James Japan's Fedora 8 Installation Adventure

Problems and solutions during installation

I downloaded the Fedora 8 DVD ISO image and made a DVD out of it with K3b. The Anaconda graphical installer just would not work for me in the beginning! It aborted with error messages. I tried several times without avail. This is the first time I had trouble with the Fedora Anaconda installer. I've been using Fedora since Fedora Core 3. Fedora 8 has some new changes in it, and therefore probably bugs as well.

After a bit of googling I found another person with the problem. After a bit more googling I learned that I could use the 'lowres' argument after the kernel line to reduce the screen resolution. I thought that this might satisfy the Anaconda installer, and it did! The installation proceeded without errors. Below is exactly what I did:

1. Immediately after booting from the Fedora 8 DVD and seeing the first screen, hit the tab key. This will give you a command line to add options after the kernel.
2. I entered the following options: lowres selinux=0 reiserfs

Note that by 'entered' I mean I typed the commands and pressed the enter key immediately afterward.

This is the first time I've used the lowres option. I always use the selinux=0 option in order to disable selinux from the beginning. Selinux is overkill security for me and it interferes with Wine. And I use the reiserfs option in order to enable support for the reiser file system which I use on my /home partition. I use ext3 for the / and /boot partitions.

I only do clean installations, never upgrades. In Fedora Core 4 I tried to upgrade from Fedora Core 3 but ran into dependency problems. It is easy to do a clean installation and yet keep your /home/user data files if you have created a separate partition for /home from the very beginning on your PC. For this reason, I never use the default Fedora partitioning scheme, but always the custom partitioning. It involves creating 4 partitions.

1. First I create the /boot partition and allow 100 megabytes for it Boot partition should always be set to format in ext3. This is where the kernel lives.
2. Then I create the / (root) partition and allow 20 gigabytes for it. My root partition is consequently only 30% full after installation and adding more programs later with yum. I probably could get by with only 10 gigbytes full, but I have plenty of hard disk space to play with on my 250 gigabyte drive.
3. Then I create a swap partition immediately after the root partition. It should be twice the size of your physical RAM.
4. Finally I create the /home partition and allow it to have all the remainder of the free space of the drive.

If you have do a custom partition like the above in the very beginning, the next time you install Fedora with a new version, you only have to reformat the /boot and / partitions, never the /home partition. This way you can always keep your former data!

If you are doing a fresh install and have already a /home partition from a previous installation, it is important that you use the same user name as your previous installation if you want to have your files accessible after installation. However before you first log in to that former user directory, you must first log into root to change the ownership of the former user directory in order for the system to let you access the data in the directory. Do this:

1. At the log in greeter screen, enter the word root, and then enter your root password. You will be warned that you are logging in as root and can hurt your system. Click on continue.
2. Click on Applications, then move the mouse pointer to System Tools, then click on Terminal. The Terminal window should open and you should see a command line. After that enter the following:
   
   chown -R yourusername /home/youruserdirectory
   Note in this case your username and your user directory should be identical.
3. Wait till the chown command has done its thing. You will see a blinking cursor again when finished. After that log out of root and into your user directory with your user password.

Note that unless you change the ownership of your former /home/user directory using the chown command from root, you won't be able to log into that directory with either Gnome or KDE.

Tweaks after the Fedora 8 installation.

1. First I let the update manager to update my system. If the update manager doesn't do it right away, open Terminal, enter su and your password, and enter
   yum update -y
2. Then I installed the Livna Fedora 8 repository RPM
3. Then I opened Terminal, logging into root with the su command, and entered the following:
   yum -y install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia libdvdcss libdvdread libdvdplay libdvdnav lsdvd libdvbpsi seahorse firefox-32 bluefish thunderbird yumex nautilus-open-terminal vlc gftp gnome-commander mc k3b samba system-config-samba wine* zim
   This gives me the needed drivers for my nvidia card to work in accelerated mode, and all the codecs and programs I like to use. I have an AMD 64 bit processor and therefore use the Fedora AMD 64 bit version, but because Flashplayer doesn't work on the 64 bit version of Firefox, I use the 32 bit version. I had to tweak the default browser setting in Gnome to run firefox-32 instead of the default Firefox.
4. In order to get the OpenOffice quickstarter to work, I had to manually delete OpenOffice Quickstarter shortcut file in the .config/autostart directory. This is because that shortcut was pointing to an older OpenOffice installation that wasn't present anymore, and it therefore interfered with the OpenOffice Options settings under Tools, Memory OpenOffice.org Quickstarter. The Enable Systray Quickstarter would not stay enabled until I manually deleted the older shortcut. Note that the .config directory is a hidden one in your user directory, and can only be seen in the file manager by enabling the show hidden file option. In Gnome Nautilus all you have to do is press Ctrl and the H key to show hidden files.
5. Initially in Fedora 8 I didn't get any sound in Flashplayer. I learned I had to add alsa-oss support using yum. This is because by default the also-oss sound modules are not included in Fedora 8.
6. In order to get sound using Windows programs in Wine, I had to open winecfg and disable the ALSA driver and OSS driver and enabled the E sound Driver (ESD). I never had to do this in previous versions of Fedora. Again this is probably because of changes in Fedora 8.
7. In order to get the Mozilla Sunbird calender to work, I had to use yum to install compat-libstdc++33

Improvements I noticed in Fedora 8

• Faster booting, about 15 seconds faster than Fedora 7
• Wine works better than ever! In Fedora 7 I had to move the Window before I could input any text in a dialog box.
• The firewall is improved with more options in the GUI interface.
• Gnome and Nautilus seem to run faster

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