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Linux is open source and Adobe flash is not. Fedora and many Linux patrons don’t much care about closed source software, so you’re left to figure out how to make things like Adobe Flash work. Freak Show to the rescue.

To install Adobe flash, follow these steps:

Open your terminal and change in to your home directory:

cd ~

You probably don’t have wget installed, so install that:

yum install wget

Time out while I rant: Dear Fedora, fuck you. Who the fuck uses any desktop distribution without having wget installed? Also whois isn’t installed by default. Really?

Moving forward, download the rpm for your yum distribution manager:

sudo wget http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/linux/x86_64/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

Now install the rpm to add it to yum:

sudo rpm -ivh adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

Import the repository GPG key:

sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

Update your local yum repositories.

sudo yum update

Install the 64 bit Adobe Flash Plugin

sudo yum -y install flash-plugin

Check if the install was successful. Go to “about:plugins” in Firefox’s address bar and look for “Shockwave Flash”. If installed properly you’ll see:

File: libflashplayer.so
Version: Shockwave Flash 11.0 r1

You’re not alone, I’m sure. For a while I’ve been avoiding Fedora if only because I wasn’t able to figure out why my ATI video card seemed to be in overdrive even when it was simply idle. The fan would turn on as if I were gaming or watching a Blu-Ray disk.

I wasn’t about to let Fedora melt my expensive video card or wear out the fan bearings, so I decided that I was either going to fix the problem or never run Fedora. This shelved my exploration of Fedora for quite some time until tonight when I felt compelled to try it once more – and to fix the hot video card problem.

The problem is, simply put, Fedora’s default settings for the video card’s power management are the highest settings. The GPU is essentially revved to its factory max at all times, the way I understand it. This of course makes the fan spin too fast all the time.

How do you fix it? Here’s what I did, but your mileage may vary:

echo auto > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

As soon as I did this, my GPU’s fan slowed to an almost inaudible pur. I needed to chattr +i the file to get the changes to stick. I’m not sure what’s changing it – perhaps someone can comment and let me know. Perhaps changing the power_method mentioned later in this post to dynpm would stop it from being changed.

Adding the immutable option definitely stops this from happening though:

chattr +i /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile

Now, there are a few ways to tweak power management related settings. You can select from two PM methods: dynpm and profile. The dynpm method dynamically change the GPU clocks according to GPU load. The profile method is supposed to be more static.

Fedora 16 64bit comes with profile enabled by default. To change the PM to dynpm, do this:

echo dynpm > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method

Now, with the profile method you can select from several profiles: default, auto, low, mid and high. The default setting is the default profile and it runs HOT. It uses default clocks and doesn’t change power states. The low, mid, high profiles change the GPU clocks accordingly. The auto profile does just what it says, it automatically switches between the profiles. There is some conflicting information out there on exactly which profile it switches to at what time, but I consider my problem resolved with the auto profile setting.

So to summarize, you can either use dynpm or profile for Power Management.

to switch to profile:

echo profile > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method

and to switch to dynpm:

echo dynpm > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method