Various FC5 Questions...

[EngineerJoe]

Over the last little bit, I have been using FC5 more and more. Once I got my wireless NIC up and running, I have almost no reason to run XP while at my g/f's place. In my attempts to "tweak" FC5's performance and ease of use, I have come up with some questions. I chose to start one thread instead of 3 so I don't clutter up the boards too much

1. When I turn on the computer and the boot sequence attempts to obtain an IP address thru eth1 (my wireless NIC), it says "Device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization". Once FC5 is loaded up, I simply type
/sbin/modprobe bcm43xx
/sbin/dhclient eth1
/sbin/ifup eth1
iwconfig
And then my wireless internet works. Is there anyway I have this automatically done as part of the boot sequence?

2. When I chose to shut down my laptop from my GUI, it waits for a bit (maybe 20-30 seconds), and then the screen shuts off and that's it. Not until I press <CTRL>+<Alt>+<F1> does it start the shut down sequence. Why?

3. When booting up, I still get an error mentioning something about my fglrx.ko module (I know this has to deal with my LCD Screen / video card chipset compatibility with FC5. I can't read the whole thing before it jumps to the next screen. Is there anyway I can pull up this error message? Once I do, perhaps then I can ask why it's doing this!

For those that are wondering and think they can help, I am using an Acer Ferrari 4005 Notebook. I look forward to any help I may receive

[partha]

Over the last little bit, I have been using FC5 more and more. Once I got my wireless NIC up and running, I have almost no reason to run XP while at my g/f's place. In my attempts to "tweak" FC5's performance and ease of use, I have come up with some questions. I chose to start one thread instead of 3 so I don't clutter up the boards too much

1. When I turn on the computer and the boot sequence attempts to obtain an IP address thru eth1 (my wireless NIC), it says "Device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization". Once FC5 is loaded up, I simply type
/sbin/modprobe bcm43xx
/sbin/dhclient eth1
/sbin/ifup eth1
iwconfig
And then my wireless internet works. Is there anyway I have this automatically done as part of the boot sequence?

There has been a lot written on this. Perhaps you can not turn on eth1 at boot time? To do this, you can change the setting onboot=no in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1. You can also check out the bcm43xx website.

2. When I chose to shut down my laptop from my GUI, it waits for a bit (maybe 20-30 seconds), and then the screen shuts off and that's it. Not until I press <CTRL>+<Alt>+<F1> does it start the shut down sequence. Why?

Actually the system is really shutting down. Perhaps this is the FC5 version of being "user-friendly". Simply wait a little and the power should go off.

3. When booting up, I still get an error mentioning something about my fglrx.ko module (I know this has to deal with my LCD Screen / video card chipset compatibility with FC5. I can't read the whole thing before it jumps to the next screen. Is there anyway I can pull up this error message? Once I do, perhaps then I can ask why it's doing this!

This of course has to do with the ATI drivers. Check the log files /var/log/messages or /var/log/Xorg.0.log

For those that are wondering and think they can help, I am using an Acer Ferrari 4005 Notebook. I look forward to any help I may receive

[EngineerJoe]

There has been a lot written on this. Perhaps you can not turn on eth1 at boot time? To do this, you can change the setting onboot=no in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1. You can also check out the bcm43xx website.
I feel like an idiot. I should have mentioned that I've already checked that and it says onboot=yes.

Actually the system is really shutting down. Perhaps this is the FC5 version of being "user-friendly". Simply wait a little and the power should go off.
If I hit CTRL-ALT-F1 just after I click on Shutdown, the computer is off inside of 90 seconds, if I don't press a thing, it'll stay on. Going on 5 minutes now...

[EngineerJoe]

WARNING: I make no guarantee that these instructions won't cause catastrophic death to your computer and/or loved one(s)!

Excuse the excitement, but I can finally give back to the forum. I figured out how to solve my initial problem (with the help of my sis' b/f) and I will gladly post my solution for others to see....

What we must do is create a bootscript. Load up the terminal and switch to root (I'm not sure if you have to switch to root to do all this, but I did)
su -
After you do this, you want to find the right directory to make the bootscript in. As tempting as it is to do so on your desktop, I suggest the /etc/init.d/ directory
cd /etc/init.d/
Create a bootscript with the name of your choice. I used 'wireless.sh'
gedit wireless.sh

This is what I typed in my bootscript
#!/bin/bash
#'wireless.sh - secretly hoping this works

/sbin/modprobe bcm43xx


When you're done typing the script, you must save and exit.

Now, we much chmod the new file
chmod +x wireless.sh

To quote my friend "This is a very simple 'black and white' script with no feedback during the bootup sequence. You'll soon know if you have a wireless connection or not"

Now, we must create a symbolic link (a symlink) in the appropriate runlevel. I believe the way it works is that if you boot entirely in text mode, your runlevel is 3, if you boot directly into your GUI, your runlevel is 5. If anyone would like to point out a command that could spit out the into on the default runlevel, it would be greatly appreciated.

If you have runlevel 3
cd /etc/rc3.d/
ln -s ../init.d/wireless.sh S99wireless


If you have runlevel 5
cd /etc/rc5.d/
ln -s ../init.d/wireless.sh S99wireless

Now, the S99 means that it will basically be run last (99th on the list I believe) BUT, when I did this, I found out that I had an S99 already (S99local I believe) and my computer was slow to boot. If functionality is all you need, this MAY work. I went one step further...

I checked what was available.
cd /etc/rc5.d/
ls
I found that I had S08iptables, S09isdn, S10network and S12 syslog. Meaning the order of loading is iptables, isdn, network, and then syslog. I could make a symlink for S11 since S11 was free, but I wanted to run my wireless script before I ran the network (I hope this all makes sense). To do this, I pushed S10 to S11 and created S10wireless. How did I do that? I'm glad you asked
cd /etc/rc5.d/
ls -s ../init.d/network S11network
rm S10network
ls -s ../init.d/wireless.sh S10wireless
If your runlevel is 3 instead of 5, you would use 'rc3.d' instead of 'rc5.d'

This seemed to work for me, I now have wireless upon bootup (mind you, I have to make sure that my essid and chanel are configured properly before shutting down). I would like to point out that I do not believe that there is proper WPA support yet for the bcm43xx driver, so this configuration works so long as your wireless network is "unsecure". For those that are regularly going to use an 'unsecure' network, I would suggest modding the router to block all mac addresses except yours.

If you have any questions, or if a mod would prefer to clean up / simply this post, please feel free to do so. I hope this helps anybody else with this problem. Once I figure out the solution to problem #2, I will gladly do that writeup.

- Joe