[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 11:16:26 -0700
davbraley at comcast.net (David Braley) wrote:

>...snipp...

> > In general, I try to avoid any card that you have to build your own
> > drivers.
> 
> Why? Is there a problem when doing updates, especially kernels that
> will render the driver unusable? That would be a bummer if I had to
> re-install the driver for this card each time I did a kernel update.

Yes, you will need to rebuild it for each kernel update. The kernel
doesn't keep a stable ABI (except by accident)... 

> ...snipp...

> WARNING!!!!!! RANT COMING!!!!!
> 
> I have been using Linux as my main desktop now for over 7 years, and I
> had know idea how much of a "newbie" I was until I tried Fedora. I am
> sure from the perspective of a seasoned Linux user, Fedora is a
> powerful and polished distro. But from my perspective, I find it much
> more difficult to get setup and working compared to other
> distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Mandrake, and of course SuSE. I
> even find it harder than Gentoo! Yes, Gentoo is a ton of work, you
> sit on your ass forever while the thing installs/updates but I never
> felt like I was lost, or experiencing any kind of weirdness like irq
> or strange permission conflicts during the installation process. This
> of course is due to their incredible documentation!
> 
> There is some very frustrating weirdness about Fedora I still can not
> figure out. One thing that is really irritating is if I log into X as
> a user, in this case the user "david", open a terminal and su in as
> root or sudo a command, I have strangely limited powers to administer
> the system. Networking tools/commands like ifup and ifdown are not
> available. 

Are you doing 'su root' or 'su - root' ? Try the - in there... stupidly
the default is to not have /sbin/ and /usr/sbin/ in users path's. This
means if you su without making it a login shell (so it sets the path as
it would be for a root login) you don't have any of those commands in
your path. 

> This is probably a bash config thingy or maybe it has
> something to do with SELinux that is set-up by default on
> installation. Who knows. THAT IS THE PROBLEM! Fedora does not behave
> like other distro's, so when a poor sap like me moves over, it is
> like I am not in Linux anymore. What little I have managed to learn
> does not seem to help, well to be honest, most of it does.  : )
>

It's likely just the path issue above. Nothing to do with selinux or
anything. Perhaps the default should be to have sbin in users path's,
but Fedora is behaving just exactly as might be expected IMHO. 

> END OF RANT!!!!!
> 
> 
> Ahhh, I feel better now.
> 
> (Rolling up sleeves)
> 
> Now lets see...  how in the hell do I get Java, Flash, and MPlayer
> working on this damn thing ;-)

For mplayer and the like, enable the livna repo: 
http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/UsingLivna
Then you can simply 'yum install mplayer'

For flash see: 
http://macromedia.mplug.org/faq.html#fedora

Fedora ships with the free gcj setup, so that might work for your java
needs. If not, you can always get the rpm from sun. 

> Take care all!
> 
> David

kevin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.nclug.org/pipermail/nclug/attachments/20061210/e71755b0/attachment.pgp>