Category: Linux

Fedora 15: Further Observations…

I’ve mentioned Fedora 15 a couple of times recently:

A couple more things I’ve noticed along the way:

  • Lots of the early press complained about the “reduced productivity” of the GNOME3 desktop. Having used it for a while now I can safely say it doesn’t impact me at all. When I’m using my MacBook Pro I have to move the mouse down to the bottom of the screen to activate the doc. It’s like a reflex reaction. I’ve found I do much the same thing with GNOME3. If I’m using the mouse to switch to Activities (rather than the Windows key), I make a circular anti-clockwise motion with the mouse so it touches the top-left corner of the screen. That switches to Activities without a mouse click, so on the down move of the circle I’m over the doc. It’s really pretty stress free. A single mouse move with no extra clicks. Sorted.
  • I did an upgrade from Fedora 14 on one machine. Fedora 15 includes LibreOffice in place of OpenOffice. As a result OpenOffice was not “upgraded”, and the existing OpenOffice installation stopped working. It wasn’t a problem, I just installed LibreOffice, just an observation.

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 15: First big problem…

Yesterday I hit a pretty major problem with Fedora 15. I did a reboot and the login screen came up fine, but when I tried to log in I got a message saying,

failed to load session ‘gnome’

No options or alternatives. Just back to the login screen. ??

I started the machine up in “Full multiuser mode” by hitting the “a” key during boot and adding “3” on to the boot parameters. Once at the login prompt I could now log in as root. Since it looked like it might be a GNOME problem I uninstalled and reinstalled GNOME.

yum -y groupremove "GNOME Desktop Environment"
yum -y groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment"

No change!

My next thought was to install KDE, so at least I would have a desktop. I did this using,

yum -y groupinstall kde

I made KDE the default window manager by editing the “/etc/sysconfig/desktop” file to contain.

DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE

The machine now rebooted and I got KDM as the display manager. This allowed me to start KDE, but surprisingly, also allowed me to start GNOME as my window manager.

Now I figured it was probably an issue with GDM, not GNOME itself, so I reinstalled GDM.

yum -y remove gdm
yum -y install gdm
yum -y install gdm-plugin-fingerprint

Bingo. I was now able to switch back to GDM as my display manager by editing the “/etc/sysconfig/desktop” file to contain.

DISPLAYMANAGER=GNOME

I have no idea what happened to cause this problem in the first place. Googling for a solution wasn’t much help because most posts are really old and the new ones just said reinstall.

If anyone else has misfortune to run into this issue, you now know how I got out of it.

Incidentally, my brief time on KDE did not fill me with a desire to switch. I think I prefer GNOME. I am however a little nervous about the stability of Fedora 15 after this incident. Maybe I did something dumb to cause it, but if I did, I have no idea what it was. I’m just running a browser and VirtualBox VMs for the most part.

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 15: First Impressions…

It’s been nearly six months since I made the switch from CentOS to Fedora as my main desktop OS.

The Fedora 15 final release dropped a couple of days ago and I slapped it on my main desktop PC straight away. As usual, the first impression is all about the visuals. GNOME 3 looks great. I’m sure lots of people think KDE looks great too, but I tend to just stick with the default window manager, so it’s GNOME for me.

If you’ve read any of the press you will know that the menu bar and task bar have been removed. This is kinda weird at first. How does it affect me?

  • Task Bar: I was surprised how reliant I was on the task bar for switching between open apps. I would say about 50% of the time I was using the task bar and 50% of the time I was using alt+tab. Now I’m using alt+tab 100% of the time. I think this change has worked really well for me. I feel like I’m navigating quicker.
  • Menu Bar: I think this one will annoy a few people. In essence, the menu bar is still there, but one layer down. If you click on “Activies” in the top left (or hit the Windows key) you switch to the activities screen. There is a favorites doc on the left and if you click “Applications”, you get a menu (more like a filter) on the right of the screen. That’s all nice, but the thing I really like is if you click the Windows key and type in a few letters it returns all apps and items that contain those letters in the name. Similar to the Windows menu, but prettier. So if you insist on using the menu like an old-style menu, I think this change will annoy you as it requires an extra click and some animations. If you use the favorites doc and the search feature I think it’s quite cool.

The fancy visuals worked straight out of the box for my main desktop machine, but one of my other machines (with a better graphics card) couldn’t handle GNOME 3 and ran using fallback mode. Fallback mode is pretty much like previous GNOME releases with a menu bar and task bar. I’m sure some people will prefer fallback mode, but I think the new stuff is certainly worth a try.

If you really can’t handle the new interface you can manually switch to fallback mode. Start up the System Info dialog (Activities > Applications > System Settings > System Info), click “Graphics” , flick the “Forced Fallback Mode” switch and relog.

As for the OS itself, I’ve had no dramas so far, but it is early days. Time will tell…

By the way, I did the usual Oracle on Fedora thing.

Cheers

Tim…

Two New Articles: UDEV and Database Triggers…

I’ve recently put a couple of new articles about old subjects on the website. In both cases, the articles were initiated by forum questions, but the explanations became too painful in the format of a forum post so they graduated into articles…

  • UDEV SCSI Rules Configuration In Oracle Linux 5 : For those of you that like to follow my Virtual RAC guides, but don’t like using ASMLib, you can use this article and replace ASMLib with UDEV.
  • Database Triggers Overview : This is really a primer on database triggers. I’ve focussed mostly on simple DML triggers, since this is what the vast majority of trigger-related questions I’m asked relate to. Consider it the “minimum” you should know before you write a database trigger.

Cheers

Tim…

UltraEdit for Mac/Linux v2.1.0.3…

Followers of the blog will know I’m a big fan of UltraEdit. I have a multi-platform unlimited upgrades license, so I run it on Linux, Mac and occasionally on a Windows VM.

I noticed today that version 2.1.0.3 was released for Mac and Linux about a month ago. Not sure how I missed that on the update notices. 🙂 The changes for Mac are not that big because it was already at version 2.x, but the Linux version had been hanging around the 1.x for some time now and was missing a lot of functionality compared to the Mac version. This latest release is a pretty big catch-up for the Linux version and it now contains pretty much all of the functionality I use on a regular basis.

Both the Mac and Linux versions are still lagging behind the Windows version in terms of total functionality, but who cares about Windows… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle 11gR2 on Oracle Linux 6…

With the arrival of Oracle Linux 6 comes the inevitable installation articles.

The Oracle installation on Oracle Linux 6 is certainly smoother than the recent Fedora installations have been. Even Enterprise Manager works fine with no meddling.

The official 11gR2 installation guide has not been updated to include Oracle Linux 6 and I can’t see any notes on MOS about it, so I’ve essentially followed the installation for Oracle Linux 5 and adjusted where necessary. I’m guessing when the official notes are released they are going to be pretty close to this. I can’t see any certifications against Oracle Linux 6, so I guess I would avoid it for production Oracle installations at the moment.

Cheers

Tim…