Installing Fedora 14 on an older 32 bit system

So, I would like a second system at home out in my shop area. I have an old 32 bit system (a Gigabyte 7DXR motherboard with an Athlon XP 1900+ cpu, 1.5 G of ram, and an Nvidia GeForce FX 5600XT graphics card). A perfectly usable machine. I scrounge a parallel ATA disk (120G) for it, repartition and install Fedora 14 from the DVD.

I haven't done a fresh install in a long, long time, and it is amazing how many issues come up due to bogus default choices in the fedora distro.

Nouveau and my Acer x223w

I have a nice Acer flat screen that will do 1600x1200, but the Nouveau system has decided it can only do 1024x768. Having fought with Nouveau in the past to no avail, I get the nvidia manufacturer driver. I have decided that Nouveau either works out of the box, or you abandon it -- as with many "clever" automatic systems, if it doesn't figure out what is right, there is no hope trying to configure it. So I download the legacy 173.14 driver from the nvidia site and install it. I comes right up with 1600x1200, and offers me an xorg.conf file if I want to customize. Nice! This is how things ought to be.

For some reason telinit 3 was doing absolutely nothing back in nouveau days. It remains to be seen if the nvidia driver is better behaved. Since this and a number of things conspired to make my system useless till I found a rescue disk after I installed a new kernel and booted to it, I added this to my rc.local file: 

/root/NVIDIA.run -s -n
The above file is a link to the NVIDIA driver install package as it comes from the nvidia site. This means the driver gets rebuilt every time I reboot, but this is a small price to pay for having things work without hassle and I don't reboot often.

grub issues

First of all the obnoxious red hat graphical boot is back, so I edit grub.conf and remove "rhgb" from the boot line. This works for the 2.6.35.6 kernel that was first installed. However, when I do a yum upgrade to the 2.6.35.10 kernel, it is back! Apparently I must now put norhgb on the boot line (well they fixed a bug, but made a bad choice in making this the default without asking for it).

On top of this, I get no grub menu to offer me a choice of kernels. This would have saved my bacon when I was still struggling with getting the nvidia driver, run levels, and all that sorted out (I had to resort to a rescue disk when I found myself with a new kernel and an nvidia driver that wasn't doing the right thing). The trick here is to edit grub.conf and add a line: 

timeout=5
There is also a line hiddenmenu which you can comment out. If you do this and leave timeout=0, you will get a menu which flashes at you for a fraction of a second. If you comment this out and set a timeout, you get only a menu, which I kind of like. If you have hiddenmenu and a timeout, you get a countdown which you can interrupt to get to the menu.

selinux

This has, so far, done nothing but annoy me. When I install the 2.6.35.10 kernel, it announces that it has to do a long and laborious relabelling of my disk (the first sign that the dreaded selinux has arisen to make me miserable). I endure this, then go to /etc/selinux and edit the config file to disable this wretched thing.

Kernel messages

I am getting two sorts of these. First a cluster of what I am told are harmless messages about: 
Unable to locate IOAPIC for GSI 8
This are annoying, but the word is that they are harmless. I also get various announcements about kernel oops, and in fact when I look at /var/log/messages there is lots of chatter, and many mentions of nouveau in the tracebacks, so if I can figure out how to get the nouveau driver out of my life, my life will be better.

Getting rid of nouveau

This is not as easy as it should be, given that this thing sucks so bad. I added it to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf - but lsmod shows that it is still there. Apparently the virtual console setup uses it to offer high resolution consoles, and this (along with "Plymouth" - the feature nobody needs or wants) complicates things. Stand by for news as I dig and yank on the roots to get rid of this weed.

Seahorse

Along with the 2.6.35.10 kernel I seem to also have this thing called seahorse. (Sounds unlikely, but I didn't get the following question till I upgraded the kernel): 
Enter Password to unlock your login keyring
This appears in a cute little popup now, and seems to be linked in some way to the fact that my wireless setup has a WPA secret password this thing feels it needs to manage for me. So, the long and short of it is that I have to type my password twice every time I login on this system, which I don't like much.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org