x86_64 CentOS Linux Desktop

In some ways this article is just another in the continuing saga of the Server Upgrade article. Once the server was up and running on my old desktop's CPUs and mother board, I put together my new desktop. I ended up with an MSI K9N Neo V5 motherboard mainly because it had a large number of PCI slots and an Athlon 64 X2 5600+ CPU (dual core). I first tried to do the same thing I did on the server and just attach the old desktop's disks, CD burner and DVD burner in a way that would mimic the old configuration and leave well enough alone. This worked for the most part but the DVD burner just produced coasters for no apparent reason.

I took advantage of the local CompUSA's going out of business sale to buy a new SATA DVD burner and a 36 inch, round IDE cable to run to the old DVD burner. The old 18 inch cable was stretched pretty tight but I'm not convinced that some vestige of the old drive or system configuration wasn't somehow causing the drive to be weird. It seems that the cable and the re-install to get to x86_64 fixed the problem so I now have two DVD drives which should make copying DVDs easier.

Besides wanting to re-install to make sure there wasn't some remnant of the old configuration botching the DVD burner, I decided that now was also a good time to use all 64 bits of the new CPU and install CentOS 5 x86_64. The conventional wisdom seems to be that x86_64 isn't a good idea on the desktop but I've never been one for believing conventional wisdom.

The CentOS 5 installation went smoothly as expected. All system components and major functional components "just worked." The first annoyance was that the installer had selected the "vesa" video driver and the monitor no longer went into power saving mode after the screen saver had kicked in. The ati driver didn't work with my video card:

/usr/bin/fglrxinfo
display: :0.0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon X1300/X1550 Series
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7276 Release

This is hardly a cutting edge video card but apparently it's too new for the open source "ati" driver.

After spending some time confirming that all of the appropriate settings were correct, I eventually installed the ATI proprietary driver. In spite of dire warnings on the unofficial ATI driver wiki, this was actually a piece of cake. The only compat-lib required as of RHEL/CentOS 5.1 is compat-libstdc++-33 which yum has no trouble finding or installing.

yum install compat-libstdc++-33

I did get an SELinux complaint during the install so it may be a good idea to set SELinux to permissive mode (setenforce 0) during the install and then turn it back on (setenforce 1) when you're done with the install. Also, the ATI control panel only runs as root but this appears to be a shortcoming on ATI's part (it doesn't prompt for the root password like the built-in configuration tools do).

Most of the problems people seem to run into have to do with getting full functionality for the x86_64 Firefox browser. The 64 bit version of the browser works just fine. It's just that none of the plug-ins like flash, java, etc. have fully functional (or sometimes even just functional) 64 bit versions. I decided that this was a time to go along with the conventional wisdom so I uninstalled the 64 bit version of Firefox :

rpm -e firefox-1.5.0.12-7.el5.centos.x86_64

       libswt3-gtk2-3.2.1-18.el5.cenos.1.x86_64

I will point out that I left the 64 bit version of Thunderbird installed and haven't noticed any issues between the 64 bit T-Bird and 32 bit Firefox.

At this point all I had to do was install the 32 bit versions of whichever plug-ins I wanted to have available. For me that was the java run-time environment (jre), flash and mplayer plug-in. The install seems to work since the Sun "verify java installation" is happy, some flash adverts play (I could have done without those) and I can watch video from BBC news using the mplayerplug-in.

Getting the 32 bit version of mplayer installed using yum was problematic. For some reason, yum wasn't finding the 32 bit versions; just the 64 bit versions. I eventually pulled down rpms for the 32 bit versions of mplayer and mplayerplug-in and did a localinstall through yum to make sure all of the dependencies were dealt with:

yum localinstall mplayer-1.0-0.38.rc1try2.el5.rf.i386.rpm \

                 mplayerplug-in-.50-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

I should have done a yum localinstall of the ATI proprietary driver (above) and let yum figure out the dependencies but the wiki article had me spooked and, besides, I've done the old command line resolve rpm dependencies thing.

I'm not going to try to list the various applications I've tried that have all worked. I will update this page if I run into an application that doesn't work.

Cheers,
Dave