Installing Fedora 27 on a UEFI-enabled Windows 10 machine with Secure Boot enabled

I recently installed Fedora 27 on my personal laptop alongside Windows. So far Fedora 27 feels very polished and it recognized almost everything out of the box, including sleeping when I close the lid. 

There were, however, a few things I did that went beyond the usual click-click install experience, so I thought I would share:

1) The new Fedora install still boots into Windows

There's a new Fedora media installer executable that downloads the ISO and prepares a USB drive for you, and upon booting from said USB, installation is relatively straight-forward. The installation took care of creating free space from my existing NTFS partition, and automatic partitioning created a /boot, / and swap partition.

However, after rebooting my laptop ran Windows again, instead of Grub - this is typical of UEFI installations. The Fedora installation did create a new entry for itself, but it was missing one for Grub. I am not sure if this is by design, or a product of having a password on my BIOS, etc.

To fix this, we must add Grub to the authorized UEFI files. Find where your BIOS allows you to add UEFI files as "trusted for executing" and point it to 

HD / EFI / Fedora / grubx64.efi  (you must provide a name, I chose Fedora Grub)

Save the settings. You may only have an option to save and exit, like me.

Then, you must make sure that the Grub option that now appears in your boot priority list is listed before "Windows Boot Manager". Voila, it works, and this includes after updating Fedora.


2) Gnome (by default) doesn't show files in the Desktop

You can either install the gnome-tweak-tool, or just run the following in an unprivileged terminal (I think this is a per-user setting)

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons true


3) Touchpad does not support tap-to-click (ie, like a Mac).

In the Settings app, choose Devices, Mouse & Touchpad, and in the Touchpad section, turn on "Tap to click".

webm test using gnome screenshot's screencast function

I will document my VCAP studies lab setup for anyone who finds themselves in this position. I also plan to learn vSphere replication and SRM with this lab, using a laptop as the production site and a desktop as the recovery site.

Since I switched to Linux less than a year ago, i've found different ways to solve the same problems I had in windows. The prt scn (print screen) button does not work by default - you have to install a tool for it. A google seach recommends a tool called Shutter; I had already installed GNOME Screenshot.

While searching for he hot keys, I found a feature that interested me in the GNOME Screenshot tool called Screencast.

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/screen-shot-record.html.en

This basically allows you to take a small video of what you are doing. It stores the files as .webm - the HTML5 video format that is supported by all modern browsers.

So, here is my first webm embedded video in a blog post - let's see how it looks.

webm test

good news - it runs as advertised. bad news is the resolution sucks, and it grabs all the desktop (in my case, 2 screens). I will update this when I find a solution where 1) i can specify what's recorded, instead of all the desktop 2) i can read what's recorded.

Installing ubuntu over an already dual boot windows/fedora

I installed ubuntu over my dual boot fedora/windows machine.

I told the ubuntu installer to use the same /boot drive - it errored, and after i selected another drive (the one it suggested), continued.

Once booted, i only had my old fedora and windows entries in grub.

Run this in a root shell to get ubuntu loaded - note, you must have mounted the ubuntu / partition before executing it.

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


Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.14.4-200.fc20.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.14.4-200.fc20.x86_64.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.5-200.fc20.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.13.5-200.fc20.x86_64.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.4-200.fc20.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.13.4-200.fc20.x86_64.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-5a03a6d41476417baf5f18f5d1eec2af
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-5a03a6d41476417baf5f18f5d1eec2af.img
Found Windows 8 (loader) on /dev/sda1
Found Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (14.04) on /dev/sda5

done

** tip **

in case you don't like the distro you added, you can remove the partition you installed to, and then run this command again, and the grub entry will be updated accordingly :D

installing vmware workstation 9 in fedora 20 / and also how to fix when kernel upgrades don't let it compile

I was going to make a new post, but honestly, for the installation, this one covers it really well.

http://www.itzgeek.com/how-tos/linux/fedora-how-tos/install-vmware-workstation-9-on-fedora-18.html#axzz2pKokA8cG

I would obey the instructions - including leaving the root user in the dialog. This adds the benefit of only the root user being able to change the program (for example, when applying a license key).

When upgrades come, it will ask to recompile and may fail. Check these 3 things

A) login as root, do this (anytime your kernel changes)

cp /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include/linux/


B) If the upgrade process still fails - the referenced log will say something like

 error: conflicting types for ‘VNetFilterHookFn

Follow this then:

http://dandar3.blogspot.com/2014/01/vmware-player-601-on-ubuntu-1404-alpha.html

The people that get an error when applying the patch - you already have the patch (open the file, you will see it). it fails because you are running the patch twice.

C) if the above patch is already in place, open the error log and try running the build command that fails. if you find:

/tmp/modconfig-iyZm3D/vmnet-only/netif.c:152:64: error: macro "alloc_netdev" requires 4 arguments, but only 3 given
    dev = alloc_netdev(sizeof *netIf, deviceName, VNetNetIfSetup);
                                                                ^
then use what eris23 did in the comments of danda3 (he said he found it in http://archlinuxtricks.blogspot.com/ - it's in italian but you can see the post on the left). It is a 2nd patch, you have to extract and tar again, but basically you are adding a 4th parameter to bypass the error). This was on line 152 (the error shows it)

Making it simple:

1) cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/

2) tar xvf vmnet.tar vmnet-only/netif.c

open the netif.c file, go to line 152, add NET_NAME_UNKNOWN, in place of a 3rd argument (i did not find this to do any harm to workstation).

3) tar -uvf vmnet.tar vmnet-only/netif.c

and now run the installer, which in my case, finally worked.

If it still doesn't work, grab the command at the end of the error log, execute it, and start troubleshooting from there, looking for errors. Good luck!

Decibel Audio Player in Fedora 20

One of the things I haven't found in Linux (maybe until today) was a simple music player that would just let me pick a folder where I had a album and play it. Too many of those music managers turn me down as soon as they mention an "import". My music manager is the file manager :)

So I'm giving Decibel Audio Player a try. I installed it from the software GUI in Fedora 20. No problem at all - but when I tried to run some MP3s I got no audio. Now, Rhythmbox and others will guide you if you don't have the correct drivers, and maybe even help you install the rpmfusion repositories, but there was no error message here.

After googling around, the correct thing to type is

yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

and that will allow you to play MP3's (I closed and re-opened just in case).

Broadcom Corporation BCM4352 802.11ac and kmod-wl has inconsistent or slow internet with channel 11 wifi

This was a weird one. Every device in my house was ok with my AP broadcasting over channel 11, but fedora 20 with BCM4352, installed using "yum install kmod-wl" from the rpmfusion repositories, had very erratic behaviour.

Someone in a forum had asked a person with a similar problem to show what channel they were using, and it made me check my home settings. I tested and was able to connect satisfactorily to another wifi network, which was on channel 01. I switched my AP's radio from channel 11 to channel 1, and it's been working perfectly now.

A command to display what channel is being used is

$ iwlist wlp3s0 freq
wlp3s0    26 channels in total; available frequencies :
          Channel 01 : 2.412 GHz
          Channel 02 : 2.417 GHz
          Channel 03 : 2.422 GHz
          Channel 04 : 2.427 GHz
          Channel 05 : 2.432 GHz
          Channel 06 : 2.437 GHz
          Channel 07 : 2.442 GHz
          Channel 08 : 2.447 GHz
          Channel 09 : 2.452 GHz
          Channel 10 : 2.457 GHz
          Channel 11 : 2.462 GHz
          Channel 12 : 2.467 GHz
          Channel 13 : 2.472 GHz
          Channel 14 : 2.484 GHz
          Channel 36 : 5.18 GHz
          Channel 38 : 5.19 GHz
          Channel 40 : 5.2 GHz
          Channel 42 : 5.21 GHz
          Channel 44 : 5.22 GHz
          Channel 46 : 5.23 GHz
          Channel 48 : 5.24 GHz
          Channel 149 : 5.745 GHz
          Channel 153 : 5.765 GHz
          Channel 157 : 5.785 GHz
          Channel 161 : 5.805 GHz
          Channel 165 : 5.825 GHz
          Current Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)

where wlp3s0 is your interface. you can use tab to fill it in, or get the name from ifconfig

remote desktop from linux (accessing Windows machines via RDP with Remmina)

Fedora 20 is one of the easiest to use, most integrated distributions I've experienced. It was quite a surprise for me to find that establishing a simple RDP session would be a bit of work.

In a fresh installation, in software / utilities, you see a program called "Remote Desktop Viewer". Sure enough, RDP is listed as a protocol for connection. However, when you try using it, nothing happens. Turns out if you google around, this program does not support RDP currently.

There have been previous programs that support this, such as rDesktop and tsclient. However, googling a bit more will tell you that what all the cool kids use now is Remmina with freeRDP.

So how do I install this program? well, with a "yum install remmina" of course! And it installs, but... you only SSH and SFTP connections.

Turns out you must also install the rdp plugins. This is achieved with a "yum install remmina-plugins-rdp". But nothing happens on the client. Maybe I should close it and re-open it? Wow, it still doesn't display anything!

This post saved my life when I was about to fork into who knows what procedure to get this working. It explains Remmina doesn't quit when you close it... so basically you have to kill the process for it to load the plugins (if you did it in the same order I did)

https://github.com/FreeRDP/Remmina/issues/165

To see running programs (such as dropbox) in the tray, move your mouse to the bottom right corner (and do it kind of fast).

So, the better way of installing this RDP client is

yum install remmina-plugins-rdp 

as it will install remmina as a requirement and load the RDP plugin correctly the first time you run it.

Hope it helps someone :) it's a good solution so far and offers quite a few options.

gftp in fedora 20 is as winscp in windows

Winscp is a really easy to use scp client but it's for windows only. The closest i have found in fedora 20 is a program called gFTP.

yum install gftp

before you can actually do an scp connection, go to FTP, Preferences, SSH tab

where it says "ssh prog name" type ssh in lower case

and that's it - make sure you specify the right port, username, password, and SSH2 in the dropdown. press enter and you should get the familiar "add ssh key" prompt.