Fedora 22 Live Workstation Install - no fglrx - no pdftk
I recently acquired another older MB, ASUStek M3A78-EM, Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core, 4Gb ram & onboard Radeon and I thought I'd give the latest Fedora Live a try. It installed well enough and Gnome pretty much worked except for the lack of fglrx in the open source drivers. In fact KDE Plasma doesn't work at all. In the Gnome desktop however, any intensive video apps such as VLC etc overheat the CPU and crash the unit. It looks like I'd have to backport X in order to install the proprietary Catalyst drivers for this particular GPU. HTML 5 videos on the net do work, but eventually the unit overheats and dies. I switched to lightDM and that's a little better but still not up to speed. It seems that yum has been dandified for this release but when I tried the new dnf update it failed to connect to the repositories. However, yum-deprecated did update the kernel and after that update dnf was able to function as intended. As I am always a sink or swim kind of guy and because a few of the individuals I support have switched to Fedora, even though I usually install Debian, I decided to try this as my workhorse for a while. I am looking around for a more recent PCIe video card in my price range, which usually hovers around free or the price of a hamburger, but failing that I'm pleased overall with the performance of the business end of things. Well there is one exception, no more pdftk support. (Licensing issues with iText5+) My problem. I often have to combine several complete and already numbered pdf documents into one consecutively numbered tabbed document. I use a shell script like this one below to number the combined documents. I include this in case others on the list might find it handy. I didn't author it, I found it on the net somewhere and would credit the original author, if I could find my notes this morning. enscript -L1 -F --header-font=Times-Roman10 -b '||$%' -o- < <(for i in $(seq "$(pdftk "$1" dump_data | grep "Num" | cut -d":" -f2)"); do echo; done) | ps2pdf - | pdftk "$1" multistamp - output "${1%.pdf}-header.pdf" This adds a header with the page number in 10pt text to the upper right corner of each page. Then I use pdftk to burst the document again and then blend in the tabs like this pdftk TabA.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf TabB.pdf file3.pdf file4.pdf cat output newfile.pdf after each page is separated and numbered. It's a bit kludgey on larger docs but for small quick work it's ok. I was hoping to automate it more eventually. So if anyone has a recommendation on a more linux friendly video card of somewhat older vintage, or a command line tool to replace pdftk I'd appreciate it. I note that there are several GUI tools now available to assist with sorting pdf pages but I was really hoping to find something in the command line arena which I could then poke into this script. Thanks Russell
Hi Russell:
Well there is one exception, no more pdftk support. (Licensing issues with iText5+)
Hmm, that's odd. The iText AGPL change was some time ago, and pdftk Server (as Sid now calls it) is distributed as source. It's not too difficult a build, but is somewhat slow and memory intensive, as it does everything with gcj.
I note that there are several GUI tools now available to assist with sorting pdf pages but I was really hoping to find something in the command line arena which I could then poke into this script.
You might not be able to replace it all, but here are some options: * pdfinfo (from poppler or xpdf; the former is a fork of the latter) will give you the number of pages. * qpdf will extract and combine pages. It also has some neat tricks for cleaning up the detritus that Adobe's two lines of entirely incompatible PDF generation tools (Acrobat and DeathSpiral, um sorry, LiveCycle) leave behind. * For the pagination watermark, that's one thing that iText does well. To avoid it, you could either: 1) convert to PostScript and wedge a line of code in on every page preamble with the page number. If you're relying on previously-existing bookmarks in the PDF, this will likely break them. (Then again, you're printing the file, so you're probably not worried about this.) 2) qpdf has a text output mode, QDF, that is /sorta/ editable. It looks possible that you could add a text object at the top of the page, then reassemble to PDF. Haven't tried it, though. The difficulty with hand editing PDF is that everything is an object, with a hard-coded reference number and (seemingly) fixed byte offset in the stream. You change anything without fixing those references, it breaks. cheers, Stewart
| From: Russell Reiter <rreiter91@gmail.com> | I recently acquired another older MB, ASUStek M3A78-EM, Athlon 64 X2 | Dual-Core, 4Gb ram & onboard Radeon Coincidentally, my mail lives on a machine with that motherboard. I'm ssh'ed into it to read and write mail. It's running CentOS 6. I don't do anything much involving its X server (it appears to work). | and I thought I'd give the latest | Fedora Live a try. It installed well enough and Gnome pretty much | worked except for the lack of fglrx in the open source drivers. Just to be clear, fglrx isn't open source. So it cannot be in Fedora. The normal way to add AMD Catalyst proprietary drivers is to through the <http://rpmfusion.org/> repos. There are many guides to this on the web. I never do this because the open source drivers for AMD are good enough for things I do. | In | fact KDE Plasma doesn't work at all. I'm surprised. That ought to be fixable. Perhaps it requires experts. | In the Gnome desktop however, any intensive video apps such as VLC etc | overheat the CPU and crash the unit. That's a hardware problem. No software you run on a PC should be able to "overheat the CPU and crash the unit". That hardware problem is likely to afflict you with a bunch of different workloads. | It looks like I'd have to | backport X in order to install the proprietary Catalyst drivers for | this particular GPU. What do you mean by "backport X"? What X is newer than Fedora's? Why do you think that it would solve your problems? | HTML 5 videos on the net do work, but eventually | the unit overheats and dies. I switched to lightDM and that's a little | better but still not up to speed. Overheating ought to be fixed. In hardware. Consider cleaning out dust as a first step. Among other things, look at heat sinks and fans. Consider updating firmware (in case thermal throttling has changed). I don't actually know if this is meaningful, but dmidecode on my machine reports BIOS Revision: 8.14 The Asus site has M3A78-EM BIOS 2701 released 2010/11/12. I'm pretty sure that that is what I'm running. If brave, see if one of the heat sinks no longer connects properly. Finding out can be destructive, so I don't recommend this unless you are daring and experienced. And have thermal paste to replace the existing solution. (AMD CPUs came with a disk of stuff instead of paste and it is supposed to be single-use: detaching and re-attaching a heat sink is not intended to work.) | It seems that yum has been dandified for this release "Dandified"??? "Gone" is the more accurate word. Or is this word play: DaNdiFied? | but when I tried | the new dnf update it failed to connect to the repositories. However, | yum-deprecated did update the kernel and after that update dnf was | able to function as intended. That's odd. And interesting. Hard to say what actually was going on now that the phenomenon is gone. It's good that the problem is eliminated. Good luck.
Thanks Stewart and Hugh. I'll have a look at Stewart's recommendations for pdf manipulation. Interestingly I forgot I had previously used ImageMagic's "convert" to combine pages, perhaps I can also use it to apply the page numbers as watermarks. I think I gave up on that the last time, which was a couple of years ago, because I found pdftk worked for this. On 7/26/15, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> wrote:
| From: Russell Reiter <rreiter91@gmail.com>
<snip previous>
Just to be clear, fglrx isn't open source. So it cannot be in Fedora.
Sorry I should have said fglrx _as_ open source.
The normal way to add AMD Catalyst proprietary drivers is to through the <http://rpmfusion.org/> repos. There are many guides to this on the web. I never do this because the open source drivers for AMD are good enough for things I do.
I try to convince the people I assist that repository based systems are the way to go. For this effort I had added rpmfusion and used the recommended ATI install script but alas no joy.
| In | fact KDE Plasma doesn't work at all.
I'm surprised. That ought to be fixable. Perhaps it requires experts.
This might also be due to the fact that I switched to lightDM in an effort, rightly or wrongly, to control the heating issue. I'll switch back and give it a go after I improve the cooling.
| In the Gnome desktop however, any intensive video apps such as VLC etc | overheat the CPU and crash the unit.
That's a hardware problem. No software you run on a PC should be able to "overheat the CPU and crash the unit".
That hardware problem is likely to afflict you with a bunch of different workloads.
| It looks like I'd have to | backport X in order to install the proprietary Catalyst drivers for | this particular GPU.
What do you mean by "backport X"? What X is newer than Fedora's? Why do you think that it would solve your problems?
Sorry - my poor semantics. I meant downgrade, apparently while there is supposed support for these older GPU's in X 1.17 stepping down to 1.16 has apparently worked for some people as noted here. https://bluehatrecord.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/installing-the-proprietary-am...
| HTML 5 videos on the net do work, but eventually | the unit overheats and dies. I switched to lightDM and that's a little | better but still not up to speed.
Overheating ought to be fixed. In hardware.
Consider cleaning out dust as a first step. Among other things, look at heat sinks and fans.
Clean as a whistle, from a dust perspective. I have added one case cooling fan to the back of the unit and I'll add another to the front to increase throughput. :-) Right now I'm directing the output of my Air Conditioner to the rear of the unit. I get almost an hour of VLC video before the crash this time.
Consider updating firmware (in case thermal throttling has changed). I don't actually know if this is meaningful, but dmidecode on my machine reports BIOS Revision: 8.14 The Asus site has M3A78-EM BIOS 2701 released 2010/11/12. I'm pretty sure that that is what I'm running.
Thanks dmidecode shows this BIOS info for me. Vendor: American Megatrends Inc. Version: 0508 Release Date: 08/14/2008 It looks like a bios upgrade is added to the TODO's
If brave, see if one of the heat sinks no longer connects properly.
This was my "hail mary" option.
Finding out can be destructive, so I don't recommend this unless you are daring and experienced. And have thermal paste to replace the existing solution. (AMD CPUs came with a disk of stuff instead of paste and it is supposed to be single-use: detaching and re-attaching a heat sink is not intended to work.)
Thermal grease is on the list. God I hate that stuff, just a dab too much and you defeat your whole purpose.
| It seems that yum has been dandified for this release
"Dandified"??? "Gone" is the more accurate word. Or is this word play: DaNdiFied?
Yup, dnf = dandified yum.
| but when I tried | the new dnf update it failed to connect to the repositories. However, | yum-deprecated did update the kernel and after that update dnf was | able to function as intended.
That's odd. And interesting. Hard to say what actually was going on now that the phenomenon is gone. It's good that the problem is eliminated.
Good luck.
Thanks I note that system rescue cd www.sysresccd.org/Download gives me finer grained control over the display manager when running off the cd, ie. more display resolution options and screen rotation. There is an option for a disk install of system rescue cd as kind of a kludge, or perhaps I'll try out Gentoo proper itself. I just used system rescue's tool kit to shrink the partition in preparation for a backup os. First a bios upgrade tho. Cheers Russell
--- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
On 2015-07-26 11:37 AM, Russell Reiter wrote:
… I forgot I had previously used ImageMagic's "convert" to combine pages, perhaps I can also use it to apply the page numbers as watermarks.
It *may* convert the pages to bitmaps, which is likely not what you want. But I could be wrong: when Chris at Seneca mentioned using Pango Markup Language <http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2reference/pango-markup-language.html> in ImageMagick at a recent talk, I was pleasantly surprised that it made decent all-vector PDFs via IM. Another option for overlaying watermarks is Apache PDFBox. It works from the command line, but you are invoking Java: https://pdfbox.apache.org/1.8/commandline.html#overlayPDF Usage looks fiddly, but PDFBox is pretty mature. cheers, Stewart
On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 07:59:23AM -0400, Russell Reiter wrote:
I recently acquired another older MB, ASUStek M3A78-EM, Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core, 4Gb ram & onboard Radeon and I thought I'd give the latest Fedora Live a try. It installed well enough and Gnome pretty much worked except for the lack of fglrx in the open source drivers. In fact KDE Plasma doesn't work at all.
In the Gnome desktop however, any intensive video apps such as VLC etc overheat the CPU and crash the unit. It looks like I'd have to backport X in order to install the proprietary Catalyst drivers for this particular GPU. HTML 5 videos on the net do work, but eventually the unit overheats and dies. I switched to lightDM and that's a little better but still not up to speed.
If your system overheats and crashes, then you have a hardware problem to fix, NOT a software problem. Now if it crashes, that could be software, but overheating is not. Clean the dust out of the fans and make sure they are all working. Maybe one of the sticks of ram is failing, which could cause it to crash and mess up the video. (Any hardware that relies on software to do just the right thing to manage temperature is doomed to fail). -- Len Sorensen
<snip previous housekeeping>
(Any hardware that relies on software to do just the right thing to manage temperature is doomed to fail).
I agree with this but I did once cool a laptop with a bag of frozen peas, at least until I got power management sorted out, so I'm kind of willing to try just about anything. I just posted a bit of an update and question on where to sourcing cooling stuff. I use to overclock quite a bit, mostly before the jumper free days, so to find that the bios defaults to auto in overclocking, makes me wonder about the effectiveness of the default settings. I was literally blowing cold air from my AC right into it at one point, but after the firmware update and graphics tweaks, I put the unit back in place and so far so good. The little copper headers on the heat sinc kill me, I can't believe they transfer heat better that just blowing air across the fins. Russell
-- Len Sorensen --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 01:01:22PM -0400, Russell Reiter wrote:
I agree with this but I did once cool a laptop with a bag of frozen peas, at least until I got power management sorted out, so I'm kind of willing to try just about anything.
Many laptops have lacking cooling and when they get a lot of dust in them start to have problems. So you clean the dust out of the fans and heatsinks once in a while and they run much better again. On some models this is easy (Pretty much anything that says thinkpad on it), and on others it is a complete nightmare (Compat R3240 for example)
I just posted a bit of an update and question on where to sourcing cooling stuff. I use to overclock quite a bit, mostly before the jumper free days, so to find that the bios defaults to auto in overclocking, makes me wonder about the effectiveness of the default settings.
I was literally blowing cold air from my AC right into it at one point, but after the firmware update and graphics tweaks, I put the unit back in place and so far so good.
The little copper headers on the heat sinc kill me, I can't believe they transfer heat better that just blowing air across the fins.
I am not a cooling design engineer. :) I hope whoever designs the cooling system is. -- Len Sorensen
participants (4)
-
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Lennart Sorensen -
Russell Reiter -
Stewart C. Russell