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2004年09月28日

Fedora Core 2

I recently installed (and am using this instant) Fedora Core 2 (FC2) Linux. Fedora is the community arm of possibly the most recognized commercial Linux distribution Red Hat. Red Hat used to distribute its flavour of the OS for free while selling support to corporate clients. While this is still the basis of their business model, they merged with the Fedora project in September 2003 and separated their commercial product "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" from the community supported version "Fedora Core".

Enterprise Linux is still based on Open Source Fedora Core, but includes software updates, support, and systems management. The packages included from Fedora are restricted to a manageable subset for which Red Hat can guarantee support. For more information about the history of Red Hat Linux and Fedora, go here. Red Hat, incidentally, was founded by Canadian Bob Young, from Ancaster, Ontario, who now owns the Hamilton Tiger Cats!

When I first installed FC2, I was impressed with the easy graphical installation. The first time I installed Linux, specifically Slackware Linux, was in 1998 and involved a text based installation with lots of tapping 'y' or 'n' to confirm or deny cryptic configuration options. Getting a graphical interface running was a concerted effort in itself. Installing Linux is now, dare I say, as easy as installing Windows. OK, let me qualify that. Installation is easy, but there were a few obstacles to a fully functional system that required some research and expertise.

My two main problems were wireless networking, and Japanese character input, neither of which were working out of the box.

Wireless Network
The problem with the wireless card was pretty severe. Not only was I not able to connect to the network using the card, but the PCMCIA device itself was not being properly detected. An error message was generated at boot. Those of you familiar with the PCMCIA module in Linux are probably accustomed to the two beep system of notification. The first beep indicates if the card is correctly detected, and the second beep indicates if the card is correctly configured. High pitch is good and low pitch is bad, so what you want is two high pitch beeps.

But now the beep system is gone. cardmgr, the utility responsible for monitoring sockets, can be run with a "quiet" option to disable beeping. But it looks like it is being run normally in the startup scripts, so perhaps the system speaker is disabled. I have yet to figure this out and it only compounded the problem of me not knowing why the card was not working.

I found the following advice in a forum:

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and set 'ONBOOT=no'

And it got rid of my error message at boot, but still no network. I tried the "System Tools" -> "Network Device Control" utility from the main menu, and saw something that looked promising. But when I tried to get the interface activated using the utility, it gave the strange error message:

sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
sit0: unknown hardware address type 776
Bind socket to interface: No such device

This is because it was using, by default, a nickname 'eth0:1' for the device. When the command 'dhclient eth0:1' is run behind the scenes, it does not execute correctly. It needs to be run as 'dhclient eth0' with the real device name. But once I figured that out, I had another problem. dhclient broadcasts on the network to ask for configuration information from a DHCP server (usually your home router these days). However, the card was still not communicating with the access point.

After blaming the driver (orinoco_cs) and looking for an alternative, I eventually discovered I was using the appropriate driver. After much experimentation with card configuration settings, I finally found the incantation that got my network card to work:

iwconfig eth0 rate auto

So if anyone else out there has a 3CRWE737A AirConnect Wireless LAN PC Card made by 3COM, you need to set the data rate to automatic to get it to work. To have this done by default, edit the configuration script corresponding to your network device (eg. /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0_0) so the entry for rate reads RATE=auto. You can also set the ESSID of your access point and other information here.

Japanese Input
Japanese text input was another mystery. One site I read went so far as to claim that the entire Japanese community had been cut off because of the lack of support for Japanese input in FC2. The old method of Japanese input in Linux was to make sure the canna server was running, then launch kinput2. Because I generally wanted everything in English, I would run applications as needed with Japanese support enabled by setting the language and input method environment variables on the command line before launching the application.

I finally found, on the Fedora Core 2 Input Method Testing Guide, the magic I needed to get Japanese input working. Set the environment variables LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 and GTK_IM_MODULE=iiim So if you were running firefox from the command line with Japanese input support, you would type the command:

LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 GTK_IM_MODULE=iiim firefox&

So far this works great! Use ctrl-space, not the old shift-space, to switch between input methods. A little IME (Input Method Editor) button even appears on the gnome taskbar. Actually, only the second variable, GTK_IM_MODULE is necessary to enable the IME.

Satisfaction
I am really impressed with FC2. It runs well, it is very intuitive (unless something is broken!) and it looks beautiful. All the text is anti-aliased and can be configured with sub-pixel smoothing for LCD monitors. The graphical configuration tools work nicely and there is one tool for each job. Previous Linux desktops often included an overwhelming suite of redundant utilities and applications; everything and the kitchen sink. FC2, in contrast, delivers everything you need and nothing more.

I highly recommend you give it a try. Use bitorrent to make the download go quickly and read this before you install FC2 if you want to dual-boot between Windows and Linux. If you have ever used Linux before, installation will be a snap and I expect you will be impressed.

You can learn more about FC2 and download the CDs (for free of course) here: http://www.fedora.redhat.com/

Leave me a comment if you need help with the installation!

Posted by William at 2004年09月28日 22:36

Comments

Posted by: zooey at 2004年09月30日 11:45

Posted by: William at 2004年09月30日 13:48

Posted by: zooey at 2004年10月01日 04:43