Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle) was officially released last week. I’ve been using Fedora 14 for quite sometime and I figured it was time to try an updated version. I’ve been a KDE user for well, forever but I was looking forward to checking out the new GNOME. From reviews, not a lot of old time GNOME users like it but I’m always looking for a desktop that has a nice “modern” feel.

Fedora 17 – Getting Started

I’m not going to go into a lot of installation details here. I’m mostly going to discuss the issues I ran into getting everything to work correctly. If you need help with installing software such as MP3 support, DVD playback and other apps, you can’t do better than Mauriat Miranda’s Personal Fedora 16 Installation Guide. It’s for Fedora 16 as I did not see a completed guide for Fedora 17 but everything I installed from his guide worked perfectly.

Fedora 17 – Installation Specifics

• Installed the full DVD ISO Fedora distribution. Not the Live CD.
• This was a clean, fresh install. Not an upgrade.
• This is a dual boot machine along with Windows 7

Off to the Races…

Right off the bat, things got a little ugly. First off, the error “Disc Not Found: Floppy. No such device”. popped up right after boot which kinda made sense since this laptop has no floppy drive but the error hung up the installation. While it was hanging, the screen flashed very pixelated non printable characters. Never a good sign. After a few minutes, things got back on track. Please Note: After completing everything and running sudo yum update to fetch all updated packages available, this message and screen issues went away.

Another error message I received during the install was the message “Font True Not Found”. I will provide the Grub boot loader code below that will remedy this issue.

Lastly, the installer *seemed* to have finished installing as the GUI dialog displayed “packages 2239 of 2239 completed” but the progress bar was stuck at about 90% and the installation hung for about another 15 minutes…but it did appear to finish successfully.

And Boom! Goes the dynamite

I reboot…and everything goes to shit. The RedHat Graphical Boot (rhgb) locks up multiple times. All attempts to load the standard “First Boot” screen fail. Sadly, I’ve been here a bunch of times before. Of all the issues I’ve run into with RedHat/Fedora installs, 9 times out of 10 it’s either been a graphics problem or an ACPI problem. I drop to runlevel 3 and try to take a look under the hood.

If you’re here because you are having similar problems or are new to Linux and you only get one thing from this post, remember this…“When in doubt, acpi=off”

After logging in as root, I

• Create a new user. I was concerned the first boot screen would not re-appear to create one
• Temporarily turn off SELinux because well, shit happens
• Run dmesg to get any hints…nothing
• View /var/log/messages for anything fishy…nothing

At this point I walk away. I’ve been using RedHat/Fedora based Linux since RH6 (Hedwig) and I know not to get too worked up over shit like this. I grab a smoke, a cup of coffee and then get down to business.

OK, Time to get your hands dirty

I reboot and enter edit mode in the Grub boot loader (press e). I find the kernel boot line (it starts with /linux….) and I append “acpi=off” to the end of the boot parameters then hit F10 to boot.

The kernel boots and everything looks good so far and believe it or not, I get a graphical login screen. Yes!

The user I added at the command line is in the login list. Awesome. I login to KDE and it boots! Everything looks great except…no battery power management. This is due to me turning off ACPI support. So, to double check, I reboot but I let the system start up on it’s own without passing any extra parameters to the kernel to see if ACPI is truly the problem…..and it is. The login screen never fully loads. I get the login screen image, but no login box. CTL-ALT-DEL is the only way out.

At this point I have to start the ACPI dance and see what other options I can pass to the kernel to get everything to work because a laptop with no power management is worthless. If you are stuck at this point, I recommend you read up on ACPI kernel parameters at Less Watts’ Linux ACPI

Sadly, you may need to be on your own from here on out because the parameter that worked for me may not work for you. Also, make sure you read through the ACPI info very thoroughly as you could be making things worse if you don’t know what you are doing.

After trying multiple kernel options, the one that worked for me was “pci=noacpi”. Currently, everything works great. Power management is good. Not as good as Windows, but good. The KDE Plasma desktop effects look great. Everything runs. Crisp, snappy and fast.

Below are the changes I made to get things to run right. If you get stuck and can’t get things going, feel free to ping me.

File: /etc/default/grub

GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="Fedora"
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=us rd.lvm.lv=vg_dell-m5030/lv_swap rd.lvm.lv=vg_dell-m5030/lv_root LANG=en_US.UTF-8 rd.luks=0 pci=noacpi"
#GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/system/theme.txt"

You may be seeing the SYSFONT=True as I mentioned previously. Change accordingly.

Note my modifications..
SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 and pci=noacpi

Run the command:

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

then reboot. Good luck.

Oh and by the way. I did try out GNOME. I’ll say it was different and very pretty but it was too much of a resource hog and I went back to KDE. It’s fantastic.

Photo by: kayakeverywhere

Bitly updated their site recently to a lot of headaches, bellyaching, complaining and at first, I was one of them. I went to use their site yesterday before I was aware that new changes were forthcoming. Initially, I was lost. I didn’t realize what was happening, what I was supposed to do, where I was going and naturally got pissed off like a lot of other people did.

The mass exodus has been clearly visible since the update. I’ve seen a lot more people using Google’s URL shortener on their Twitter feeds just in the last 24 hours.

I have no ties to Bitly. I do not know anyone who works for them. I’m an average user, just like many of you. For me, using the original version of their site was effortless, almost robotic. Grab a link, paste it in and click “Copy”. Almost too easy for such a great utility. Perhaps that was the problem.

Bitly, why the face-lift?

I think the recent changes may have something to do with bounce rate. How could it not? It may not be the sole reason but I’d have to think it came up a lot at their re-design meetings. Being someone who is trying to build products myself, I can’t help but not think about bounce rate these days.

Let’s think about it. You paste the link, you copy it…and you’re gone! How many times did you actually read or click through what was on Bitly’s other pages before or after you used the site?

For me, it’s probably just a handful of times out of the hundreds of shortened links I’ve generated and a few of those times were to look over my number stats. Their bounce rate has got to be pretty bad. There was nothing on their site to entice us to stay. Honestly, they could have switched over to spam ads and most of us would have never noticed.

Now, you actually have to spend a little time on the site to do what you want. So we went from two clicks at best to 4 or 5. Big deal. I’m OK with that. Bitly is a great tool and a great brand. If they started putting some sponsored ads on their site to help with costs, I’d click on a few. How could you not? Good services cannot survive without loyalty. So, I’ll be sticking around. They’ve earned it.