Notes on Fedora Core 6 Install (and brief notes on FC 7 7/1/07)

Hardware Info

• Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

• CPU: AMD 64 X2

• Sony DVD RW DRU-530A

• Firewire: TI TSB43AB22A 1394a

• Ethernet

  • Fedora finds:

    • Marvel 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller

    • nVidia CK804 Ethernet Controller

  • FC5 Runs on the latter

  • Asus MB manual says

    • Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet

    • nVidia nForce 4 Gigabit Ethernet

• AC97 Audio: Realtek ALC850 Audio controller

• Onboard SATA RAID

• Harddrives: Several ATA & SATA

• Graphics: nVidia Geforce 7900

• Monitors: Dual a Sony & a Samsung

August 20, 2007

• Firefox 2.0.0.5 x86_64
• about:plugins in address bar will show all plugins installed
• adding a plugin.expose_full_path=true will show where plugins are installed
• many plugins (like flash) will not work or are hard in x86_64
• installing both 32 & 64 bit versions of firefox and doing sudo yum install firefox-32 will solve the problem
• firefox will start the 64 bit version
• firefox-32 will start the 32 bit one
• otherwise you have to use the nspluginwrapper package
  (Flash Plugin with 64 bit Firefox how-to)

October 27, 2006

• Downloaded all ISOs, compared hashes

• Printed CDs and compared iso and printed disc hashes

• Booted to CD & checked media for all discs

• Hit Enter for standard graphical install

  • System locks up after starting graphical installation. All I get is a big X (worked fine in FC7)

• Booted again and did linux text install

  • Ditto, same problem only this time blue screen, really, really blue

• Installed Suse 10.1 with no problems :-)

November 5, 2006

• Tried again, this time with noprobe option...

  • it worked but without hardware obviously

• Went back to FC5 and did some searching. Found some problems with older fedora due to the onboard RAID

• Booted to CD and tried with nodmraid option (this is still required in FC7)

  • IT WORKS!!!!!!!!!!

• Got to the network page, changed the dhcp for eth0 (Marvell) to static ip

• Got to select packages screen and ended with a unhandled exception error when I tried to select Fedora Extras

• Tried again & got the same problem even with dhcp

• The hardware probe finds two NICs eth0 == Marvell, eth1=nvidia. FC5 uses eth1 so I tried again using eth1

  • Did not select Fedora Extras, got about 1/4 of the way through the install & ended with the same exception

  • Worked fine on eth1 in FC7

November 18, 2006

• Downloaded x86_64 ISOs, checked sha1 hashes

• Printed CDs and checked md5 values

• Booted to 1^st disk, hit enter for graphical install and watched it die like before

• used nodmraid option, got install going, then had file read exception

• Started over and got the same problem. This time I hit retry lots of times and it eventually worked

  • Same file read problem happens every time I put in a new disc

• Finally got everything installed

November 2006

• Something cause problems with the xorg server. Every time I use anything multimedia the server dies. Sometimes it is able to restart & sometimes it just stays dead. My guess is gnash the freeware flash player.

• I reinstalled the x86_64 version & everything works again

• Solution: See Dual Monitors Below (reinstall the nvidia.com driver)
  

• There is a kmod-nvidia package for FC7 on the livna repo that allows dual monitors and solves the above problems.  It also includes a GUI to configure the servers
  ---------------------------------

  SATA Drive Problems

• Neither of my sata drives mounts even after configuring fstab

• The error message in the logs seems to indicate lvm problems

• Searched the web and found similar issues.

  • Looked for a config file or other easy way to disable lvm could not find one

• Went into rc.sysinit and commented out the lvm stuff in the following if statement

  • if [ -c /dev/mapper/control ]; then

• On second install they work fine?
  

• All this works fine in FC7.  All drives are listed as sd (sda, sdb, etc) even ones that used to be hda, etc

  
  Dual Monitors

• Attached xorg.conf primarily from FC5 works fine after I remove module lines

• The X display started dying again every time I play a multimedia file (12/13/06)

  • Found the following in the /var/log/kdm.log file:
    (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the GLX module; please check in your X
    (EE) NVIDIA(0): log file that the GLX module has been loaded in your X
    (EE) NVIDIA(0): server, and that the module is the NVIDIA GLX module. If
    (EE) NVIDIA(0): you continue to encounter problems, Please try
    (EE) NVIDIA(0): reinstalling the NVIDIA driver.
    (EE) AIGLX: DRI module not loaded
    (EE) AIGLX: DRI module not loaded

  • Reinstalling the nvidia driver solved it. Must be a conflict with the nv driver & since dual monitors require the nvidia version...

  Fuse

• Been using some of these for awhile but, wow: http://fuse.sourceforge.net/

• Remember to add your user to the fuse user group or you will get a fusermount error
  
  Misc Installed Programs

• rar, par2, eclipse, MyEclipseIDE, sshfs, ntfs-3g, encfs, tidy, gqview, xine, kchmviewer. qparted, xmms, k3b, cxoffice, yakuake
  
  Eclipse

• The yum / rpm version of eclipse gives me troubles with MyEclipse so I went back to my old manual install version

  
  Misc Problems Solved

• While trying to install either helix, RealPlayer, or kompozer I continually get an error like:
  error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5
  I solved the problem by doing: sudo yum install compat-libstdc++-33
  Apparently there are several compat libs out there that solve distro problems

• This is required in FC7 too

• NumLock: you need to edit /etc/X11/xdm/kdmrc and change the #Numlock=Off to Numlock=On
  
  Cups & Printers

• The kde admin tool does not work to add printers, you get a variety of errors

• Go to http://127.0.0.1:631 and use the cups web interface

December 2006
VMWARE

• Installation on FC6 how to from: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=503951

  1. Download and install the VMWare Server package from VMWare.
  Don't run the configuration tool yet

  2. If you do not have the Development Tools installed do
  yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

  3. Ditto for the kernel headers
  yum install kernel-devel

  4. Apply the latest VMWare patch (I get vmnet compile errors if I do not do this)
  wget http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/vmware-any-any-update105.tar.gz
  tar xzf vmware-any-any-update105.tar.gz
  cd vmware-any-any-update105
  ./runme.pl

• My bet is that #4 above gets done again at every new kernel

• Seems like not with every single new kernel but with some
  (going to 2.6.20-1.2933.fc6 required update108)

#/etc/X11/xorg.conf for FC6 x86_64 Dual Monitors
# XFree86 4 configuration created by DrJohn

Section "ServerLayout"
 Identifier "Multiple X Layout"
 / Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
 Screen 1 "Screen1" RightOf "Screen0"
 InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
 InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Module"
 Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier "Keyboard0"
 Driver "kbd"
 Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
 Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier "Mouse0"
 Driver "mouse"
 Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
 Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
 Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
 Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"

 ### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
 Identifier "Monitor0"
 VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
 ModelName "Sony SDM-HX73 (Digital)"
 DisplaySize 340 270
 ### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
 HorizSync 28.0 - 65.0
 VertRefresh 57.0 - 63.0
 Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
 Identifier "Monitor1"
 VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
 ModelName "Samsung 931B"
 ### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
 HorizSync 30.0 - 81.0
 VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier "Videocard0"
 Driver "nvidia"
 VendorName "Videocard vendor"
 BoardName "nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0291"
 BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
 Identifier "Videocard1"
 Driver "nvidia"
 VendorName "Videocard vendor"
 BoardName "nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0291"
 BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
 Screen 1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier "Screen0"
 Device "Videocard0"
 Monitor "Monitor0"
 DefaultDepth 24
 SubSection "Display"
 Viewport 0 0
 Depth 16
 Modes "800x600" "640x480"
 EndSubSection
 SubSection "Display"
 Viewport 0 0
 Depth 24
 Modes "1280x1024"
 EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
 Identifier "Screen1"
 Device "Videocard1"
 Monitor "Monitor1"
 DefaultDepth 24
 SubSection "Display"
 Viewport 0 0
 Depth 16
 Modes "800x600" "640x480"
 EndSubSection
 SubSection "Display"
 Viewport 0 0
 Depth 24
 Modes "1280x1024"
 EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
 Group 0
 Mode 0666
EndSection