Fedora Core 6 Linux

Intro

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.

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.

Reboot and do a normal install. Select repositories and packages as appropriate.

Tweaking

As usual, some things did not work, most annoyingly the heavily advertised AIGLX based eye-candy.

nVidia beta drivers

I followed the description on [1] to install the latest prepackaged nVidia drivers from livna.org, which worked fine. Unfortunately, to get compositing enabled, you need a beta-driver and do some more manual tweaking.

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

Enabling desktop effects did not work.

Installing the beta driver:

I used yumex, the graphical front-end for yum.

>$ yumex &

• Search for "nvidia" and select the beta-driver FIXME from the selection.
• Restart (unloading and reloading of the kernel module might help as well)

Now the fun begins:

• My nVidia driver complained about

FIXME

fortunately this could be fixed by adding noapic to the kernel start arguments. X started again. Still, enabling desktop effects did not work.

Googling for the error messages yielded the following sollution

Compiz and visual effects

FIXME

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.

Video

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

Links

FC6 Installation Notes by Mauriat Miranda.