Fedora 11 network install

When a mirror or repository is available on a fast network, it can be much faster to install from that rather than from install media (like a DVD or especially CDROM where several disks must be fed to the machine). To do this, you can prepare a special network install CD (iso images are part of the standard distribution), or just use the install DVD as I am now doing.

You cannot just let the install DVD do its usual thing, you must tell it to revert to an ancient dialog in order to be able to do this. Watch closely when the disk first fires up and insert the askmethod option on the boot line, i.e. you want something like: 

linux askmethod
In my case, I used the usual grub editor and appended askmethod to the default set of boot options.

For whatever reason, this makes the installer use a non-graphical install (when you see this happening and realize that your mouse is useless you should feel confident that you are on the right path). After questions about your language and keyboard and many other things, it will offer you a menu of ways to install. The bottom one (labelled URL) is the one you want. The URL you give must contain the directory images within which is the file install.img. In my case I used: 

http://server.mydomain/fedora/releases/11/Fedora/x86_64/os
Before long it is rattling merrily along through packages.

Iraf and mmt_env

These notes apply specifically to how we do things at the MMT observatory. We have a package (mmt_env) that simply holds dependencies to a boatload of other packages we want to install on all machines, the idea being that we just yum install mmt_env and get a uniform set of things installed on all of our various machines. This failed though on top of a fresh install with a broken dependency on iraf_config. What does work is: 
yum install iraf\*
After this yum install mmt_env moves along to the next problem: 
GPG key retrieval failed: [Errno 4] IOError:
What needs to be done is something like this: 
rpm --import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
The trick of course is having a URL for the key. Some keys install with fedora, and you can do: 
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY*

RPM Fusion

RPMfusion is a merger of Livna, Dribble, and Freshrpms. See the Configuration notes for a guide as to how to set this up. For Fedora 11, you must install two rpms: 
su -c 
'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'
If you want, do the free one first, then the non-free (or both at the same time).

Offline firefox

On one of our machines, firefox keeps switching into offline mode. This is clearly a symptom of some more serious problem, but here is a plugin to change firefoxes behavior:
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org