darkness

Here are a few random notes on installing FC5 on my T40 (2379-D6U).

Where to begin? Disable SELinux. At least, that’s what I needed to do as of the time of this writing. I’ll hopefully file some bugs, but Bugzilla is down right now. Some examples:

audit(1145252072.627:3): avc: denied { write } for pid=2199
comm="pm-powersave" name="vm" dev=proc ino=-268435366
scontext=system_u:system_r:hald_t:s0
tcontext=system_u:object_r:sysctl_vm_t:s0 tclass=dir

That one looks like hald trying to run pm-powersave from the pm-utils package. Isn’t pm-utils the same as pm-scripts (and pmscripts)? I think pm-scripts are obsolete (unless, perhaps, you’re using APM)?

audit(1145252075.936:4): avc:  denied  { use } for  pid=2215
comm="bluez-pin" name="[7165]" dev=pipefs ino=7165
scontext=user_u:system_r:bluetooth_helper_t:s0-s0:c0.c255
tcontext=system_u:system_r:xdm_t:s0-s0:c0.c255 tclass=fd

audit(1145252075.936:5): avc: denied { write } for pid=2215
comm="bluez-pin" name="[7165]" dev=pipefs ino=7165
scontext=user_u:system_r:bluetooth_helper_t:s0-s0:c0.c255
tcontext=system_u:system_r:xdm_t:s0-s0:c0.c255 tclass=fifo_file

Sorry, your guess is as good as mine here. It doesn’t look good, though, does it? I’ve had problems getting a PIN dialog to pop up when I want to bond with a Bluetooth device, too, so I’m not fond of further complicating my situation with SELinux blocking some of the bluez stuff.

audit(1145252427.672:11): avc: denied { unlink } for pid=2578
comm="NetworkManager" name="resolv.conf" dev=hda6 ino=3232800
scontext=system_u:system_r:NetworkManager_t:s0
tcontext=system_u:object_r:etc_runtime_t:s0 tclass=file

This one is my personal favorite. NetworkManager works fine after rebooting. I get connected to my wireless network, everything happens like it’s supposed to. However, I hibernate, then resume, and I get the above audit message. When I had SELinux in enforcing mode, the result is that the wireless connection is established, at least somewhat (it’s a bit hazy now, but I think it did DHCP correctly; DNS might have been horked, judging by the above message), but nm-applet spins forever and takes up 100% CPU.

Now, there is an option to “disable SELinux protection” for NetworkManager. When I disable this protection, it basically totally stops working. I think this error is the cause of that:

Apr 17 00:17:47 darktop NetworkManager: <WARNING>
nm_dbus_get_networks_cb (): nm-dbus-nmi.c:527
(nm_dbus_get_networks_cb): error received:
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied - An SELinux policy prevents
this sender from sending this message to this recipient (rejected
message had interface "org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerInfo" member
"getNetworks" error name "(unset)" destination
"org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerInfo").

Good times. For shits and grins I tried disabling SELinux for hald too, but that definitely didn’t get me anywhere. In fact, I think hald stopped… working. I’m pretty sure that’s when my laptop suddenly decided it couldn’t suspend anymore (as evidenced by the disappearance of a “Suspend” option from the main menu on my gnome-panel).

So instead I just turned it all off. I don’t know if I’m exactly happier this way, but at least I’m presumably getting on with my work, rather than dicking around with suspend/resume problems.

Andy says, "One of the coolest things these days is NetworkManager.”
You say, “yeah, it’s really important for fedora, gnome, and linux in general.”
Andy says, “Wireless-tools pisses me off.”

Did I mention fucking NetworkManager doesn’t work in KDE? Or so I’m told. I really didn’t even try. As much as I’m not really happy to say it, if you want to use Fedora—especially on a laptop—you should probably just give in and use Gnome. So much of Fedora’s automation and nice configuration stuff seems available mainly (or sometimes only) within Gnome. It basically sucks pretty bad.

In other news, gnome-power-manager is apparently destined to be the Death Star of power management on your box. Don’t set up acpid on your new FC5 installation, just poke at gnome-power-manager. Be sure to check for more options by using gconf-editor; for example, I found I could tell gnome-power-manager not to lock the screen when I shut the lid, but it still engages the screen saver (and DPMS I’d hope). (Note that the bit about gconf-editor is true for lots of stuff. I guess this is how I’ll be configuring my Gnome applications from now on?)

On the T40 your hibernate (Fn-F12) and display off (Fn-F3) buttons won’t work, at least not by default. I could probably make Fn-F3 work by using the blank.sh script from ibm-acpi and acpid (I know, I just said to ignore it); I believe that does some ugly hack to find the right Xauthority file and then sends the xset command to put the LCD in DPMS suspend mode. (Don’t try using vbetool, for example: the screen won’t un-blank by itself.) I never use suspend-to-RAM so I configured Fn-F4, which sends a proper ACPI sleep button (by default), to do suspend-to-disk. My LCD contrast and “ThinkLight” (or whatever) buttons still work. There seems to be work pending towards making all the different ACPI keys work. I’ll also say there’s apparently talk of moving acpid into Extras. I find it weird that I have to run a GUI to get power management?

If you want to use the built-in modem, slmodem is still what you need. Grab the slmodem-alsa packages from Livna, though.

Stanton Finley’s FC5 installation notes are once again a good place to start for installing Xine, mplayer, Flash, probably Java (though I just built the JPackage stuff myself). I don’t even have Dag installed on this laptop yet: I’ve found everything I need thus far between Core, Extras, and FreshRPMS (except Flash, of course). This does remind me to install the Emacs Speaks Statistics package, though.

gnome-bluetooth-manager is still useless. After scanning two or three times it finally found my phone, at which point I could do absolutely nothing except look at its icon. Pretty as the icon was, I did something like sdp browse from a terminal while my phone was in “announce mode” (right now I’m drawing a blank as to what it’s called, sorry). Then my V710 said “do you want to bond with ?” I said yes, V710 asked for a PIN. After I entered the PIN into V710, for the first time ever, I got a GUI box that popped up and asked me what PIN to use for bonding. After that I was successfully bonded. I copied in my old rfcomm.conf and /dev/rfcomm0 basically worked.

I’m happy to say that software suspend seems to work great, with either shutdown or platform in /sys/power/disk. I see no difference between the two right now, and it defaults to shutdown, so I’ve left it at that. Sound, wireless (ipw2100; oh, uh, grab that firmware from ATrpms; I’m a liar), video, even Ethernet seems to come back. (OK, so Ethernet is no surprise.)

If you want to use VMware (Workstation, at least, and probably other versions too), you’ll need the latest patches from this weird site with VMware patches. The current one is called vmware-any-any-update101.tar.gz. I have no fucking clue who runs this site, but the patches always seem to fix my problems.

All in all… I guess I’m happy I upgraded because I got software suspend out of it. It’s easily 4x as fast as APM BIOS suspend-to-disk, and I have an actual working suspend-to-RAM now, should I ever want to use it. On the other hand, I feel like I’ve had to fuck with FC5 a whole lot to get it even remotely working the way I want. I can’t seem to find where any of the new power management stuff (i.e., gnome-power-manager) is really documented. That was a big hurdle. As was figuring out that I just need to disable SELinux. I’m really not sure that NetworkManager should be getting pushed so aggressively, nor that gnome-power-manager was ready to see the light of day. (By the way, shouldn’t there be some way I can set up some acpid events, use dbus-send, and send events to, say, gnome-power-manager for my IBM hardware buttons? Is that documented somewhere? Reading the source makes me… think that the functionality just isn’t there. Also, be careful with dbus-send: I crashed the system message bus several times.)

It’s amusing that not so long ago I was telling some friends that Linux isn’t really that hard to install. My ass it isn’t hard to install—at least, assuming you want to take advantage of your hardware beyond the most basic features.