Tommi’s stuff

Installed Fedora 10 a couple of days ago and I must say I’m very pleasantly surprised. Install went smoothly as ever and getting everything up and running was pretty much painless. Here’s pretty much what I needed to do to get it working on my HP nw9440 laptop:

• Installed from the DVD install media
• Setup RPMFusion - rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
• Installed nvidia drivers,yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
• Installed a few of my favorites, gnome-do, mplayer, networkmanager-vpnc, rdesktop, gnucash

A nice surprise was that rhythmbox now automaticly invites me to download and install the needed rpms for mp3 playback and others, finally!

Also, suspend and hibernate now works perfectly.

NetworkManager now works out of the box with my iwl3945 wifi card.

OpenOffice.org 3.0, now opens evil Microsoft Office 2007 files.

Conclusion, haven’t stumbled across a single annoying thing so I’m extremely happy with the quality of this release!

Just ran into quite a bit of trouble trying to get VMware Server 2.0 to run on Fedora 9. After quite a bit of digging I found that vmware-hostd calls PAM and unix_chkpwd seems to cause a problem in hostd. The error message from the VMware Management Web:

The server is not responding. Please check that the server is running and accepting connections.

And after looking through the proccess list I found the following:

root      9817  9741  0 17:26 ?        00:00:00 [unix_chkpwd] <defunct>

My fix was to turn off password authentication in PAM for VMware and hope for a fix from VMware soon. This fix was suggested in this post.

Turning off authentication:

# cat /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd

#%PAM-1.0

auth       required    pam_permit.so

account    required    pam_permit.so

After that I suggest closing out connections to the vmware ports using iptables if you have disabled the default firewall which should keep you safe. Addition to /etc/sysconfig/iptables follows:

-A INPUT -i ! lo -m tcp -p tcp -m multiport --dports 8009,8222,8308,8333 -j REJECT

Hope this helps..