ZoneMinder Forums

This weekend I am beginning my project of setting up ZM on FC4. I will periodically post my progress and will probably have some questions

Why am I using FC4? I recently upgraded some servers from FC1 to FC3, and it was not fun. Going from FC2 to FC3 isn't too bad, but FC1 to FC3 has some unique issues like FC3 using "udev" instead of "dev" just to name one. Anyhow I decided to setup the newest FC so that I won't have to upgrade for awhile.

I will probably have some FC4 specific problems, but I'm up for the challenge and hopefully logging my experience will help any others who wish to use FC4.

There will be a FC4 RPM up shortly after some issues are worked out with 1.21.1. Meantime I have 1.21.0 built and being tested.
Someone might be interested in knowing also that I have done an upgarde from on an existing FC3 to FC4 and ZM that was built for FC3 is functioning fine as far as I can tell. The upgrade has been running for two hours.
Regards,
Cordel

First Update:

Tonight I built the PC. Quick Specs:
Athlon 1.2Ghz
1GB RAM
200GB Hard Drive
AirLink 101 802.11g PCI Wireless Adapter
Case w/6 fans, 4 in front, 1 in rear, 1 in side.
Very old Iomega 4X CDROM

I already had all of the parts, except the case and wireless card. I have not ordered the DVR card yet. I had to get a case with lots of fans as my ZM server is going to be located in my garage storage area, which, while protected from the elements, is not air conditioned. It's also fairly difficult to traverse the attic to run a dedicated ethernet cable to the storage room, which is why I decided to go wireless at least until the winter when the attic is more tolerable.

I had a few problems getting FC4 installed due to the ancient 4X CDROM...had to reburn a few discs at slower speed.

I had a hell of a time getting the PCI wireless card working. Turns out it only works with a windows driver, so you have to use "ndiswrapper" which basically allows you to load the windows driver under Linux. Scary stuff, but that was only the beginning.

After getting the ndiswrapper stuff installed, I could scan for and see my AP just fine with "iwlist wlan0 scan", but when I tried to configure the wlan0 interface with the SSID, I would get pagefaults, and then a kernel panic and a hard lockup.

Turns out often when using ndiswrapper, your Linux kernel can not have "4KSTACKS" turned on, which FC3 and FC4 have by default. Apparently windows drivers require 16K stacks.

I then had to find and follow some instructions on how to configure the FC4 kernel for 16K Stacks. Among other things, it invovled grabbing the kernel source for my kernel and patching it with a patch from http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wl ... acks.patch

After reconfiguring and recompiling my kernel, rebooting, and going through the iwlist, iwconfig process again, the wireless network interface is up and functioning!
Before I decided to call it quits and get some sleep, I upgraded MySQL with the newest version (FC4 cam with 4.1.11):
[root@zoneminder ~]# rpm -qa |grep MySQL
perl-DBD-MySQL-2.9007-1
MySQL-client-4.1.12-1
MySQL-python-1.2.0-1
MySQL-shared-compat-4.1.11-0
MySQL-devel-4.1.12-1
MySQL-shared-4.1.12-1
MySQL-server-4.1.12-1

That's where I'm at right now. Tommorrow when I wake up I will start the actual ZM install. I don't have my capture card or cams yet, so I will probably test it out with a USB camera for now, just to get used to the interface.

I will post more updates as they happen.

Good luck! Are you doing this for fun?

Phil

Did some more work tonight...ZM is now installed! Now if I just had a capture card and some cameras I could start experimenting with it. Ironically both of the USB cameras I have have known issues under linux. One is a Logitech Quickcam Pro 3000, which uses the "pwc" driver, which is known to be broken in newer kernels. The other is a Vicam/3Com Homeconnect which is also known to have issues

I am in the process of pricing and ordering a capture card and a couple of CCD cameras...until then I am going to read the manual thoroughly and explore all the options in the web interface, and probably post some questions.

Zoneminder to answer your question, I guess it is partially "for fun", but mostly I wanted to build my own home surveillance and automation system. I may end up running "misterhouse" on the same server.

All in all, I would have to say that installing ZoneMinder on FC4 was not difficult at all

I've just install zm on FC4 no problem but i can't get it to run. When I try to start the zm service it keeps saying unrecognised service. More caffiene and I'll have another go!

EDIT:

I've put the zm script into start up and now i get another error when starting the service:

Starting ZoneMinder: Bareword "ZM_PATH_LOGS" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl line 77.
BEGIN not safe after errors--compilation aborted at /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl line 78.

I'll continue digging a solution later!

Sorted, not searching the other posts enough, ran the perl ./zmconfig.pl again and its fixed!