Fedora Core 6 - GeForce3 Ti 200

I upgraded my main home computer to Fedora Core 6 (FC6) this past weekend. It has faithfully run Fedora Core 3 for the last couple of years, however, I was so impressed with FC6 on my laptop I decided to update the main computer as well.

After completing the installation I usually look to The Unofficial Fedora FAQ for answers on the usual little quirks that come with each release, however, they appear to have not updated the site for FC6. Instead, I turned to Fedora Core 6 Tips and Tricks for quick references to installing the most popular free add-on software packages.

The first thing I always do after a fresh install is update my yum configuration to include the livna and freshrpms repositories,

rpm -ihv http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/6/i386/RPMS.freshrpms/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm
rpm -ihv http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/i386/livna-release-6-1.noarch.rpm

Installing Xine DVD Player
With the above repositories setup, installing the Xine Video Player is as simple as entering the following yum statement,

yum install xine xine-lib-extras-nonfree libdvdcss

and letting it resolve the other package dependencies. The libdvdcss library is what allows one to play commercial DVD movies.

Installing the Nvidia Drivers
One of my other motivations for upgrading to FC6 was the new OpenGL accelerated desktop effects provided by Compiz. Upon grabbing the latest drivers from Nvidia I discovered that my video card is now listed as "legacy" and is no longer supported in the most recent driver downloads. I read that Compiz needs at least version 96xx of the Nvidia drivers to work. I had to try several different ones until I found that the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9631-pkg1.run package worked correctly.

My final modified xorg.conf configuration file is below which contains the necessary entries to add the Nvidia OpenGL drivers as well as the transparency effects.

# Xorg configuration created by system-config-display

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "single head configuration"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load  "dbe"
        Load  "extmod"
        Load  "type1"
        Load  "freetype"
        Load  "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"
        Option      "XkbModel" "pc105"
        Option      "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "nvidia"
        VendorName  "NVIDIA Corporation"
        Option      "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

I am still amazed it runs as well as it does on my aging Pentium III 866 Mhz.

Gas Leak!

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was punctuated earlier this morning by a knock on our door. One of the sub-contractors working next to our neighbor's house had punctured a gas line while excavating. Whoops. They advised we might want to evacuate the house, just to be on the safe side, until the gas company could cap the broken line. It seemed like a reasonable suggestion so we headed a few doors down to the development's show home and office to wait.

All in all we were only out of the house for about 15 minutes before the gas company showed up and fixed the leak. I was pleased that my house was still where I left it and that it did not end up resembling a pile of popsicle sticks.

PyBlosxom on DreamHost

The site has successfully been migrated over to DreamHost. It took me a while to get the Apache RewriteRules configured as they turned out to be a little different than what I was previously using on my server.

On my server, where the pyblosxom.cgi script resided in a cgi-bin directory, I had the following rule in place:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/(.*) /cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/$1 [L]

This sends all requests through the .cgi script by default and removes the need for it to be included in the url.

On DreamHost accounts there is no cgi-bin directory because scripts can be run from anywhere in the site. The following RewriteRule was needed to make everything work as is was before:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) /index.cgi/$1 [L]