After several weeks of preparation and work, the three Linux computers have been upgraded to Fedora Core 6, the current release of the freely-available version of Red Hat Linux.

I downloaded the CD and DVD images in November, and loaded the installation packages on the main server’s web server. I started with the P3 500. This upgrade (clean install actuall) went without a hitch. The machine booted cleanly off of the rescue disk, and the installation went fine. The main server and the laptop were not so smooth.

I backed up all the data and configuration from the server, a P3 850 2-processor machine. It has been running Fedora Core 3, and I needed to reconfigure the disks, so a clean install was in order. I loaded Fedora on the web server on the P3 500, and booted off of the rescue disk. (One note on installation methods. Keeping the P3 500 around has been very convenient for Linux installs. I have found burning CDs to be problematic at best, so having the full install on a web server both removes the need for burning CDs and having to swap disks during the install.)

When I went to choose HTTP as the install method, I received a message that no drivers were installed for that boot method — Fedora could not talk to the NIC. I tried many things. I bought a new NIC (gigabit ethernet for $20 at CompUSA), tried to create a driver disk. Nothing worked. I posted at Fedoraforum.org, usually very helpful, but no one there was able to help. Some advice on where to look from Fedora-List led me to boot off of a full install DVD, ctrl-alt over to another terminal, and run lspci -v. This showed me that not only was Fedora not seeing the NIC, it wasn’t seeing anything on the PCI bus. This allowed me to make a much more informative post to Fedora-List. The kind people there gave me a number of kernel parameters to try. The one that worked was pci=noacpi.

Once that was figured out, the installation went fine. I had the usual troubles installing the Perl modules for The Gimp, (send me an e-mail if you need to know how) but with my full /etc directory backed up from the old install was pretty clean.

The laptop had some trouble, but that was mostly user error. First, I had trouble getting the machine to boot off of the CD. Cleaning everything solved that one. Then I had a strange error when I went to upgrade. The install said it could not find the install package repodata file. I should have paid more attention the first time through as I would see this error again. I just figured that I should do a clean install instead of an upgrade and proceeded. Half way through the package load, the machine locked up. I cursed and started over. I then kept getting the same error about repodata. No on-line search showed this error. Finally it struck me. I was entering the IP address for the server instead of the P3 500 with the install data on it! Thankfully, once I had that figured out the install completed successfully.

Here are some of the things I have found with FC6:

• Printer support is much improved. You don’t use the HP IP emulation, rather IPP: protocol which works very well with both Windows and OS 10.
• Installing the Java runtime environment (JRE) for Firefox is a pain. You can use an RPM from Sun that puts Java in the correct place, but you need to use this command (as root) to get it to work: ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_09/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so
• There is a new search program that comes with Fedora called Beagle. It is supposed to index everything in all your files so you can find a document with a quick search. I don’t use Google desktop and I don’t need Beagle. It hogs memory and CPU. I uninstalled it yum remove beagle
• I tried running the laptop with SELinux (Red Hat’s Secure Enterprise Linux) enabled. It rebooted half way through the main yum update after install, and then complained about restarting. I disabled it entirely. It has always caused me nothing but problems. Hey, I’m not an enterprise so why do I need secure?
• The NTP daemon on the server did not need any tweaking to get it to accept NTP calls from the other PCs on the net. On past installs it has taken a lot of changes to the ntp.conf file to get it to work.
• I haven’t gotten flash to work yet.