It’s hip2b2

I expected my upgrade to Fedora 8 to be as flawless as my upgrade to Fedora 7. Oh. But, I was mildly disappointed. The upgrade itself was fine but there were a number of issues that you might encounter along the way too. Here are my notes that should help you in your upgrade or installation of Fedora 8 on Dell hardware.

• Problem running Fedora 8 installer from DVD-ROM. Yes. The first thing you do to upgrade or install is actually problematic. This is because of a possible (never ending) issues with ACPI. Just add the following string to the end of the kernel options boot line.

  nohz=off noloapic
  

• Installing TuxOnIce (formerly known as Software Suspend 2). Ok. Since, I did an upgrade it should have upgraded the kernel and support files too. Which it did nicely. But, after testing hibernation, my machine refused to wake-up and it hung at the “going atomic” part of the resume. So, I went into single user mode and tried disabling and enabling each service at my run level to find the guilty service. I did not have to go to the module level because my runlevel 1 hibernates and restores nicely.

  Anyway, here is the yum repository file for those of you who want to install TuxOnIce for the first time. Put this file in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory.

  [suspend2]
  name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Software Suspend 2 kernels and utilities
  baseurl=http://mhensler.de/swsusp/download/yum/fc$releasever
  enabled=1
  gpgcheck=0
  

  Then run the following commands:

  yum install kernel-tuxonice
  yum install userui-tuxonice-fbsplash userui-tuxonice-theme-fedorainfinity
  

  After this … It still won’t work. This is the point where my upgrade left me. The solution is to make sure that NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher services are disabled before hibernating and that they restart after a resume. Simple edit the /etc/hibernate/common.conf and add the following line.

  StopServices NetworkManager NetworkManagerDispatcher
  StartServices NetworkManager NetworkManagerDispatcher
  

  The current working version of the Linux kernel with TuxOnIce that I used and tested is 2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8.

• Nice TuxOnIce GUI hibernate screen is not working. My problems did not end there. Apparently, the was a bug in the mkinird-tuxonice script for this version that failed to increment the version number of the tool. Another problem is that you can’t seem to use any other splash theme like the nice fedora-infinity theme you installed above. What are we to do?

  First off, patch the ‘mkinitrd-tuxonice’ script with the following:

  --- mkinitrd-tuxonice.old       2007-12-08 14:34:21.000000000 +0800
  +++ /sbin/mkinitrd-tuxonice     2007-12-07 17:25:35.000000000 +0800
  @@ -83,7 +83,7 @@
   nolvm=""
   nodmraid=""
   tuxoniceuserui="none"
  -tuxoniceversion="20209"
  +tuxoniceversion="20212"
   tuxonicefwtarget=""
   splashtheme="suspend2"
  

  Then regenerate the initrd file with this commad. Replace the 2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8 string with the appropriate version of the kernel-tuxonice you are using.

  ln -s /etc/splash/fedora-infinity /etc/splash/suspend2
  rm /boot/initrd-2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8.img
  mkinitrd-tuxonice -v --tuxonice-userui=fb --splash=suspend2 
      /boot/initrd-2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8.img 2.6.23.8-63_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc8
  

  Notice that splash is set to suspend2 instead of fedora-infinity and that a hyperlink was created pointing suspend2 to fedora-infinity. why such a round about way of changing themes? Well, it seems that mkinitrd-tuxonice only uses suspend2 during boot-up but packages the custom theme on creation of the initrd. Using suspend2 eliminates these issues.

  These simple instructions should solve the ‘/sys/power/suspend2/do_resume file not found’ error when trying to boot up with this initrd and will give you the beautiful fedora-infinity boot-up screen.

This is now officially the fifth Fedora I have installed in this notebook. Hope this helps. Good luck!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.