James Japan's Personal Fedora Core 6 basic installation Guide

Written Oct. 26, 2006

I did the basic FC6 installation and now am working within it to make this web page of notes to keep in mind what I did, both for my sake, and for the sake of all my Fedora Core Linux friends in cyberspace. The installation worked perfectly fine for me, but I cannot guarantee that following my notes will work for you. You should know what you are doing before you do it. Above all, make sure you have a good recent backup of your /home directory before you install FC6!

I wonder why the Fedora people named this version of Fedora Core "Zod". Could it be named after General Zod, Superman's archenemy? :-)

I downloaded the Zod-dvd-i386.torrent from http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/torrents/ and used Bittorrent to download. It took about 23 hours, slow but sure! Because I have a DVD burner, I prefer downloading a single DVD ISO image rather than 5 CD ISO images. It's much easier and faster to install from a DVD. After the download was finished I used my favorite Linux CD/DVD burner, k3b, to burn the DVD ISO image to a DVD disk. DVD read/write drives are pretty cheap these days - at least in Japan.

Basic Installation Tips

Before you start, you might want to look at this slideshow of Fedora Core 6 installation process.

I am especially listing the points I did that are different from the default settings. You should know why you are changing the default before you change it.

  1. First I made sure that the most important data of my /home partition was backed up to an external media. In my case I have a USB drive. I learned that my most important data (gpg keys, mail box settings, ftp settings, Firefox bookmarks, etc.) are rather small files and therefore a large media is not needed to back them up to. Some can even fit on a floppy disk!)
  2. Inserted the FC6 installation DVD into the DVD drive and rebooted. I made sure that the boot priority in the BIOS was set to boot the DVD before the HDD.
  3. The DVD booted into the first screen. At the command prompt I entered
    linux selinux=0 reiserfs
    and hit enter. This command disables Selinux - which I don't want because it interferes with Wine and slows down the system a bit, and adds support for the Reiser file system which I had used in my /home partition. If you don't use either Reiser or Wine (which you probably don't if you don't know what they are) and you want better security, just hitting enter without any options is sufficient.
  4. Did the media check. I used to skip this before but thought it best to do it this time. The media check said my DVD media will OK to use to install.
  5. Changed the default English keyboard layout to the language of my keyboard layout - Japanese
  6. Used the default clean install Fedora Core option rather than the upgrade. This is especially because I wanted to change the location of my /home partition to another drive. You may find that using the Upgrade option is easier for you if you are a beginner.
  7. In the partitioning dialog screen, I changed the default option from "Remove Linux partitions on selected drives and create default layout" to "Create custom layout" Unless you do this, you may lose all you data on your /home directory when doing a clean install!
  8. Manually edited (or assigned) the /boot/, root (/), and /home mount points of the partitions of my first drive. I did this so I could change the /home partition from sdb2 to sda6 (I use SATA hard disks. Your drives may be named hdb)
  9. Left the Grub boot loader setup screen's settings as the default
  10. Left the Network Devices settings screen as default: Set Hostname automatically via DHCP.
  11. Set the time zone to Tokyo Japan
  12. Set the Root Password
  13. In the Software selection dialog screen, I included Software Development and Web Server. I also selected Fedora Extras. Though I'm not a software developer, I found it is good to include the development tools in order to properly compile and make programs from source when they are not available in a Yum download or RPM format. I included Web server to be able to use Samba to network with my Windows PC when needed. And I included Fedora Extras to have programs like Wine and other goodies. Besides that reason, certain third party repositories like Livna and Freshrpms need the Fedora Extras repository installed in order to work.
  14. In the Customize applications dialog screen, I either selected or unselected certain applications according to my personal usage.
    • In the Desktop Environments I included KDE. Though I prefer using Gnome for my desktop rather than KDE, there are certain KDE applications I like and so it is important to have the KDE base installed in order to use them.
    • In the Applications selection I included Educational Software and choose all 5 of the optional packages.
    • Included the Engineering and Scientific section because by default it includes a units conversion tool.
    • Under Graphic Internet options I included Azureus, Bittorrent, Bluefish, Kickpim, Deskbar-applet, Gftp, Gwget and Thunderbird. I don't know why Thunderbird was not included by default! I removed Ekiga, Evolution and Evolution-webcal which I don't use.
    • Under Graphics I included Kdegraphics. There is a program similar to MS Paint that I use from time to time.
    • Under Office/Productivity I included Kdepim and Openoffice-base - a data base program which I'm trying to learn.
    • Under Sound and Video I included K3b and all Xmms packages. I removed Rhythmbox which never worked for me.
    • Unselected Text-based Internet - never use it.
    • Under Development I included KDE Software Development
    • Under Servers I included Windows File Server and removed Web Server
    • Under Base System Administrator Tools I included Yumex, Removed Dial-up Networking, selected System Support and included MC (Midnight Commander which is like the old Norton / Volkov Commander file manager for DOS) and Wine.
    • Under Languages, I included Japanese Support. I live in Japan.
  15. After clicking all the necessary OK and Next boxes, FC6 did its thing, formatted the partitions I had selected to reformat, and copied the files of the applications I chose. Then it ejected the DVD and asked me to click to reboot the machine.
  16. After reboot the Firewall dialog box came up. I selected Samba as a trusted Service. Samba is the Windows networking tool.
  17. Left the Selinux setting Disabled (was the default in my case.)
  18. In the Date and Time setup screen I clicked the Network Time Protocol tab and enabled the Network Time Protocol. This keeps my PC on the right time. Another reason is when booting my machine, if I don't have Internet connectivity for some reason, the Network Time Protocol will not connect and this will tell me that something is amiss - like my LAN cable unplugged.
  19. Set up my user name and password.
  20. Did the Sound Test and passed it
  21. At the log in screen, logged in with my user name and immediately pulled down the top panel bar so that it is sitting on the bottom panel. I'm comfortable this way after being a Windows user. :-)
  22. I updated my system with yum as soon as I could possible after installation by logging into root from Terminal with su and entering the command:
    yum -y update
    Another process using yum interferred in the beginning. I just repeated the command the second time and it worked and ran the updates.
The installation went flawless! No error messages whatsoever! I couldn't even do a partial install of FC6 test 4 last week due to bugs.

Problems so far after installation

Improvements in Fedora Core 6 I noticed

I'm very pleased with Fedora Core 6. Applications do indeed seem to load faster. I'll probably be adding much more to this page from time to time, so please come back later.

Comments? Questions? Errors found? Email: Write me at:

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