Fedora's back online, but can I install anything else?

Well, I finally discovered the solution for my self-inflicted problem with Fedora failing to go online...  My guess that it was Network Manager was semi-right: the update I chose was a scheduled one that somehow conflicts with the acer-wmi module.  The immediate solution was to log in as root and type

modprobe -r acer_wmi

Once that was done and proved that it worked, I edited the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file to include a line that said "blacklist acer_wmi" so it'll avoid loading in the future.


I also discovered (with some embarrassment) the reason for a serious problem I was having with trying live distros.  Almost all of them (including Gujin, which is more of a boot manager) would boot up to a point, then crash in some manner.  Turns out that even though there's nothing suggesting it on the little sticker, my netbook's processor is 64-bit! 

So I'm downloading Mint Debian Edition 64 right now... I wouldn't do it, but Fedora refusing to let me install Open Office instead of what they want me to use (and their devs' recent Ubuntu-team-like attitude) really annoys me, and working fighting with OpenSuSE's web-based live creator reminded me how much I hate their repository setup.  So over to Debian-based distros (or Debian) I go...

Now it's working, now it's not

I'm starting to think the netbook is cursed or something.  I've discovered, first, that despite being listed as 11.6" it doesn't fit in 11.6" cases...and 12" cases are about three inches too big. 

More infuriatingly, my own screwing around has caused a deeply strange wifi problem.  I was annoyed at having to try repeatedly to bring wifi up, and updated NetworkManager...which promptly placed a block on wlan0 that I can't lift in Linux.  Of course the block doesn't appear to exist in Windows.

So far, I've tried booting other/older distros via USB to see if their NetworkManager/Wicd could control it (nope), then installed & asked rfkill to "unblock" it.  I now know from experimenting that the Fn+F3 combo controls a hard block on phy0, but that acer-wireless has a soft block that won't go the eff away.

Edit: evidently OpenSuSE 11.3 will lift it. That makes even less sense, but if it works, I'm installing it: I want to explore Linux when I feel like it, not when major components fucking break.

LibreOffice won't recognize the existence of its dictionary (I've tried more things than I can keep track of to fix THAT problem) and I can't get OpenOffice of any version to install.  Since that's not enough, while typing in hand-edited changes to my writing, I've noticed the computer copies don't match the printouts, plus a good quarter of them have inexplicably lost all text formatting.

A Fedora/RPM LibreOffice repo exists!

My other tiny triumph of the day concerned LibreOffice.  Thanks to Fedora's insistence on excising a tool I rely on from their copy of OpenOffice I spent too many hours Saturday trying to install either LO 3.3.1 or an unmolested OO 3.3.  If I followed the instructions and installed the damn things from RPMs, the program segfaulted after the registration screen with the oh-so-useful error $sd_prog/$sd_binary. (I found jackall useful about that online...) Copying a chunk of files from the RPMs on top of an existing Fedora-mangled install basically got me nowhere aside from several yards closer to dumping Fedora.


Meanwhile, I intermittently searched the web (and various RPM/app sites) aggressively for a RPM repository, but all I found were repos for other distros, and the knowledge that LibreOffice will be available in Fedora 15 (which doesn't help me now).  Finally, Sunday night I discovered a Fedora-based repository with LibreOffice, courtesy of an intriguing distro I've never heard of before called Kororaa.

Their repo file didn't work right away (package managers kept telling me the repository was inaccessible), but a lucky guess let me figure out how to fix it.  Open a terminal/console and do "su" so you become root, then download their .repo file per their instructions:

wget http://kororaa.org/repos/kororaa.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/kororaa.repo

Once you've grabbed it, while still root, open the little bugger with your favorite text editor (I like nano):

nano /etc/yum.repos.d/kororaa.repo

On the "baseurl" line, change the part bolded here from the original:

http://kororaa.org/repos/kororaa/$releasever/$basearch

over to a more useful (as of right now; the number will change):

http://kororaa.org/repos/kororaa/14/$basearch/

(I'm not using Fedora 14 on this machine, but it doesn't seem to matter.)

All you should have to do from there is use your preferred package manager to remove any old copies of OpenOffice/LibreOffice and install the properly-functioning one from Kororaa.  I recommend also trying their distro out because it seems like a very good way to have your cake with Fedora and eat it too.

Up and Working!

Well, my Acer Aspire One 721 (or AO-721) "Cecil" is now sitting happily in Fedora 14 and fully functional.  I switched to using Unetbootin (rather than Gujin) to make a liveUSB of Gparted Live (I'd been using System Rescue CD) -- that gave me no problem at all about resizing the partitions and adding new ones.  I then used Unetbootin yet again to create a new Fedora 14 live USB, booted it...boing, no problem at all installing!

After setting up some very normal things (turning on tap-to-click, etc.) I discovered something really problematic: it couldn't come out of suspend/hibernate, and once rebooted after such an incident, it couldn't turn wireless on.  After a few days of periodic searching, I found these instructions, which also works in other distros like Linux Mint:

1. As root, edit /boot/grub/grub.conf (mine was .conf, theirs was .cfg) in your favorite text editor.
2. Search for the word "quiet" and add these words after it, then save: 
noacpi apm=on noapic 

However, wireless was still off!  If I held down the function key and hit F3 to turn it back on, it didn't light up, even though all of the other function-F# keys were working just fine.  After some searching and experimenting, I noticed that after hitting Fn-F3, "Enable Wireless" in the NetworkManager tray icon was alternately an option or grayed-out; if I clicked on it when I could, surprise surprise, I was suddenly back online!  Turns out that the bleeping thing is toggling the wifi off & on just as it should, but due to some glitch, the light is only being turned on if NetworkManager also enables it.

If only all of my problems were this easy to fix...

Is this a gift or a curse [Edit: It Works!]

Evidently my brother got fed up with hearing about my various failing computers -- ages 6, 10 and 11 -- because to my shock, when I came home from seeing the Wavy Gravy Movie with Dad & his partner, there was an Acer Aspire One 721 here for me.  It's currently being used to stream old Grateful Dead videos for me, because...

...so far, the three Linux installers and Gparted on its own have all been unable to resize the hard drive partitions, which is required to install Linux. [Edit: Working OK now, see next post.]  Fedora 13 & 14 yell "FIRMWARE BUG" at liveboot, which evidently never happens with netbooks other than the AO721 (lucky me).  Fedora and OpenSuSE refuse to boot off USB keydrives created by my Averatec (only option at the moment).

I'm learning that I still don't care much for Windows, but that for some reason, it's able to connect to my wifi router -- Linux has recently been forcing me to type in the IP, DNS servers, gateway, etc. and I don't know why.  I can't think of anything redeeming to say about Firefox 4, which I've avoided in Linux thus far as 3.6 has mercifully been the default on my preferred distros.

Better get back to figuring this thing out (after some aspirin for the headache the netbook or frustration has caused both days thus far).

QuickiWiki Look Up

Nooo, not my monitor!

When I was using Fedora, one of the more bizarre issues that started cropping up is that when -- and only when -- it was left unattended for several hours, my external/only monitor would shut off and refuse to come back on for several minutes.  The power light would flicker for about two seconds when I asked it to turn on, and my sharp (likely autistic-linked) ears could hear all kinds of weird (and now predictable) electrical fluctuations, but no picture.  Turning the screensaver off, turning it on, changing it, etc. didn't help.

I switched back to OpenSuSE, left it overnight, and to my shock, the monitor was still on the next morning.  I figured that I'd just solved the problem, saving me the very real possibility of having a dead monitor, especially since I can't afford a new one and don't know how to fix it yet. That is, until today, when I found the monitor in "sleep" state and it shut itself off for several minutes when I moved the mouse to bring it back up. This is really frustrating -- there's a ton of non-optional expenses in the next few months (and I don't mean presents), and this was the second Westinghouse to pull this on me in a row.  Bleep Westinghouse.


Time to do some serious research on fixing LCD monitor power issues, I guess.  Well, I had planned on learning how to fix electronics via soldering iron sometime, and I'll be thrilled for a week if I pull it off!!

OpenSuSE, Fedora, argh

I wrote quite a while back that I'd settled in OpenSuSE 11.3 Linux, and was extremely happy with it.  Well, I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but a couple of months or so ago, a stupid mistake on my part updated it to 11.4 Alpha, breaking my ability to run a huge number of programs and generally making me unhappy.

So, after a lot of frustration one day, I decided to try something else entirely: Fedora 13.  Aside from some initial hassle, and a few things I hadn't managed to puzzle out yet, that went quite well, enough that I recommended it to a fellow novice.  So I was quite pleased when it turned out that, hey, Fedora 14 was out!

I used the little updater that runs in the background, then does its magic after a reboot.  The next morning, I merrily rebooted the computer...and was told I didn't have enough disk space -- but not which partition it wanted space on.  It also, as I soon learned, did something so I couldn't boot into the still-untouched 13; fixing the free space issue didn't help.  Meanwhile, the Fedora 14 Live CD I'd downloaded for kicks inexplicably makes the screen go blank after filling the "F" logo in.

So much for that idea. I didn't know how to fix 13, or if it could be fixed, so I put the OpenSuSE GNOME 11.3 live CD in -- and installed that instead.  I'm typing from it now, noticing the interesting mix of things it does better than Fedora & things Fedora definitely has a huge lead in.  I can't figure out for the life of me how I got their bizarre problem with Firefox's failure to respect the font hinting settings (a non-issue in Fedora) fixed last time, and the solutions I've found/tried aren't the one I used last time.

It's at times like this that I actually do understand claims that Linux will never conquer the desktop, or why Ubuntu is ahead (though it has the same stupid Firefox font issue, they also have a ready-made fix). Arrgh.  Maybe I'll just find a fix so Fedora 13 will boot, or the way to forcefully reverse the screwed-up "upgrade" from OpenSuSE 11.3->11.4alpha, since both installations are still sitting peacefully in their own partitions on my drive...