{"id":501,"date":"2009-06-13T19:27:06","date_gmt":"2009-06-14T02:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/?p=501"},"modified":"2009-06-19T10:02:44","modified_gmt":"2009-06-19T17:02:44","slug":"preparing-for-fedora-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/?p=501","title":{"rendered":"Preparing for Fedora 11:  Installation on the Acer laptop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/fedoraproject.org\/get-fedora\">Fedora 11<\/a> was released this past week and I&#8217;ve already downloaded the various netinst and DVD ISO images for both 32bit and 64bit systems at home.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve got 5 computers to upgrade: 1 development server, 1 MythTV server, my desktop, 1 Myth client and my laptop. \u00a0 Since I&#8217;ve now got a nice quad-core in my office at home, I can start the upgrade process with the Acer laptop.<\/p>\n<p>The first thing to do when starting the upgrade process is to <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.fedoraproject.org\/release-notes\/f11\/en-US\/\">review the release notes<\/a>.\u00a0 Most of the time there aren&#8217;t any major issues you&#8217;ll need to worry about when groing from Fedora X to Fedora X+1, but that may change if you&#8217;ve skipped a couple of releases.\u00a0 I try to avoid that these days, but I did once go from Fedora 7 to Fedora 10.\u00a0 This is another reason I never upgrade releases but actually reinstall each release.\u00a0 See my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/?p=326\">Everyday Guide for Fedora Upgrades<\/a> for dealing with that process.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the things I found in the release notes that are of interest to me are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>PulseAudio is reported to be more tightly integrated with the rest of the system.\u00a0 Or vice-versa.\u00a0 Pulse Audio has been a pain the butt to me so far.\u00a0 But we&#8217;ll see how this situation has changed wtih F11.<\/li>\n<li>EXT4 is now the default filesystem.\u00a0 That means the root filesystem will use EXT4 when I reinstall.\u00a0 But I doubt there is anyway to get the EXT4 features on an existing filesystem.\u00a0 Since I have no intention of pulling all that data off the system just to get a new filesystem, EXT4 won&#8217;t help me with day to day data (outside of the OS files) for some time.<\/li>\n<li>MinGW is now included as a development tool.\u00a0 This doesn&#8217;t mean that much to me at home since I couldn&#8217;t care less if my applications run on Windows.\u00a0 But I have to work with JNI (Java Native Interface) code at work and having MinGW on my F11 installation means I don&#8217;t have to set up a development environment under Windows.\u00a0 I just have to test under Windows.\u00a0 Well, its as close as I can come to ignoring Windows while still having to support it.<\/li>\n<li>Anaconda doesn&#8217;t allow changing disk partition sizes in text mode.\u00a0 Say what?!?!\u00a0 So anyone with nVidia cards that are misbehaving may be screwed.\u00a0 Hmmm.\u00a0 Well, supposedly the boot time graphic card support is better with F11 too so maybe this won&#8217;t be as big an issue as it used to be.\u00a0 I know I need custom layouts and apparently only the graphical install will allow this now.\u00a0 We&#8217;ll see.<\/li>\n<li>Root logins are still disabled, but at least now <a href=\"http:\/\/fedoraproject.org\/wiki\/Enabling_Root_User_For_GNOME_Display_Manager\">there is some info provided<\/a> how to get around this restriction.<\/li>\n<li>PolicyKit has more control over printers.\u00a0 I really hate PolicyKit.\u00a0 It gets in my way.\u00a0 I am the only user on these boxes.\u00a0 Can&#8217;t I just disable the damn thing?<\/li>\n<li>There is a wordpress RPM but I would never it.\u00a0 It&#8217;s far too easy to install manually and that makes it very easy to test new configurations before taking them live.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s an important one.\u00a0 The X.org project is apparently disabling the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace keystroke to kill the X server.\u00a0 Fortunately, you can easily fix this with <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.fedoraproject.org\/release-notes\/f11\/en-US\/sect-Release_Notes-X_Window_System_Graphics.html\">minor edits to the xorg.conf file<\/a>.\u00a0 Apparently they did this because braindead emacs users couldn&#8217;t find the right keystrokes in their editor. Bunch o&#8217; dorks.<\/li>\n<li>gcc has been rev&#8217;d to 4.4.\u00a0 Not sure if that will require any changes on my end, especially since I&#8217;ve been doing mostly (yuck) Java programming at work.\u00a0 Of course this change comes with a warning that syntax changes may break things.<\/li>\n<li>Oh oh.\u00a0 DBus permissions have been tightened.\u00a0 Anytime they do something like that I find something that doesn&#8217;t work like it used to.\u00a0 I wonder what it will be this time&#8230;.<\/li>\n<li>Meld has been updated but I don&#8217;t see any functional improvements in the feature list.\u00a0 Even so, if you don&#8217;t use Meld and your a programmer you should consider it.\u00a0 It&#8217;s quite handy, especially if you&#8217;re like me and don&#8217;t rely on pansy-ass IDEs.<\/li>\n<li>Netbeans and Eclipse have been updated.\u00a0 Not that I care.\u00a0 I write Java with vi and cscope.<\/li>\n<li>Some interesting embedded support for Atmel and AVR parts.\u00a0 We might like that at work.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t notice any mention of <a href=\"http:\/\/rpmfusion.org\/\">RPMFusion<\/a> in the release notes.\u00a0 It seems to be alive and has packages for F11.\u00a0 So I guess they&#8217;re just not encouraging use of non-free codecs.\u00a0 I also missed any reference to the intel driver updates.\u00a0 I know that the intel graphics chips were the first to be ported to the latest X.org release using a new architecture that relies on some kernel updates.\u00a0 Well, nows the time to put all those together and see if the intel driver has gotten any better at supporting multiple displays.\u00a0 Personally, I don&#8217;t need this anymore.\u00a0 My desktop uses an nVidia GeForce 8200 and has dual monitors.\u00a0 My laptop has the intel chip, but I can always test the driver by using the extra LCD I have.\u00a0 I may do that, if time permits.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #003366;\"><strong>Update: 2009-06-13 9:27pm<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Most of the initial installation is going well on the laptop.\u00a0 I&#8217;m using the Anaconda options from my notes on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/?p=202\">Migrating a MythTV server to F10<\/a>.\u00a0 I got to the point of custom partitioning and decided to use EXT4 for the root partition.\u00a0 Turns out boot partitions cannot be on EXT4.\u00a0 So I&#8217;m back to EXT3.\u00a0 So much for experiencing the benefits of the new filesystem.<\/p>\n<p>The selection of repositories is kinda weird.\u00a0 They offer the installation repo (the DVD) along with i386 and i386-updates repos.\u00a0 Clicking on those i386 repos just gives an error.\u00a0 If they don&#8217;t work they should probably be removed.\u00a0 Maybe its how I specified the anaconda options.\u00a0 Maybe doing the install via an nfsiso repository mucks this up.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m doing a custom installation.\u00a0 The <em>units<\/em> package is gone from Engineering and Scientific collection of the Applications packages.\u00a0 It might be somewhere else.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t use this much, but its a nice tool to have around.<\/p>\n<p>One thing that annoys me with the custom package selection is being forced to enable a collection in order to see what&#8217;s in it.\u00a0 Why can&#8217;t I just see the list without having to enable anything first?<\/p>\n<p>Installation has started.\u00a0 Wait a awhile, then check back to see if my Acer laptop runs better or worse.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #003366;\"><strong>Update: 2009-06-14 3:20pm<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mjmwired.net\/resources\/mjm-fedora-f11.html\">Mauriat already has his F11 guide available<\/a>.\u00a0 Be sure to check that out for help on getting everything running.<\/p>\n<p>Wireless networking still isn&#8217;t working right.\u00a0 For some reason I can&#8217;t get the route automatically added for the wireless connection.\u00a0 So I have to do it manually.<\/p>\n<p>There are some loud clicks on my desktop session.\u00a0 I have all desktop audio effects disabled so I&#8217;m not sure what&#8217;s causing that.<\/p>\n<p>Everything else seems to be up and running at the moment.\u00a0 I haven&#8217;t checked all features, like video.\u00a0 But the basic system is running and I can access sudo from my user.\u00a0 That means I can fix whatever is broken from that user.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t notice that sudo hangs if the network is not properly configured.\u00a0 I really hate applications that hang because the network is not working even though the application is not doing anything on the network.\u00a0 Ugh.<\/p>\n<p>I am installing the fastmirror plugin for yum but will not install the presto plugin.\u00a0 I need my systems in production mode (from my point of view) and will wait till others decide on the reliability of partial file transfers for package updates.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, the process for reinstallation probably only took about 2-3 hours, tops.\u00a0 And that&#8217;s with lots of breaks and distractions, plus the initial installation which was about 20-30 minutes of unattended processing.\u00a0 It&#8217;s become pretty painless.\u00a0 Total disk usage is about 5.2G on the root partition for installed packages, including a bunch of development stuff.\u00a0 Not bad.\u00a0 Leaves me with over 4G for additional Fedora managed apps.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #003366;\"><strong>Update: 2009-06-19 11:02am<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>I should note that after many releases of disabling it because it didn&#8217;t work, NetworkManager is now my preferred way to use wifi hotspots.\u00a0 I tried it with F11 and was able to quickly and painlessly (sans my collection of shell scripts) login at a local Panera.\u00a0 So I would recommend leaving NetworkManager enabled now if you use your laptop at wifi hotspots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fedora 11 was released this past week and I&#8217;ve already downloaded the various netinst and DVD ISO images for both 32bit and 64bit systems at home.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve got 5 computers to upgrade: 1 development server, 1 MythTV server, my desktop, 1 Myth client and my laptop. \u00a0 Since I&#8217;ve now got a nice quad-core in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35,5],"tags":[64,231,89,634,48,43,88,635,229,52,230,621,78,228,639,629,95],"class_list":{"0":"post-501","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-fedora","7":"category-linux","8":"tag-acer","9":"tag-anaconda","10":"tag-dual-monitors","11":"tag-fedora","12":"tag-gnome","13":"tag-intel","14":"tag-intel-driver","15":"tag-java","16":"tag-java-native-interface","17":"tag-jni","18":"tag-mingw","19":"tag-mythtv","20":"tag-nvidia","21":"tag-nvidia-geforce","22":"tag-pulseaudio","23":"tag-wordpress","24":"tag-xorg","25":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe9t8-85","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":504,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions\/504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graphics-muse.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}