Fedora Core 6 notes

It is always a good idea to read the release notes and the install guide for any linux release.

Mauriat Miranda has a compendious fedora core 6 install guide, that I found it useful to refer to.

I am tackling all this around December, 2006.

Do a yum upgrade of an existing Fedora Core 5 system

First I intend to do an upgrade via yum of a critical system now running fedora core 5. After the disaster with fedora core 5 making the install everything option null and void, doing an upgrade seems like the path of least pain.

This won't do you any good, but as a note to myself, the local fedora mirror is on mmt:/media/fedora. This is a usb hard drive we keep on that server just for this purpose. It is available on our network as mmt:/net/mmt/media/fedora/6 It is available to the planet as http://www.mmto.org/fedora (which is a symbolic link to /media/fedora).

Under this directory we have i386/iso and i386/os It looks like all the rpms can be found in one place at: /net/mmt/media/fedora/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS

To do the yum upgrade, I am told to first hand install the release rpm fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm

To find out what is in this file: 

rpm -qlp fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm

/etc/fedora-release
/etc/issue
/etc/issue.net
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-beta
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-legacy
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-rawhide
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-test
/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rawhide
/etc/redhat-release
/etc/yum.repos.d
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-core.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-development.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-extras-development.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-extras.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-legacy.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates-testing.repo
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo
/usr/share/doc/fedora-release-6
/usr/share/doc/fedora-release-6/GPL
/usr/share/doc/fedora-release-6/eula.txt
/usr/share/eula/eula.en_US
/usr/share/firstboot/modules/eula.py
/usr/share/firstboot/modules/eula.pyc
/usr/share/firstboot/modules/eula.pyo

To whack this in (it also requires the release notes rpm) do: 

rpm -Uvh fedora-release*
This stomps on (in my case) 4 repo files, creating rpmnew files for fedora core, development, extras, and updates. I hack away in /etc/yum.repos.d mergin in the rpmnew files, and then cut loose with: 
yum update
It finds 4627 packages to update (as of 11-30-2006), and away it goes (good thing this is on a fast network with a local mirror). This concludes with the following: 
Error: Missing Dependency: mozilla = 37:1.7.13-1.1.fc5 is needed by package mozilla-js-debugger
Error: Missing Dependency: freetype = 2.1.10-5.2.1 is needed by package freetype-utils
Error: Missing Dependency: libgnomecanvaspixbuf.so.1 is needed by package gtkhtml
Error: Missing Dependency: mono-core = 1.1.13.7-2.fc5.1 is needed by package mono-basic
Error: Missing Dependency: libttf.so.2 is needed by package freetype-utils
Error: Missing Dependency: libttf.so.2 is needed by package bg5ps
Error: Missing Dependency: mozilla = 37:1.7.13-1.1.fc5 is needed by package mozilla-mail
Error: Missing Dependency: libgcj.so.7 is needed by package eclipse-pydev
Error: Missing Dependency: mozilla = 37:1.7.13-1.1.fc5 is needed by package mozilla-dom-inspector
Error: Missing Dependency: mozilla = 37:1.7.13-1.1.fc5 is needed by package mozilla-chat

These are all dependencies on my system that will get screwed up when packages get removed to install newer ones so, do this (we can always yum install them back again later if we really want or need them): 

rpm -e mozilla-js-debugger
rpm -e mozilla-mail
rpm -e mozilla-chat
rpm -e mozilla-dom-inspector
rpm -e mono-basic
rpm -e freetype-utils
rpm -e bg5ps
rpm -e eclipse-pydev
The upshot of part of the above is that mozilla is GONE under core 6. It is firefox or nothing (or seamonkey??).
I am told that I could have done yum erase mozilla.
gtkhtml has some other dependencies: 
rpm -e gtkhtml-devel
rpm -e gnucash
rpm -e gtkhtml

Now we are ready to try again. And it works (takes a couple of hours), now for a reboot. By golly, it comes up (and with the nvidia driver from livna, it just doesn't even get it trouble with video driver issues. Pretty painless. I feel a bit like a wimp for not doing a full install, but maybe I am just getting smarter.

The first issue was that the adobe PDF plugin was causing firefox to hang. The answer here is: 

yum erase AdobeReader_enu
yum erase AdobeReader
Some cool thing displays PDF for firefox, so for now, I will just do without the Adobe distributed PDF plugin.

So what is new?

Xen holds promise. Ruby has jumped from 1.8.4 to 1.8.5. I am now running a 2.6.18-1.2849 kernel instead of the 2.6.18-1.2239 kernel I was running under FC5 (seems pretty anticlimactic).

AIGLX and compiz allow you to do cool animated effects (and who knows what else in the future). This has turned out to be an adventure of its own, so follow the link.

Do a full install on new hardware via http:

I have a new system I want to set up, and rather than burn a stack of CD's and shovel them through, I want to try to do a network install via http:

First, I burn a bootable CD, in this case the entire CD number one from the distribution ISO image collection. (I expect to burn the whole CD stack anyway for other purposes, so may as well start of with this one.)

Indeed this CD boots and at the prompt I enter: 

linux askmethod

About this time, I discovered that within this CD is a smaller iso image (boot.iso) that is only 4.7 megabytes in the /images directory, so I burn this onto a CDRW and switch to using it.

This CD boots, I hit return and fairly soon am confronted with a menu of options.
I choose install from http and away we go entering IP number information, it wants:

A note on the path -- it wants to retrieve the file PATH/images/stage2.img, so give it whatever PATH will make this work.

This went just fine, and is certainly the way to do things in the future.

Yum

After a while, I find that my nightly yum auto updates are not running (bummer). Then I find that service yum restart is summarily rejected. It would seem that as of fedora core 6, this service has been renamed to yum-updatesd, which I will need to find and install and activate. And this is exactly the case, do this: 
yum install yum-updatesd
service yum-updatesd start
Seems to be no need to do chkconfig --level 35 yum-updatesd on as the rpm sets that up.

However, you also need to edit the config file also before this will do anything for you automatically. The file in question is /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf. I have it send updates via email rather than dbus (whatever the heck that is), and turn on the three booleans to download and update automatically. Then I restart the yum-updatesd service.

Poppler

What the heck is this, and why should you care? Well, because poppler and xpdf cannot live happily together and yum update gives up when it trips over the confusion. My quick answer is: 
rpm -e xpdf xpdf-utils
And now at least I can update my system. I suppose I should use yum erase instead of rpm -e but old habits die hard.

Indeed after erasing xpdf and friends and doing my yum update, I find I cannot yum install xpdf due to the conflict, one must choose.

Perl-Tk and SCIM - gas and heartburn

My perl-Tk GUI's all work fine, except for one thing. The entry fields don't work -- making many of these GUI's useless (i.e. anything involving the keyboard is dead).

The solution has to do with SCIM, and the first thing for me to do is to get some packages that I don't have:

yum install system-switch-im yum install im-chooser After doing this, I can get to a new menu entry:
Now from the gnome menus, I go to:

System --> Preferences --> More Preferences --> Input Method

The "use legacy input method" option is greyed out, so I select "Never use input methods", and Perl-Tk entry widgets begin to work!

The recommended fix was to select the "Use legacy input methods" option, so I try some fishing around to see if I can get lucky finding what package this might reside in:

yum install scim-bridge -- nope yum install scim-tables -- nope

Bah! - I give up.

Java

All I want is the JRE so cool java things will work in my browser. I go to java.sun.com and download jre-1_5_0_11-linux-i586-rpm.bin. I do a chmod on this to make it executable and run it: 
chmod a+x jre-1_5_0_11-linux-i586-rpm.bin
./jre-1_5_0_11-linux-i586-rpm.bin

Heaven knows what happens -- running updatedb followed by locate on libjavaplugin shows me that it put the stuff into /usr/java/jre1.5.0_11. It also shows me that I have/had old stuff in /opt/jre1.5.0_08 ....

Then I keep my fingers crossed and do: 

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_11/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org