DevHeads.net

My wife got an obnoxious popup on her machine, couldn't get rid
of it, and called me downstairs. I got rid of it in a trice -- and then
dove heavily into a trap.

She complained also of the cursor giving trouble -- I had noticed
that it always appeared somewhat to the right of what it was actually
pointing to. This time I thought to connect it with the fact that a
little over an inch along the left edge of her monitor was plain black.

Aha! thought I, the display needs adjusting. I tried a couple
things, got nowhere, and tried system-config-display.

It alerts me, and shows a bug unreported. I tell it to report. It
churns through seventy downloads, or so it says.

When it thinks it's ready, I fill out its question as to what I
was doing, and tell it to go.

It gives me a box, labelled Report Done, but containing two error
messages.

One is called Bugzilla, with the rest in red, "Can't login. Check
Edit->Plugins->Bugzilla and /etc/abrt/plugins/Bugzilla.conf.

I normally run four PCs behind a KVM switch. The same ones worked
fine for years, with several Fedora releases, and three or four switches
as those wore out.

Sometime since I installed F12, I began seeing a nasty trick. Any
one machine works fine, so long as you stay on it; but if you switch
around for just a few minutes, you'll find it frozen -- not seeing
keyboard nor mouse, not recoverable by anything less than the reset
button -- when you come back.

I've tried changing keyboard and mouse. I even bought a new KVM
switch.

For the last several years, I have been running the same four PCs
behind the same KVM switch, with the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor
(an HP w2207 which is marginal for the hardware of the older two), with
several releases of Fedora.

Now suddenly (beginning iirc with, certainly after, installation
of F12) everything related to the display keeps going exponentially worse.

Discussion with a local friend who speaks hardware (as I do not,
alas!), reached a suggestion to try updating the firmware.

Googling got me to a stub of what had been Fedora Portal (and had
apparently had someth

I run Gnome, and have a strong if irrational allergy to KDE in
general; but there are several apps (such as Konqueror for man pages, and
K3B) that I use so much that I make sure to get them even if I have to
install all of KDE to do it. I might well use, or at least try, several
more, if I didn't have to interrupt what I'm concentrating on ..

But for as long as I can remember, there have been two kinds of
entries in the Main menu: ones that will tell you what they are or do if
you hover the cursor over them -- and ones that belong to KDE.

Why the lacuna?

I put a dictionary on my panel -- one of two in the Main Menu;
and I *think* the spellcheckers for gedit and alpine are different. I'm
forever having to add entries to the latter two, and would to the
dictionary on the panel if I could.

Is there one single most compendious dictionary available for
Fedora? Can I replace all three of mine with it? Or if not, can I merge
all three, once and for all?

It seems a pointless waste to have to add "frobnosticate" or
"yclept" thrice ....

Follow-ups set to gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general

  On my #2 PC, I had finally given up on preupgrading. I
copied /home/btth onto an external hard drive; did a fresh install; copied
/home/btth back (and did "chown -R btth:btth" on it just in case); did a
lot of customizing; did a PackageKit update, which called for rebooting;
did the reboot. That failed.

  Somewhere among all the above, I got disgusted with the
display, which turned out to be 800x600 -- despite being connected
directly (no KVM switch!) to the 1680x1050 monitor.

"Your computer failed to suspend. Check the help file for common
problems."
"Visit quirk website."

I have no faintest intimation *what* help file might be worth a
tinker's dam, of whatever clay.

But the button, which tries to launch a browser, points at http://
people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/ -- which has failed a couple
dozen times with at least half a dozen browsers.

What's more, so have all attempts to truncate that URL and
navigate from there.

Nor do I know more than the spelling of "suspend," "sleep,"
"hibernate," nor any synonym in a computer sense.

Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 signature: NOKEY, key ID
8dc43844
rpmfusion-nonfree/gpgkey | 1.7 kB 00:00

Public key for rpmfusion-nonfree-release-11-1.noarch.rpm is not installed
[root at BBB ~]#

PackageKit has been doing the same thing. (It started with a
demand for two keys, eventually bethought itself of getting one, and did;
but it persists, like yum above, in failing with the other.)

I tried "yum update preupgrade," as usual, and got nothing, as
usual; then I tried plain preupgrade -- and got a bunch of messages;
after a while, I got back to that machine (still without telling it to go
ahead), and found a lot more messages. Maybe they'll tell somebody
something.

My #3 PC is a handed-down Dell PowerEdge sc1420, now running F11,
which began life as a server for a list I help manage. (The list is now
hosted elsewhere.) I call it BBB (Big Black Beast), since it's so much
larger and blacker than any of my others.

I also have a Lite-On external USB DVD-RW drive, which the BBB
sees perfectly well when it's plugged into it.

I don't know what I did that made my panels go away -- but I need
them back.

All I see is the bare desktop, with launchers for Computer, my
user's home, and the trash.

I need my left (originally top) and bottom panels. How do I get
them back??

One machine has the background pic switched to fullscreen (I
think; I never go near putting anything into that.), or at any rate
doesn't show either my bottom panel or my left panel. How do I get out of
this display and get my panels back??

[....]

PC #4, my oldest and slowest, is now running F12!

Gnat in ointment: I could swear I told it to upgrade existing
(and got suspicious when it let me "customize now"), but it didn't.
However, that machine and all it had were expendable.

What's more, that same DVD-RW, now in my Thinkpad T42, is
installing F12 again.

I've tried all the tricks on this list a/o the troubleshooting
site, over and over. I finally gave up : downloaded and burned a DVD --
and *still* hit the catch-22 error, with too little space in mnt/sysimage/
boot.

Now what?

Can I simply delete all of /boot, or everything in it? All of
grub.conf? Or what? It's going to be a royal pain if I have to burn all
my data to media, and then sneakermail that back onto each machine,
instead of just upgrading f11 ....

It's really a question about remixes generally, I guess; but
Omega is the one I'm running. Will it take a preupgrade, as I think, or
is there some gotcha out there??

Many times, when I hit ^J amid text in compose mode, it merely
makes a mess; and trying to mitigate that only keeps making it worse.

This is with Alpine 2.0 under Fedora 11; I haven't yet managed to
spot a pattern in when it happens.

I asked on the Alpine list, and was told inter alia that "Alpine
2.00 in Fedora 11 has been known to have bugs not related to
Alpine, but to gcc. You may want to report this to them and see if they
can duplicate it."

What I know of gcc, alas!, would go in a gnat's eye. Can anyone
here help??

What is it with libnetfilter_conntrack.so.1()(64bit) and
iptstate-2.2.1-5.fc11.x86_64 (fedora)??

On two machines -- one on my desk, using gpk-update-viewer, and
one downstairs on my wife's, using yum update under ssh (and trying all
suggestions, plus yum remove and you install) -- I hit catch-22.

[....]

[....]

I thought at first that was over my head, but I played around a
little, and found it. (I do run Gnome.) It took effect as soon as I
logged out and back in.

Many many thanks!

For as long as I can remember, any install of Fedora or RedHat
before it has put launchers for Computer and my home folder on the
desktop -- even the Live CDs do it.

On one F11 machine, mine disappeared the other day. I have no
idea how or why.

I've grown accustomed to their use, and have tried to get them
back.

I don't know what I did, but they now appear on one (only one!)
of my dozen-and-a-half workspaces. And I can't seem to find a way to tell
the machine to put them on all.

How do I fix this??

I have

[btth at Hbsk2 ~]$ rpm -q qgis
qgis-1.0.2-1.fc11.i586
[btth at Hbsk2 ~]$

or equivalent on all four of the Fedora 11 PCs on my desk -- and none of
them can seem to launch it. Not with the GUI (by clicking the launcher,
which shows a Q transfixed by an arrow pointing NE), nor yet from the CLI
(by commanding "qgis &" as user or as root).

Any guesses why not?

There is a little more detail at

http://forum.qgis.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4969

but no answer there, either.

I'm running Garmin Mapsource in Wine under F11.

When I clicked on Help and told it to check for updates, it did
downloads of 6.15.6.0 for about a minute, then popped up another window
telling me to click on an Install button -- but Wine or Fedora 11 or
something fails to display the button, and hitting Enter instead doesn't
work either.

rpm -q wine
wine-1.1.29-1.fc11.i586

I closed the app, did a Wine boot, and tried again. This time it
popped up a different message, saying there was trouble accessing the
downloaded files.

I closed the app again, and did another Wine boot.

A friend just getting into linux has been having trouble on one
machine with Ubuntu 9, but finally got 9.04 installed and working. Now he
asks :

(I run Fedora, and have no clue.) Can anyone tell him?

I've been dutifully updating my own machines with gpk-update-
viewer; but ssh -X for some reason doesn't seem to handle it well when I
update my wife's, on another floor. So, rather than bite off more
troubleshooting than I can hope to chew, I've just gone back to plain ssh
to my userid on her machine, then su - , then yum clean all followed by
yum update.

This practice rubs my nose in all the reboots that PackageKit
keeps demanding, since yum never does.

What is dellsysidplugin2 -- and why do I have it on a machine
that, afaik, has never been near Dell??

[root at Msgv2 ~]# yum update
Loaded plugins: dellsysidplugin2, refresh-packagekit
fedora/metalink | 16 kB
00:00
fedora
[....]

Google Linux gets lots of hits on it, but the ones I've looked at
seem to be just people asking what it is and why ...

They make it incredibly tedious to get rid of all their miserable
language-pack cruft -- and the minute you turn your back, they shove it
all in again.

Is there a way to prevent / disable that abominable practice?

Or has the time come to admit that the blasted browser is not
worth the trouble it takes?

Is there a reasonably similar one without this disgusting
practice? Seamonkey, maybe?

To my great satisfaction, it became possible shortly before the
release of F11 to run two of my four legacy suites of proprietary GPS/
topo map software under wine.The two suites I prefer (Garmin's own and
one of Maptech's) now install, launch, and run -- and most of them
usually do the crucial function, transferring data to and from my GPSs.

(Details in a June 29th post here, titled "Mappery : uncertain
success with Fedora/Wine/Garmin")

There is a snag, though.

Disclaimer : what I know of hardware would go in a gnat's eye,
comfortably.

I have a T30 Thinkpad, into which a hardware

Gnome-appearance-properties gets installed with a default
collection of wallpapers, themes, backgrounds, or whatever they're
called; I have plenty of my own that I like better, and always delete
those. But some screensavers, such as Slip in xscreensaver, still find
them -- apparently in /usr/share/backgrounds. I'd like to get rid of
them.

I'm the nearest thing there is to tech support for my wife's
machine (which, like mine, runs F11) -- downstairs.

Rather than trust to auto-updating, and be constantly interrupted
when busy, I disable that and just run gpk-update-viewer by mouse every
day or so, when there are quiet moments, on one machine after another.

One advantage of that, btw, is that when I see an update for an
app I'm sure I don't want, it alerts me to go uninstall it.

One thing bugs me. It seems like practically every update I get
has not one but several of those little icons telling me I have to reboot
when the update finishes.

Is this really necessary?? Why???