Fedora 12 notes

Fedora Core 12 notes

Some folks say you should call it "Fedora 12" and drop the "Core", but all the RPM's still have fc12 in their name, so it seems that even those "in the know" aren't with it yet.

It is not officially supported, but in general, I do upgrades via yum, and this seems to work for FC12. See my:
FC12 yum upgrade notes

One of my systems was tangled up with a bunch of dependencies involving every php package known to man. I gave up sorting it out and decided to do the upgrade from the install media (on DVD), here are some notes on that:
FC12 DVD upgrade notes

Nvidia driver issues

For those of us (like me) using the vendor proprietary nvidia driver, there are some issues to sort out. What seems to be the story is that the "nouveau" driver for nvidia that ships with fedora is getting control early in the game, and then gets into a fight with the "nvidia" nvidia driver. (You did know you can choose from 3 different nvidia drivers, did you not?) The 3 choices are:

nv The 2D open source driver from Nvidia.
nvidia The 3D closed source driver from Nvidia.
nouveau The new 3D GPL driver that became the default in FC11.

A variety of fixes are suggested, including:

Add some special jive to the kernel boot line in /etc/grub.conf. The special jive looks like: nouveau.modeset=0 vga=0x318.
Blacklist the nouveau driver in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf by appending this line to that file: blacklist nouveau

Apparently the kernel starup option fix does the job and the blacklisting is not required, but it is a good trick to keep in mind.

If you get the nvidia driver from rpmfusion, (as kmod-nvidia)there is some confusion about what repository it is in (look in the updates-testing repo).

If you are into using compiz with desktop effects there may be other issues depending on your exact graphics hardware and which nvidia driver you are using.

See notes at:

The drivers are found in /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers or /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers on a 64 bit system. If the proprietary driver has NOT been installed, you will see these two files:

nouveau_drv.so
nv_drv.so

You can pick one or the other in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (if you have one). The lazy approach is to stick with the default (nouveau).

Note that error messages end up in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and/or any number of files names /var/log/Xorg*.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org