Fedora 13 Linux

Installation notes for Fedora 13 on my AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+. As usual, you can find more complete Howtos on the Net, so I won't repeat this here.

Download

Via one of the ftp mirrors. Burn to DVD, done.

Basic install

As with my previous installation, I did not do an update but a complete reinstall. I just scraped the old FC10 installation, keeping the home-directories and manually installed software.

There where some temporary issues with dependency resolution on install (if you choose to customize the package-selection during install), yum complained, that it could not find certain packages (which where available localy and on the net). That went away after retrying. Still strange

Tweaking

Installer

The installer had issues with hardware detection and configuration, I was able to get it running by adding acpi=off to the startup commandline:

linux acpi=off

The downside: Currently I do not have auto-shutdown by default, I have to tweak this a little bit further.

See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KernelCommonProblems#Crashes.2FHangs for hints on how to solve this problem.

None of the kernel argument switches did it, but I got an error-message on boot, stating "8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC", googling that gave some hints, and the final sollution was to disable ACPI functionality partly in the BIOS. Hideous crap.

Issues

Mouse

I own a (pretty crappy) Razer Krait, which has ultra high-res sensor. Despite the fact, that the mouse speed and sensitivity could be adjusted good enough in the previous Fedora install, some update broke the mouse acceleration and sensitivity settings. No workaround yet (there are some manual settings, which I have not had time to try yet).

Font, skinning

Default skin got worse, all blue icons with blue inlay-logos, which are barely distinguishable from each other. Has been better. You can choose another layout, but...

Fonts have a shadow and are white by default. Badly readable. Not good also

Legacy OSS games

I like to play ut2004, which uses OSS (and OSS via ALSA), which does not play nice with pulse-audio (no sound).

Installing alsa-plugins-pulseaudio and setting alsaunmute solved that problem.

Removable USB harddisks

Fedora 13 (or 12) apparently changed the way removable disks are unmounted, and this fails with external USB 2.0 harddrives. After "Savely remove drive" they are immediately remounted.

For USB sticks, there are now two entries "Eject" and Safely remove drive".

It is beyond me, why this has been changed from a perfectly working solution ("Unmount").

Automatic updates

It seems that automatic updates broke somewhere inbetween. At least I don't get the usual patch announcements unless I start the updater manually.

Shutdown issues

Fedora 13 (as the previous installation) had issues with my current computer. The BIOS did not play well with the LINUX ACPI logic and the machine has to be booted with acpi=off. This prevents auto-shutdown, and the power button has to be pressed manually to switch the machine off. In addition, and most annoying, the current Fedora 13 install fails to shutdown the keyboard properly (legacy PS/2), the Num lock LED keeps on on shutdown.

Bottomline

Currently FC13 feels slightly more crappy than FC8, which is a shame... Maybe there will be bugfixes.