• Install Gnome Shell Extensions - GPaste, Media Player, Weather, Alternate Status Menu, Dock Extension, Places Menu, User Theme, Window Navigator, Zeitgeist
• Install Software - Google Chrome, Picasa, Google Earth, HandBrake, Skype, WinFF, Unico Theme Engine
• Clean up system
• Optimize boot by turning off unnecessary services
• Show system info

Gnome3 customization -- Changing the Panel Colour and make It Transparent on Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop Edition

The /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/panel-border.svg is the main file to be changed to change its appearance. Now wake the gimp expert in you

$: sudo gimp /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/panel-border.svg

modify the file as you wish here i deleted the whole image

ctrl + a and Del

then took the brush tool choose colour black (default), set Opacity to 52 and made the brush image large enough to cover the full image painted once in the image then choose a colour, set Opacity to 100. Painted a line in the bottom, this will appear as the bottom border. Saved it as panel-border.png, because in gimp does not support saving a file in .svg format. Now open up the file /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css

$: sudo nano /usr/share/gnome-shell/theme/gnome-shell.css

goto the section

#panel {
 color: #ffffff;
 background-color: black;
 border-image: url("panel-border.png") 1;
 font-size: 8.5pt;
 height: 1.86em;
 }

change the line border-image: url(“panel-border.svg”) 1; to

border-image: url("panel-border.png") 1;

save the file
reload the gnome3 desktop by hitting Alt+F2 then enter r and hit Enter

Gnome shell will work without 3D acceleration in Fedora 17

From a message posted on Nov 3 to fedora mailing list by Adam Jackson the currently rawhide[1] fedora will have a gnome-shell that no longer treat llvmpipe as an unsupported driver. This means you can run gnome-shell even on VirtualBox or any other VM or on a hardware without 3D support.

So the Gnome shell will be available to everyone What about Gnome fallback which was executed when 3D acceleration was not available. It will no longer be required.

Still the work on software rendering of Gnome shell is only 10% complete. (When i wrote this post).

Fedora launched community knowledge base

Following the recent release of Fedora 16, the Fedora Project has announced the launch of its new Ask Fedora community knowledge base and support forums.

The new site is powered by Askbot, an open source Q&A forum written in Python and Django, which allows community members to ask and answer other users' questions related to Fedora. Before Ask Fedora, the three primary resources for users were the project's IRC channel (#fedora in irc.freenode.net), the mailing lists and FedoraForum.

Users can sign into Ask Fedora using their Fedora identity or any OpenID, including those from Google or WordPress. Information on how to participate can be found in the Ask Fedora FAQ and on the Ask Fedora wiki.

My ask fedora profile url is http://ask.fedoraproject.org/users/668/vishnu-pradeep/

Install htop

htop is an interactive process viewer for Linux. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses. Install Htop in fedora using following command:

sudo yum install htop 

Enable Zram in Fedora 15

While trying to optimize the elementary OS performance, Sergey Davidoff stumbled upon a project called compcache that creates a RAM based block device which acts as a swap disk, but is compressed and stored in memory instead of swap disk (which is slow), allowing very fast I/O and increasing the amount of memory available before the system starts swapping to disk. compcache was later re-written under the name zRam and is now integrated into the Linux kernel.

I decided to give it a try, and the result on my desktop with a quad-core CPU and 2Gb of RAM was fantastic: instead of freezing after running out of RAM, the system worked like nothing happened. I didn't notice any difference at all. It looked just like adding more RAM! Surprisingly, I got almost the same results on a 6-year-old laptop with Pentium M and 1Gb of RAM! So, I've improved the script to automatically adapt to the amount of memory in the system and automatically scale across several CPUs or CPU cores, packaged it in .deb and uploaded to PPA.

- Sergey Davidoff

Sergey also mentions that the only thing that prevents this from being enabled by default in elementary OS Luna for now is the existence of Atom netbooks with fast SSDs for which he doesn't know if this would be useful or not.


This is especially useful for netbooks, old computers (or computers that don't have too much RAM), virtualization or embedded devices but of course, you can use it on any computer.

What follows are instructions on how to enable zram for Fedora. You need Linux kernel version2.6.37.1 or better with zram compiled as a module.

Run the following command to see if you have zram available as a module in your kernel.
modprobe zram 

If the above command runs without errors, you have zram available as a module in your kernel. If not, you need to rebuild your kernel to have zram compiled as a module. Refer to these instructions, here, to learn how to compile a custom kernel for fedora.

There are 3 files you need to enable zram for Fedora. They are:

• zramstart (Bash Script)
• zramstop (Bash Script)
• zram.service (Systemd Service File)

Get these files from here.

Place zramstart and zramstop in the following folder.
/usr/bin

Place zram.service in the following folder.
/etc/systemd/system

As root, run the following commands to enable zram for Fedora.
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable zram.service
systemctl start zram.service

Run the following command to make sure the zram service started properly.
systemctl status zram.service

The output should look like this.
zram.service - Enable compressed swap in memory using zram
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/zram.service; enabled)
Active: active (exited) since Sun, 02 Oct 2011 22:46:31 -0400; 44min ago
Process: 942 ExecStart=/usr/bin/zramstart (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/zram.service