Suppose your USB media is drive /dev/sdb, and your ISO image is at /path/to/some-image.iso. If you have an actual file system mounted (e.g., /dev/sdb1), unmount it from the command line. (Do NOT unmount it from a GUI, e.g, Gnome, as that may not leave it in a state where it is usable over USB.)

Now run the command: livecd-iso-to-disk --format --reset-mbr /path/to/some-image.iso /dev/sdb1

Previously I spent a bunch of time trying to run the command without the --format option, and got all sorts of complaints about problems with my USB medai, partition table, filesystem, etc. I’m not convinced that the error messages were accurate. The --format option simplifies everything.

The command above will default to formatting the USB media with an ext4 filesystem, which works fine with Linux, but may be inconvenient for use with Windows. You can apparently use the poorly-named --msdos option (which should have been --fat or perhaps --vfat) to use a FAT filesystem on the USB media rather than ext4. However, I haven’t verified that this works.

The obvious thing to do was to change the spec from:

BuildRequires: qt-devel

to

BuildRequires: qt-devel >= 4.6

However, Koji still tries to use qt-devel-3.x!

A Google search revealed an explanation in the rpmfusion-developers list from Kevin Fenzi:

That doesn’t work because it’s missing the Epoch. “>= 1:4″ would work, but it’s better to use the virtual qt4-devel Provides, which is backwards-compatible with EPEL 5 (which had an actual qt4-devel package), which will keep working in the future when Qt 5 will be the default and which avoids the pesky Epoch.

Now on to the next problem!

sudo groupadd foo
sudo usermod -a -G foo user
newgrp foo

Note that this makes the new group effectively the user’s primary group ID in the current shell and any new descendents. If you don’t want that, do another newgrp back to the original group. The new group will still be in the process’ group list.

Note that the “-a” (append) option to usermod may not exist in all Linux distributions.

1. GNOME 3 was designed by idiots for idiots.  They’ve tried to make it completely drool-proof, and in the process made it unusable by anyone with half a clue.  Use xfce instead.
2. To make suspend work on 2.6.35 kernel (or newer?): put acpi_sleep=nonvs on kernel command line.  Necessary for many laptops, but not all.  Definitely necessary on the Sony VPCEB17FX.  https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16396 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=641789
3. To find the UUIDs of your partitions: blkid
4. To display the LUKS header of an encrypted partition: cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda6
5. To boot a Fedora live CD such that it all gets loaded into RAM, and the CD is ejected:  add live_ram to the kernel command line.

• kmod-nls-base
• kmod-usb2
• kmod-usb-core
• kmod-usb-net
• kmod-usb-net-cdc-ether
• kmod-usb-net-rndis
• kmod-usb-ohci
• kmod-usb-uhci

Once these were installed, I edited /etc/config/network, and under “config interface wan” replaced “option ifname eth1″ with “option ifname usb0″.

I enabled USB tethering on the phone, and upon rebooting the router, it successfully set up the usb0 network interface and obtained its IP address, netmask, default gateway, etc. from the phone via DHCP.

At this point the only problem is that if I disconnect the phone (or disable tethering), then reconnect, the usb0 interface appears, but does not get configured by dhcp.

If you’re starting from factory firmware, the release image of Backfire has to be installed via the router’s recovery mode, which is slightly tricky.  Previously I’d figured out how to modify the image to install using the router’s standard firmware upgrade page, and that is now available in OpenWRT snapshots, but not yet in an official release.  However, last night I found that this method didn’t seem to work with the jffs2 image, so I reverted to trying to use the recovery mode.

Some people have had lots of problems with the DIR-825 recovery mode, but for others it works fine.  Originally it seemed like there was some kind of browser dependency, but apparently that is not the case.  The actual problem is that the recovery mode doesn’t work over a gigabit LAN link.  (This is now noted in the OpenWRT wiki, but wasn’t back when I first was trying to install OpenWRT.)  If you stick to 100 Mbps or 10 Mbps, it works fine.  Some people have had luck with issuing a command on their host to force the interface to 100 Mbps.  I tried that using ethtool on Linux (e.g., “sudo ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off advertise 00c speed 100″), and while that did seem to force the link to 100 Mbps, then I couldn’t talk to the DIR-825 at all.  I ultimately used a different laptop that had only a 10/100 port, and it worked fine.  Alternatively, I could have stuck a 10/100 switch between my laptop with gigabit and the DIR-825.

I replaced the card with an older Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro AGP 256MB dual DVI card, and it did not exhibit the same problem.  However, now when I moved windows over to the right side of the right monitor, they also overlapped the left side of the left monitor.  The X server defaulted to a desktop to 2560×1600, while my side-by-side monitors need 3520×1200.  Another tweak to the xorg.conf, and now it works correctly.  Also, the radeon driver supplied with Fedora 11 has 3D acceleration support for the X1950, but not for the HD2600, so I’m better off with the older card for now.

The updated xorg.conf is below.

# Xorg dual-head configuration
# monitors: Samsung SyncMaster 213T and Dell 2405FPW
# card: Visiontek Radeon HD 2600 Pro 512MB AGP Dual-DVI (RV630) or
#    or Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB AGP Dual-DVI (RV570)
# Eric Smith 
# $Id: xorg.conf,v 1.2 2009/09/19 06:05:56 eric Exp eric $

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "Default Layout"
	Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
# keyboard added by rhpxl
	Identifier  "Keyboard0"
	Driver      "kbd"
	Option	    "XkbModel" "pc105+inet"
	Option	    "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "radeon"
	Option	    "monitor-DVI-0" "Dell"
	Option      "monitor-DVI-1" "Samsung"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier "Dell"
	# Dell 2405FPW
	# Without the PreferredMode option, the X server
	# decides to use 1600x1200.
	Option "Preferredmode" "1920x1200"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier "Samsung"
	# Samsung SyncMaster 213T
	# The PreferredMode option doesn't seem to be
	# necessary here, as the X server picks
	# 1600x1200 on its own.
	# Option "Preferredmode" "1600x1200"
	Option "LeftOf" "Dell"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Videocard0"
	Monitor "Dell"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		# Without the following Virtual specification, the server
		# will default to 2560x1600 when using the Radeon X1950 card,
		# causing overlap of windows at the far right with the far
		# left.
		Virtual    3520 1200
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
	EndSubSection
EndSection

One of my monitors has a native resolution of 1600×1200, and the other 1920×1200.  The X server for no apparent reason defaults to 1600×1200 on both.  I tried adding a modeline for the larger monitor, but it didn’t do anything.  Finally I found the PreferredMode option in the xorg.conf man page, and that did the trick.  My xorg.conf is below.

# Xorg dual-head configuration
# monitors: Samsung SyncMaster 213T and Dell 2405FPW
# card: Visiontek Radeon HD 2600 Pro 512MB AGP (RV630)
# Eric Smith
# $Id: xorg.conf,v 1.1 2009/09/18 10:03:47 eric Exp eric $

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "Default Layout"
	Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
# keyboard added by rhpxl
	Identifier  "Keyboard0"
	Driver      "kbd"
	Option	    "XkbModel" "pc105+inet"
	Option	    "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "radeon"
	Option	    "monitor-DVI-0" "Dell"
	Option      "monitor-DVI-1" "Samsung"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier "Dell"
	# Dell 2405FPW
	# Without the PreferredMode option, the X server
	# decides to use 1600x1200.
	Option "Preferredmode" "1920x1200"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier "Samsung"
	# Samsung SyncMaster 213T
	# The PreferredMode option doesn't seem to be
	# necessary here, as the X server picks
	# 1600x1200 on its own.
	# Option "Preferredmode" "1600x1200"
	Option "LeftOf" "Dell"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Videocard0"
	Monitor "Dell"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Original posting below the fold.

I upgraded one of my machines from Fedora 7 to Fedora 9, and am now having font problems.  It is using a tiny font for the system font.  Here’s an example, using a newly created user to show that it is not a problem with a config file in a user’s home directory:

Fedora 9 upgrade fonts

I tried a fresh install of Fedora 9 in a virtual machine, and its fonts look more like what was used in earlier Fedora releases:

Fedora 9 fresh install fonts

On the upgraded system, I also can’t start emacs:

No fonts match `-adobe-courier-medium-r-*-*-12-120-75-75-*-*-*-*’

I went through the list of installed font RPMs (shown below), and don’t see anything missing compared to the fresh install in the virtual machine, so there must be a configuration problem somewhere.

Here is the output of “rpm -qa | grep -i font”:

baekmuk-ttf-fonts-common-2.2-6.fc8.noarch
cjkunifonts-uming-0.1.20060928-4.fc8.noarch
libXfont-devel-1.3.1-2.fc8.x86_64
libXfontcache-1.0.4-3.fc8.x86_64
baekmuk-ttf-fonts-gulim-2.2-6.fc8.noarch
libXfontcache-devel-1.0.4-3.fc8.x86_64
xorg-x11-fonts-Type1-7.2-3.fc8.noarch
libXfont-devel-1.3.1-2.fc8.i386
libXfontcache-1.0.4-3.fc8.i386
xorg-x11-fonts-misc-7.2-3.fc8.noarch
lohit-fonts-bengali-2.1.9-1.fc8.noarch
fontconfig-2.4.2-5.fc8.x86_64
lohit-fonts-tamil-2.1.9-1.fc8.noarch
mplayer-fonts-1.1-3.fc.noarch
fontconfig-devel-2.4.2-5.fc8.x86_64
paktype-fonts-2.0-2.fc8.noarch
jomolhari-fonts-0.003-4.fc8.noarch
xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-100dpi-7.2-3.fc8.noarch
lohit-fonts-gujarati-2.1.9-1.fc8.noarch
fontconfig-2.4.2-5.fc8.i386
bitmap-fonts-0.3-5.1.2.fc7.noarch
xorg-x11-font-utils-7.2-2.fc8.x86_64
lohit-fonts-punjabi-2.1.9-1.fc8.noarch
tetex-fonts-3.0-44.9.fc8.x86_64
libfontenc-1.0.4-4.fc8.x86_64
dejavu-lgc-fonts-2.19-1.noarch
sazanami-fonts-gothic-0.20040629-4.20061016.fc8.noarch
lklug-fonts-0.2.2-5.fc8.noarch
libXfontcache-devel-1.0.4-3.fc8.i386
xorg-x11-fonts-truetype-7.2-3.fc8.noarch
lohit-fonts-hindi-2.1.9-1.fc8.noarch
lohit-fonts-malayalam-2.1.9-1.fc8.noarch
kacst-fonts-1.6.2-2.fc8.noarch
xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi-7.2-3.fc8.noarch
fontconfig-debuginfo-2.4.2-5.fc8.x86_64
liberation-fonts-1.0-1.fc8.noarch
lohit-fonts-kannada-2.1.9-1.fc8.noarch
libfontenc-devel-1.0.4-4.fc8.x86_64
lohit-fonts-telugu-2.1.9-1.fc8.noarch
libXfont-1.3.1-2.fc8.i386
ghostscript-fonts-5.50-18.fc8.noarch
libXfont-1.3.1-2.fc8.x86_64
lohit-fonts-oriya-2.1.9-1.fc8.noarch
libfontenc-1.0.4-4.fc8.i386
mathml-fonts-1.0-21.fc6.noarch
urw-fonts-2.4-3.fc8.noarch