Sunday, December 15, 2013

Installing and Solving common Nvidia driver issues in Fedora

Linux still lags in desktop use, despite being the most used smartphone Operating System. The reason behind this is mostly to do with the difficulty in setting up the OS and also due to difficulty in usage and a little to do with the UI.

Linux has come from far, I mean, nowadays we have official support from Nvidia for Linux Graphics Display drivers - something we never used to have. 

The problem though is that you still have to determine what driver you need to install, look for it and install it. 


As the guide explains, you will need to find which set of drivers support your card (from the 3 sets). 

You may run into issues such as your installation not booting. The below 2 steps, as highlighted in the comments below the guide may help in this case:

  1. mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
  2. dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
You may then have to repair your boot loader (Grub2) if there were issues that prevents your OS from booting correctly. See this post on how to, but the main command is as below

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg


Alternatively, after using the `dracut` command, you may need to restart the whole process again ie Uninstalling Nvidia drivers as per the first guide, then reinstalling them as per the same guide again. this time round, they should work just fine.

If your system boots slowly after installation of drivers, you may use the `systemd` app to zero down on the issue.


  1. Install systemd - yum install systemd
  2. See this post on examples of how to use systemd-analyze 

Sunday, August 18, 2013

iPage Web Hosting, Where's The Catch?

The iPage homepage
There's this web host called iPage. They have very attractive rates, usually about a dollar. The features they offer are quite good, and very enticing. The are very aggressive, their adverts will follow you everywhere on the Internet once you visit their page, and their emails will flood your inbox once they have their email address.

So what's the catch with their dirt cheap hosting? Renewal, you hosting for the first new year as a new client at iPage might be less than $15. Your renewal invoice, however, will be  upwards of $100.

They hook clients by offering dirt cheap hosting for the first year, then hike up your prices in the subsequent years. Such clever individuals.

If they notice you are cancelling renewal due to price hikes, the chaps then offer you a slight hike, say at about $2 a month to keep you.

A typical renewal email from iPage once your $1
hosting package expires
One thing I did when signing up with them was to use a PayPal account, rather than offer them my debit card. I wonder what would have happened, had I given them my debit card.

Lately, I see they have changed, indicating on their page that their $1.89 hosting is 77 percent off their normal $8.49 monthly price. So you sign up knowing that you are on a discount package.

Their model, though, seems to work fine. And their support was also okay when I used them, but moved to djangohosting.ch for modular Pay-Per-Use hosting and asmallorange.com for small hosting.