Carl Hage

I had recently purchased one of this MSI Wind netbooks to take with me to university instead of lugging around my huge HP notebook. I was suddenly confronted with the dilema that it comes with Windows XP, something which I was not too pleased about really. Being a Linux system admin I felt it was time to get a full linux system going as I was sick of dual-booting my HP system. Initially I tried a couple of linux distro’s and played around with them, Ubuntu, LinuxMint, and Fedora were my candidates. The debian based distros did not play very well at all with my hardware and couldn’t pick up the 1024×600 screen resolution and kept me down to 800×600, something you certainly do not appreciate on a 10″ screen. I will go into some of the steps required to get your MSI Wind running Fedora Core 10 to run perfectly.

Installation

The first problem you might realise is that your netbook has no CD/DVD drive to install from. For this part of the process you will undoubtedly need, a USB thumb drive and another machine (or use the WinXP system currently running on the MSI Wind).

You need to get a program called UNetbootin, install it and then run the software, connect your USB thumb drive and select the Linux Distrobution and version that you want to install.

In my case it was

• OS Type: Fedora
• OS Version: 10_NetInstall

My thumbdrive was only 512MB so I opted for the NetInstall, this simply means that the installer will download the packages off the net and install them to your FC operating system. It is not the fastest way to install, but it sure works. Now the first time I did this I made the mistake of using UNetbootin’s advise of using the fedora.redhat.com install image, however for better speed (and possibly no bandwidth usage at your ISP) try to see if your ISP hosts a FC10 install image and packages. Most ISP’s do and you will find it downloads a lot quicker and does not go towards your monthly bandwidth usage, depending on the packages you select this can be upwards of 5GB!

Now the UNetbootin software will download the NetInstall image onto your USB drive. They tell you to clear out your USB drive and make you assume that it will be reformatted, however I realised that it is not the case, it simply adds the installation kernel to your USB drive.

So once you’ve done that, remove the USB drive and put it in your MSI Wind and boot up the netbook…

You may need to press F11 for bootup options incase it doesn’t start booting up the Linux installer. Now at some stage in the installer you will be asked for the installation medium, this is either CD/DVD, Network, or URL. You will be using the URL option. UNetbootin gave you a URL earlier to use for the installation medium, however as I said it’s better to check if your ISP has the installation images. If they don’t, then at least try to find an ISP close to your location or country that has it. You can find the more known list of FC10 mirros here.

A little confusing thing here is that you can ommit the /images/install.img from your URL as FC10 installer picks this up on its own, putting it in will give you an error saying <install-URL>/images/install.img/images/install.img was not found… So for an example if you are using BigPond, use:

http://ga14.files.bigpond.com:4040/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/

On to package selection, I advise you stick with the standard default and customise later, I got all giddy and started selecting and customising my packages, this not only made installation slower as it had to fetch a lot more packages, but the installation actually failed when it was unable to fetch a certain package and I had to start over. So take my advise and go for default, once your netbook is set up you have all the time to sit and play around with package management.

Next > Next > Next etc. You know how it goes…

Install Updates

Now your FC10 is up and running, you will need an ethernet connection at the start just to run the initial updates. We will install your wireless card drivers soon. So, simply open up your Terminal.

[carl@wind ~]$ su Password: [root@wind carl]#

Now that you are root, install some nifty yum repositories for your OS updates.

Livna

This is a very good repo to have, usually a lot of fixes, updates and extras can be found at Livna. To install it type:

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm

RPM Fusion

Another very good repo here with a lot of extras, this is a very popular repo for Fedora and RedHat derivatives in general, installation below:

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

So now you have some nice repositories added to your system, you can begin the upgrade, but just before that, you can take a look to see where the repo’s are and how to enable/disable them. This is important as sometimes a repo may be unavailable and will cause yum to fail on you..

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/

ls -la

This will show you a list of all your yum repositories. You can edit the files and check for the enabled=1 or enabled=0 to see if it is active or not, this is what you need to change to enable/disable the repo if it is giving you problems.

There are many kinds of repos you can install, however it is wise to ommit rawhide and testing repos and their packages tend to be quite unstable. For the sake of this update, enable:

fedora.repo

fedora-updates.repo

livna.repo

rpmfusion-free.repo

rpmfusion-free-updates.repo

Running yum

simply,

yum update

This will take a while so go do something while it downloads and installs the updates, note that it is likely that your kernel will be updated too.

Wireless

Now that Fc10 is installed and updated to the latest version possible, you will quickly notice that wireless networking is not enabled on your netbook, which sorta sucks because a netbook without the net is pretty much a book, and thats pretty useless in this day and age. The RPM fusion repos we added earlier have the answer and so you simply need to install the wireless card drivers:

yum install kmod-rt2860

Then reboot and you will notice that your NetworkManager now has an ‘Enable Wireless’ option next to it. For most of you, this will be the end of the tute, however I will go into some specific fixes I had to do to get everything I wanted working…

UTS Wireless

That’s right, my university’s wireless network has no support for linux (or so they say). This basically took me a few days to get around and I came very close to giving up altogether and going back to the horrible XP, however I prevailed and am a happy fedora user.

The first thing you will notice is that you can connect to the UTS WIRELESS connection that shows up when your on campus, then whenever you browse to a website you will be redirected to something like: https://wireless.net.uts.edu.au/ and will be asked for a login (UTS student ID and password).

The next page will say “Loading Network Connect…” this will take forever and finally your Firefox will crash.

The problem it turns out is the fact that Fedora uses an open source implementation of Java called OpenJDK, this unfortunately does not work as well as the real J2RE and will crash a lot.

You can test the java version your browser is using by going to http://javatester.org/version.html

You will need to go to http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp and download the latest version (at the time of writing this, it is update 12).

Download the .rpm.bin version and extract the rpm by doing:

sh jre-6u12-linux-i586-rpm.bin

This will extract the rpm, now install it

rpm -Uvh jre-6u12-linux-i586.rpm

So the latest real (Sun) Java is installed, but you need to tell the system about it:

/usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/bin/java 1612

And now you need to select it as the default java to be used:

/usr/sbin/alternatives –config java

There are 2 programs which provide ‘java’.

Selection           Command

———————————————————————————–

+ 1                        /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0-openjdk/bin/java

2                            /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/bin/java

Enter to keep the current selection [+], or type selection number:

Once you have done this the last step is to get Mozilla to use the real Java plugin and not the horrible IcedTea implementation

/usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so 1612

This will install the real Java browser plugin, and to active it:

alternatives –config libjavaplugin.so

There are 2 programs which provide ‘libjavaplugin.so’.

Selection             Command

———————————————————————————–

+ 1                         /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0-openjdk/lib/i386/IcedTeaPlugin.so

2                             /usr/java/jre1.6.0_12/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Enter to keep the current selection [+], or type selection number:

So enter 2 to change to use the real java plugin.

Now that everything is set up correctly. You need to start Firefox in safemode, to do this either create a shortcut for this or launch from Terminal:

firefox %u -safe-mode

Then go to https://wireless.net.uts.edu.au/ and login with student ID and password.

Once you have done this you will see the Network Connect working properly, however it runs for a split second and then quits. We’re almost there! Now if you look in your home directory /home/username/ you will notice subdirectories called .juniper_networks/network_connect/, now what you need to do is

cd ~/.juniper_networks/network_connect/

There should be a number of files in there

The ones you will need to get this working are ncdiag and installNC.sh

./ncdiag

will run a diagnostics test for your Network Connect installation, now I saw that it did not install properly.

What you need to do is

chmod +x installNC.sh

./installNC.sh

This will actually install the Network Connect software, then run firefox in safe mode again, login and it should pop up with the Network Connect window and your on your way, happy surfing!

Bluetooth Travel Mouse

Another problem I found was my V270 Bluetooth Travel Mouse would basically need to be re-set up each time I booted up. Basically what happens is you click on your Bluetooth Icon > setup new device… > then when your done, reboot and try to use the mouse, nothing. Then when you repeat the above steps you get Bluetooth Pairing Failed.

To fix this yo u need to do the following things:

cat /var/lib/bluetooth/*/lastseen | cut -c 1-17

00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

This is to see your mouse’s bluetooth address. Save this address somewhere.

To connect simply do:

hidd –connect 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

Now we need a linkkey to pair the bluetooth mouse to the netbook, you can enter any value, I have used random numbers:

echo 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX 64917050156063818749852764598064063 >> /var/lib/bluetooth/*/linkkeys

The number can be anything random, so don’t worry too much about it.

The last part is fixing a handshake issue with linux’s bluetooth stack (BlueZ)

vi /etc/init.d/bluetooth

start()

{

echo -n $”Starting Bluetooth services:”

daemon /usr/sbin/bluetoothd

RETVAL=$?

[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/bluetoothd

[ "$HID2HCI_ENABLE" = "true" ] && hid2hci –tohci > /dev/null 2>&1 || :

touch /var/lock/subsys/bluetooth

echo “”

sleep 1 && hciconfig hci0 reset

return $RETVAL

}

You need to add the line in bold to the file, this will reset the pairing so that you can use the bluetooth mouse on other devices as well. I share the mouse between my HP laptop and MSI Wind netbook and find this very useful.

In order for Windows not to ask for another linkkey you can write it to the mouse itself by doing:

hciconfig hci0 putkey 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:X

This should do the trick and your bluetooth mouse will work perfectly now.

Now I’ll admit not all these ideas are my own and I had to do a lot of research into getting everything working perfectly, but this is a compilation of everything I had to do to get my MSI Wind and Fedora 10 to play nice.  I will reference the blogs used below as they deserve the credit.

• http://www.ryanduff.net/2009/01/25/fedora-10-on-msi-wind-with-wireless/
• http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f9-tips.php
• http://www.kirpininyeri.com/2009/01/bluetooth-mouse-on-linux/

So It’s no wonder why Linux hasn’t become very mainstream yet, It took me a few installs, re-installs and a lot of searching and head banging to get my FC10 to work optimally. I hope this helped you in one way or another, please leave some feedback in the comments.