Fedora Core 6 Linux

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Installation notes for Fedora Core 6 Workstation on my AMD Athlon64 3200+.

After two years with FC3 I decided it would be time for a fresh install.

Download

I downloaded FC6 the day it went public via the Bittorrent link (as everyone knows, the website went down immediately before the public release). Took me an overnight download at roughly 120 kBit/sec, not fast, but it worked.

Basic install

Basic installation of Fedora Core is painless. I decided to get rid of the tangled mess that was my FC3 installation and did a backup of my /home directories and manually installed files (most of them conveniently stored in a top-level-folder called /tuxprog).

I did not format the hard-disk, but deleted just everything I did not need any longer (old system files).

To do so, boot from the FC6-DVD, enter 

linux rescue

at the prompt, select your keyboard, do NOT mount the existing system, but do so manually afterwards with 

mkdir /mnt/sda2
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2

(or whatever the partition is named, where you main system resides). The reason for this is, that the rescue system mounts the partition in a way that prohibits deletion of the /sys and /selinux directories.

Delete everything except the stuff you want to keep (with one external backup I always have two copies of my home files in this way, nice if your backup-disk decides to die the day you do the update). The alternative would be to have a second backup of course (I don't have that).

Reboot and do a normal install. Do NOT repartition the disk, but reuse the existing partitions. Select repositories and packages as appropriate.

Tweaking

As usual, some things did not work, most annoyingly the heavily advertised AIGLX based eye-candy. Below is an installation instruction for nVidia + Compiz which worked for me. After fumbling around with the new system for some time, I became convinced, that 3D-effects are a "bit" immature, and should be switched of (see below for details).

nVidia beta drivers

I followed the description on [1] to install the latest prepackaged nVidia beta drivers from livna.org, which worked fine.

Steps

  • Enable the livna repository
  • Enable livna-testing to get the unstable nvidia 1.0-9626 driver for FC6
  • Restart (unloading and reloading of the kernel module might help as well)

Commmands 

sudo rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm
sudo rpm --import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
yum install kmod-nvidia --enablerepo=livna-testing

In theory, now you can click on "Enable desktop effects" and things should work (wobbly windows, desktop cube, expose-like effects if you move your mouse to the upper right corner).

If not, read on:

  • My nVidia driver complained about
Q. My X server fails to start, and my X log file contains the error:
   
   (EE) NVIDIA(0): The interrupt for NVIDIA graphics device PCI:x:x:x
   (EE) NVIDIA(0):      appears to be edge-triggered. Please see the COMMON
   (EE) NVIDIA(0):      PROBLEMS section in the README for additional
   information.

fortunately this could be fixed by adding noapic to the kernel start arguments as advised in the README.txt file accompanying the nVidia driver. X started again. Still, enabling desktop effects did not work.

  • Add further parameters to /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  • In Device
Option	    "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
  • and
Section "Extensions"

   Option "Composite" "Enable"

EndSection

at the end of the xorg.conf

Still no effects.

Doing a manual 

compiz --replace &

gave 

compiz: No sync extension

According to a post on [2], this can be fixed by adding this to your Module section of xorg.conf: 

SubSection "extmod"
Option "omit xfree86-dga" # don't initialise the DGA extension
EndSubSection

See http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/Packages/xorg-x11-drv-nvidia if you still run into trouble (should not be the case now).

Compiz problems

Compiz seems to be unstable, at least FC6 hung and had to be reset while starting totem once. In addition, I found, that OpenGL games tend to stutter, an effect, which has been reported by others as well.

Another anoyance is, that -after fideling around with xorg.conf settings, compiz refused to draw window-borders (again).

This could be fixed the hard way by simply deleting the compiz-preference in 

rm -rf  .gconf/apps/compiz/

FC6 does not store session details by default (i.e. leaving for example a terminal open on log off would not open that terminal on next login at the same position and size again). This could be reenabled, but led to a black screen with a mouse-cursor on next login. Fun.

This could only be fixed by deleting the .gconf and .gconfd preferences.

So much for this, I will give it a try, but mostly I think I will stay with the default 2D-manager, which is rock-stable until the bugs have been ironed out.

Update The most recent updates (as of 2007-04) seem to have changed the Compiz look and feel (now again like the 2D design, and not the Compiz default) and stability a bit. I am still using the 2D desktop, due to the gaming issues mentioned above.

CD-RW/DVD+-RW

FC3 had issues with my Plextor-PX712A, which would have been solved with the new FC6 install -or so I hoped.

You can imagine my joy, when I found out, that this was not the case. Still problems detecting DVDs (DVD-R and DVD-RW are detected most of the time though). I guess I will reopen that f*cking bug report on the FC6 bugzilla.

Network

I disabled IP v6 according to the HowTo on [3].

Sun Java

FC6 comes with a half-baked Open Source Java, which makes problems with most "real" Java programs. I installed Sun Java from JPackage as described in http://www.city-fan.org/tips/JpackageJava, see also http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/JavaFAQ.

Here's the command history:

Download Java from Sun: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp

Install rpackage repository config and install a local rpmdevtools environment for your non-root user: 

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
sudo wget http://www.jpackage.org/jpackage.repo
sudo yum install rpmdevtools

Setup rpmdevtools 

rpmdev-setuptree
</bash>

Download the JPackage rpms for a standard Java development environment and make the local rpm:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
cd download
wget http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/jpackage/1.6/generic/non-free/SRPMS/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.09-1jpp.nosrc.rpm
rpmbuild --rebuild java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.09-1jpp.nosrc.rpm

Install everything: 

cd ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/i586/
(echo config gpgcheck 0; echo localinstall java-1.5.0-sun{,-alsa,-fonts,-plugin}-1.5.0*.rpm; echo run) > yum-cmd
sudo yum shell yum-cmd
(echo config gpgcheck 0; echo localinstall java-1.5.0-sun*.rpm; echo run) > yum-cmd
sudo yum shell yum-cmd
rm yum-cmd

Check newly installed Java (version, set Mozilla plugin): 

java -version
cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
rm libjavaplugin_oji.so
sudo ln -s ../../../lib/jvm/java/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so .
sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --config java

Done.

Palm Pilot

Synchronizing my old Palm m100 did not work out of the box, neither with JPilot or the Gnome Pilot Applet. 

pi_bind error: /dev/ttyS0 Input/output error

Adding my account to the uucp group changed that.

Multimedia

Mostly according to the HowTo on [4]

Music players

Rythmbox has allready been installed, although it does not look flashy (like the XMMS clones) it is nice enough, just installed the neccessary external plugins with

<bash> sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly </bash>

You will need livna.org and Fedora Extras configured.

Flash

After the final stable version of Flash 9 has been released, you can simply download the rpm from http://macromedia.mplug.org/site_uh.html and do a 

sudo rpm -Uhv flash-plugin-9.0.31.0-release.i386.rpm

That's all folks.

Video

I installed the standard totem and totem plugin for Firefox, but until now totem only managed to crash Firefox reproducibly or hang the entire system.

Showing a movie from the net with the totem-plugin yielded 

Totem could not play 'fd://0'

This could be solved by installing totem-xine instead of the gstreamer-based backend. Also don't forget to install codecs with 

yum remove totem totem-mozplugin
yum install totem-xine mozilla-totem-xine libdvdcss xvidcore


to get support for CSS scrambled DVDs and AVI videos (test Xvid on http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~fhoesli/video/index.php) for example.

Games

X-Plane 8.40

X-Plane 8.40 refuses to load with the following error-message: 

./X-Plane-i586: error while loading shared libraries: libopenal.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Correct this with 

sudo yum install openal

Now it complains about 

./X-Plane-i586: symbol lookup error: ./X-Plane-i586: undefined symbol: alutInit

Correct with 

sudo yum install freealut

Nearly there, last error message 

./X-Plane-i586: symbol lookup error: ./X-Plane-i586: undefined symbol: alutInit

Correct with 

LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libalut.so.0" ./X-Plane-athlon-xp

or write a nice startscript like this 

#!/bin/bash
cd "/path/to/X-Plane 8.40"
LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libalut.so.0" ./X-Plane-athlon-xp

(or X-Plane-i586, whichever you prefer).

Note: X-Plane 8.50 does not show that problem (no LD_PRELOAD neccessary).

Remaining issues

Stability of apps. Firefox tends to crash more often than on the old FC3 install, this might be due to plugins (i.e. the beta Flash plugin comes to mind or the xine-plugin). Have to check that.

Issues with older games (RTCW:ET) refuses to start with my current xorg.conf). As I don't play it anymore, this is no big deal. Maybe an upgrade to the final nVidia driver or other xorg-settings might help here.

Update Enemy Territory managed to crash my X-Server with the nVidia 1.0.9629 driver -eeek! Might be fixable with the most recent driver (which -according to nVidia "Fixed an X server crash starting some fullscreen OpenGL games.").

Update The Mozilla plugin for totem totem-xine-mozplugin-2.16.4-1.lvn6 seemed to be the main reason for the firefox-instabilities. Once uninstalled, Firefox runs much more stable than before.

My opinion

Green! Very green. There has been a reason why they had to delay that release several times. And they should have delayed it even further I guess. At least Gnome has some new features FC3 was lacking and -if you disable compiz- the system seems to be on par with my old FC3 installation.

Links

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