Qchem Posted May 19, 2004 Report Share Posted May 19, 2004 Being a long-time (at least for the life-span of your average Linux distro) user of Fedora Core 1 and before that various flavours of redhat, I was waiting with baited breath for 10am EST yesterday (18th May 2004) for the release of FC2. I'm on a quick 'net connection so I have no need for all the source rpms, hence I downloaded the 4 binary ISOs. 30 mins later and I've finished downloading and its onto the burning. Everything's still going to plan, the installer (anaconda) starts and is its usual polished RH self. At one point a warning box reared its ugly head and warned me that I had an unusaual partition table, it was going to `fix' the partition table and I should be able to fix it later if anything goes wrong. I thought this message was the dreaded - "I've just shafted your Win XP partition" but thankfully not, Win XP still works in the same manner that it always has (draw from that what you will). When the installer gets round to actually installing the packages, I had a little chortle to myself about the image that was displayed whilst we were in slowly scrolling bar mode. It was a message from RH, thanking the Fedora community for its involvment over the past year. A strange sense of irony must be lurking within the RH halls, but on with the article. So, there I was, install finished about to reboot - fingers crossed. Power cycle / Grub / rhgb (RedHat Graphical Boot) / Hang / Creative uses of Anglo-Saxon language / Laptop completely locked up / Remove battery. This time I editited my grub boot parameters to switch off rhgb and give a more verbose output. System boots fine. I then realise that I haven't provided any usernames or passwords (bar root). The picture became clear, firstboot had obviously borked something but decided it had done enough damage and wasn't going to run anymore. Begrudgingly log in as root, create users, log out and back in as my mortal. Everything seems nice yet somehow all too familiar, in fact its very hard for me to tell the differences between FC1 and FC2. Despite a kernel bump from 2.4.22 to 2.6.5 and moving to GNOME 2.6 I can barely tell the difference. My sound card seems to work a little better, but thats almost certainly down to the switch from OSS to ALSA. I'm not a fan of file managers (being a shell hound) but I thought I'd have a play with the new spatial nautilus. The surprising verdict was that I actually quite liked it, theres no way I'll be using it on a day to day basis but its certainly the best file manager I've used for ages. Another neat feature is the prefered applications switcher. By setting the prefered web browser to browser.of.choice, clicking on the generic web browser icon on the panel will start it - same for most types of desktop applications. The same problem exists that did with FC1, in that the default configuration of yum and up2date aren't great. That said there is a mirror feature in up2date now, which means you'll at least get the update eventually. A quick tweak of yum.conf got things working nicely and I was soon pulling firefox from the fedora.us server. RedHat, and hence fedora, have a policy of allowing zero non-open source software in the distro, meaning no MP3 support or DVD players etc, these are all easily obtainable from livna - a yum repo so this isn't a problem for those with 'net access. Also the nvidia drivers currently do not work with the FC2 kernel, due to the implementation of 4kstacks in the kernel. This provides some improvements to the kernel and as this patch will be mainstream very soon, this isn't just a fedora problem. In fact, those using other distros should be thankfull for fedoras 4kstacks inclusion, it'll probably mean nvidia will push some updated drivers out soon. As I don't play games often I wasn't bothered about this lack of 3d acceleration - but it is something for others to bear in mind. Thanks for the attention those that are still reading. The main conclusion is that this is obviously just evolution, not revolution, for Fedora Core. They seem to have stuck to the original plan in that this is much closer to the cutting edge than redhat linux used to be, but this also causes a few problems. At the moment I can't say that I'd recommend FC2 to the casual desktop user, as soon as the various yum repos are running properly, decent yum.conf's are easily available, and nvidia sorts out its drivers this will probably change. For me, it'll stay as my main distro for some time yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred_the_fish Posted May 19, 2004 Report Share Posted May 19, 2004 Same here, just one question - do you have working smbfs straight off? - if you don't, update it and you should (some fool at samba broked it for a 4 versions :( ) Second ( ) firstrun borfing appears to be a known issue, and was also present on the test3. As for Firefox... damn, that'll teach me to just "assume" and not look first - hehe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted May 19, 2004 Report Share Posted May 19, 2004 I wrote up a how-to for the nvidia * kernel problem. nvidia & kernel-2.6.6 Should get you up and going to play them games! :lol: Atleast this one supports "xfs" during install "linux xfs" durning boot and welcome a true file system! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qchem Posted May 19, 2004 Author Report Share Posted May 19, 2004 linux reiserfs is also an option. I decided to stick with trusty ext3 for the moment however. I also don't use samba, so I've no idea if it works or not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted May 19, 2004 Report Share Posted May 19, 2004 rierserfs & jfs were available since 9, maybe 8, but i'm starting to not like reiserfs anymore, to many power outages and broken systems. Did you try the nvidia post i put up? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred_the_fish Posted May 19, 2004 Report Share Posted May 19, 2004 not like reiserfs anymore, to many power outages and broken systems EH?? Thats the whole idea of the Reiserfs???!! To protect data against such problems?????? I LOVE and LIVE FOR Reiser (just don't tell the g/f that :P) - and can't wait for Reiser4 to get into a stable release version. Qchem - have you worked out how to sort out the SELinux yet so it doesn't constantly moan when you try and install an rpm without using yum / apt / up2date ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qchem Posted May 20, 2004 Author Report Share Posted May 20, 2004 ave you worked out how to sort out the SELinux yet so it doesn't constantly moan when you try and install an rpm without using yum / apt / up2date ? Yeah, selinux=0 :D Did you try the nvidia post i put up? I've read it and it looks good, however as I don't currently need 3D acceleration I think I'll leave my kernel untainted (if that could possibly EVER be the correct term for a kernel that comes from RH). I'll keep the link bookmarked in case the time comes when I can resist Tuxracer no longer..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted May 20, 2004 Report Share Posted May 20, 2004 not like reiserfs anymore, to many power outages and broken systems EH?? Thats the whole idea of the Reiserfs???!! To protect data against such problems?????? I LOVE and LIVE FOR Reiser (just don't tell the g/f that :P) - and can't wait for Reiser4 to get into a stable release version. Qchem - have you worked out how to sort out the SELinux yet so it doesn't constantly moan when you try and install an rpm without using yum / apt / up2date ? Yeah, that is the idea behind reiserfs, but i'm sure you'll find enough people that have had corrupt fs when the power goes out 8) Heres a test for you, hit reset on your pc 3x & see what happens, do it with xfs and see what happens. *** Warning, back your data up first**** No guarantees your system will come up with either but xfs does for me. :o Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fred_the_fish Posted May 20, 2004 Report Share Posted May 20, 2004 Really? I've never had problems with Reiser, but there we go. Guess its down to personal preference in the end. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qchem Posted May 20, 2004 Author Report Share Posted May 20, 2004 I stuck with ext3 as a form of security blanket - I know which tools do what if anything goes wrong. As a slight update to the thread top, I've found that gcalulator has been replaced with gcalctool - annoyed me for a while until I realised it was better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted May 20, 2004 Report Share Posted May 20, 2004 There is an update to the nvidia drivers (r3 I think) that fixes the problem with the 2.6.6 kernel. Apparently the kernel makes larger frame buffers available and this b0rks the nvidia module. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted May 20, 2004 Report Share Posted May 20, 2004 The problem with 2.6.6 is the 4kstack that was implemented into it. Nvidia needs 8kstack. I posted a how to in my first post to this thread on how to get 2.6.6/nvidia to work with fedora2 I've done it with two box's at home FX5700ultra Ti_4200 Are the cards i use and it worked fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted May 20, 2004 Report Share Posted May 20, 2004 The problem with 2.6.6 is the 4kstack that was implemented into it. Nvidia needs 8kstack. I posted a how to in my first post to this thread on how to get 2.6.6/nvidia to work with fedora2 I've done it with two box's at home FX5700ultra Ti_4200 Are the cards i use and it worked fine. That was actually what I meant - the Gentoo ebuild had a note about it. Ah well... my bad. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted May 20, 2004 Report Share Posted May 20, 2004 :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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