Fedora Core 3

[Void Main]

Here is the intructions from linuxiso.org (doesn't list DVD specifically though):
http://linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/neroburning.html

Also, did you do an md5sum on the ISO to make sure it wasn't corrupt? Of course I use Linux and k3b works fine for me for DVDs, in fact I just finished burning the DVD in about 10 minutes.

[worker201]

I had no troubles downloading the dvd image from bitTorrent, and no troubles burning the dvd on the ol' XP box using Roxio EzCd Creator 5. Just open the iso, and Roxio takes care of everything else. One double-click to open, and one click on an "okay" button. 3 clicks, and I had the dvd 17 minutes later.

[lovswr]

Actulally, it did work. For some reason, my newest pc- the one with XP, just would not boot from the DVD. I toolk that same DVD drive, & put into my FC2 box. It took about 2 hours for thei install, but this was the easiiest yet (starting from RedHat 7.0)

As an added bonus. my iiptraf now works!

[Void Main]

Well, got my laptop upgraded to FC3, not without a few major snags that didn't turn out to be all that big of a deal but surely would have thwarted a n00b. I'll try and describe them later, don't have time right now.

[Void Main]

So I stuck the DVD in the drive and rebooted to start the upgrade. Shortly after getting the graphical installer up I started getting these "Assertion" error messages popping up related to the hard drive during detection. You can see other people have had the same problem:

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showth ... =assertion

In the 5th post in the above thread "wally_walrus" mentions he found a way around the problem using parted. So I pulled the DVD out and booted into FC2 (since I hadn't wiped it out yet) and fired up "parted". It did give me a warning message but it wasn't the same warning that wally_walrus had. parted told me it was likely just a matter of turning on the "lba" flag. So I told parted to ignore the warning and start up anyway where I used it to set the lba flag on hda5 (my root partition). I started grub a second time and it didn't give me any warning so I figured I might be in luck. I stuck the DVD back in and booted and sure enough it fixed the problem and I was able to begin the upgrade.

The upgrade seemed to go flawlessly and it seems I only had to answer 1 or 2 questions in total. One of the questions was about what to do with GRUB, whether it was to upgrade it (I think this is the default) or to leave it alone. I told it to upgrade. So the upgrade process began and I went to bed. I woke up this morning and the DVD is sticking out and said the upgrade was successful and to reboot the system.

When I rebooted instead of getting a GRUB menu I got a "no operating system detected" message. Hmmmm, no problem, I just booted the FC3 rescue CD (which I had made ahead of time) where it detected and mounted my root file system under "/mnt/sysimage". I then did this:

# chroot /mnt/sysimage
# grub-install /dev/hda
# exit

Then I rebooted and up popped my GRUB boot menu as happy as can be. Upon booting the first time it hung quickly into the boot process. I realized that it was about the point that the graphical bootup normally starts. I figured it must have a problem starting X for the graphical boot so I rebooted and pressed "a" at the GRUB menu and erased the "rhgb quiet" from the boot line followed by <ENTER>. Ahhh, it booted up and came up to the graphical logon prompt. I don't know why GRUB didn't properly install at upgrade time though.

After logging in I realized I needed to get my wireless card up so I plugged the old cable into my Ethernet port so I could get to the internet where I downloaded the latest madwifi source from CVS. After a "make;make install" I rebooted with wireless.

Now it's time to go to work (only had about 15 minutes to do all the above) so I get to work and I plug the laptop into the docking station and again it hung at the graphical boot. I again was able to get it booted without the graphical startup but hooked up to my 21" monitor X didn't even start. I remembered I have a bootup script that runs at startup that can detect whether I am at work or at home and it automatically copies a customized xorg.conf into /etc/X11 depending on whether I am docked or not. Of course my old xorg.conf must not work with the new X. No problem, just removed the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and ran "system-config-display" and selected the resolution I wanted and then not only did X come up but the graphical boot works again.

So I fire up the new Evolution 2.0 and it migrated all my old stuff perfectly but I realized that it didn't install the evolution-connector (for Exchange connectivity). I stuck the DVD in the drive and went to mount it when I relized it couldn't because there was no /dev/cdrom symlink. No problem, I mounted it manually "mount /dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom" and installed the connector and Evolution was happy. I also now realize with the /dev/cdrom symlink wasn't installed. There is a problem with the "udev" package that accidentally got out in the FC3 final release. There is an updated udev package that will correct this. See here:

ttp://fedora.redhat.com/docs/udev/

FC3 users please update to udev-039-10.FC3.1 after installation

Due to debugging code left accidently in the FC3 udev package, SIGCHLD signals are blocked in udev, which prevents getting the proper exit status in udev.rules. This means no cdrom symlinks are created and pam_console does not apply desktop user ownerships to any cdrom devices.

All users are urged to upgrade to this version after the installation of Fedora Core 3.

This update can be downloaded from here

Let's see, is there anything else? Well, once I got past all those little annoyances things seem to be working really well. I noticed that there is not yet an "apt" package for FC3 over at Dag's site but I'm sure it will be coming soon. Some of the problems I ran in to probably wouldn't have occurred on a fresh install rather than the upgrade install that I did.

Ok, 1 down and 7 more to go at home (plus many more at work). My main family desktop will probably be next and I expect the tricks there will be the usual culprits: nVidia driver and VMWare modules.

Good luck!

[Void Main]

Just finished upgrading the main family desktop to FC3 with very little trouble. Before upgrading I downloaded the latest nVidia driver and updated udev RPM. Upgraded system from DVD. Had to do a non-graphical boot the first time because the nVidia driver was not yet installed. After installing updated udev package I installed the nVidia. After installing the nVidia driver you have to copy the device files for it into /etc/udev/devices or the device files will not be in /dev next time you boot and the driver will not load and of course X will not start:

# cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices

The VMWare modules built just fine (vmware-config.pl) but you have to copy the VMWare special files to /etc/udev/devices just like you have to do for the nVidia driver or the VMWare modules will not load upon reboot:

# cp -a /dev/vm* /etc/udev/devices

I think that was the extent of any oddities. It actually went much smoother than I had anticipated.

[insomnia]

This might sound stupid, but many people seem to claim(and filled a bug rapport) that your RPM-base + settings get corrupted if you don't run the media check during your install...
(...sounds silly, but hey, you never know...)

I also can't find any information about the XP/Fedora boot problem caused by parted in FC2.
Is this still true for this release?

Nvidia is running but not perfect.
(I think I'll try it without a kernel source-tree, but I don't expect a real difference here)

[Void Main]

This might sound stupid, but many people seem to claim(and filled a bug rapport) that your RPM-base + settings get corrupted if you don't run the media check during your install...
(...sounds silly, but hey, you never know...)

I don't understand what you mean by RPM-base + settings.

I also can't find any information about the XP/Fedora boot problem caused by parted in FC2.
Is this still true for this release?

I'm not aware of this problem, but then I don't use any Microsoft garbage so I don't have these types of problems.

Nvidia is running but not perfect.
(I think I'll try it without a kernel source-tree, but I don't expect a real difference here)

I'm not sure where the kernel source comes in here. I just installed the driver, no source needed, all of 30 seconds to install. What sort of problems are you having with it?

[insomnia]

I don't understand what you mean by RPM-base + settings.

As far as I understood this had something to do with wrong rpm headers(that didn't stop your installation), eventually corrupting your RPM base.

I'm not aware of this problem, but then I don't use any Micro$oft garbage so I don't have these types of problems.

http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/
I don't(and never had) Windows myself, they just use it at work.

'm not sure where the kernel source comes in here. I just installed the driver, no source needed, all of 30 seconds to install. What sort of problems are you having with it?

It sometimes(about 1 on 3 times) freezes if I close and restart X
PS: Would it make any difference if I don't use the source tree?

[Void Main]

I don't understand what you mean by RPM-base + settings.

As far as I understood this had something to do with wrong rpm headers(that didn't stop your installation), eventually corrupting your RPM base.

Ahh, the RPM "database"? This still seems very odd. I still don't know what they mean by the "RPM Headers" because there are no headers seperate from the RPMS on the CDs. I never do the CD test at the beginning because I am too impatient. The way I test my CDs is after burning them I mount them and change into the RPMS directory and do a "file *". If I get no errors then chances are it's a good burn. If it's not a good burn then it will have problems reading some of the RPMS. "file" just reads the first couple of bytes of each file so it only takes a few seconds. So far I have had no problems.

I'm not aware of this problem, but then I don't use any Micro$oft garbage so I don't have these types of problems.

http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/
I don't(and never had) Windows myself, they just use it at work.

That looks very similar to the issue I mentioned a few posts back in this thread when I tried to install FC3 on my laptop and linked to the thread where "wally_walrus" had to use the "hda=xx,xx,xx" boot param to get around it. I didn't have to use that param but I did have to change the lba flag on my root partition. I originally had FC1 on this machine so FC2 did not do the partitioning.

'm not sure where the kernel source comes in here. I just installed the driver, no source needed, all of 30 seconds to install. What sort of problems are you having with it?

It sometimes(about 1 on 3 times) freezes if I close and restart X
PS: Would it make any difference if I don't use the source tree?

I have *always* had some sort of freezing issues with the nVidia driver. At least on all of the recent drivers. It has always been frustrating. I can usually tweak things so it will only happen occassionally when the kids are playing some sort of GL game though. I don't recall ever having the problem on shutdown like you are experiencing. When I first bought my first Geforce2 card and used some of the very early Linux drivers I *never* had freezups but there was a point when all new drivers had problems. They must have lost a good developer or something. nVidia has Linux forums where I have grabbed a few configuration change ideas that has minimized the problem but it has never gone away. I must say that so far I have not had a freeze with this new driver on FC3 (Geforce4) so I'll keep my fingers crossed. As far as the kernel source, you don't need it installed. The appropriate headers are installed with just the kernel that the nVidia driver needs to build the module (/lib/modules/2.6.9-1.667/build). I don't think having the source installed or not would make any difference because it shouldn't touch anything from the source package when building the module.

[Void Main]

Just finished upgrading this server. voidmain.is-a-geek.net is now running FC3.

[agent007]

Considering this is FC3, there really shouldnt have been any of those install errors...LBA issues are ancient history. I guess this is more common with RH/Fedora..

[Void Main]

Considering this is FC3, there really shouldnt have been any of those install errors...LBA issues are ancient history. I guess this is more common with RH/Fedora..

But that's the thing. If I had partitioned it with FC3 I wouldn't have had a problem. To be honest I think I used a utility called "BING" (Boot It NG) to originally partition this laptop. FC3 installation apparently didn't like something about it. Once installed it doesn't mind it because I went and changed that lba flag back to what it was before the upgrade and everything is still working fine. I didn't have the problem on the other two machines I upgraded.

[lovswr]

&Ok, I got a wild one. I got the FC3 apt-get from freshrpms & then I got the snyaptic from my uograded apt & then removed yum. I read that you have to make changes for yum to keep working, so I figured I would just let apt install it fresh. Well, bot apt synaptic were complaining of too many "gpg"'s on my system. Using synaptic, I saw that there were about 10 different gpg-pubkeys from different places but two that were almost the same. I had a redhat & redhat beta & two similar (but not exactly the same) from fedora us. I picked one of the redhat keys, marked it for removal & nothing. Synaptic locked up, & so does apt at the command line. Also even rpm -e does not work. I tried to install the fc3 yum using rpm (again from freshrpms) but as far as I can tell, apt-get, synaptic, nor rpm works now on my system.

Also, I started messing wtih the /etc/apt/apt.conf & it keeps saying that there is something after line 3.

Does anybody know how I can remove/force either apt-get, synaptic or rpm so I can start over? TIA



apt-conf; there was more but I figured that I should keep it simple.


etc/apt/sources.list.d/freshrpms.list
### Red Hat Fedora Core 3
rpm http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/3/i386 freshrpms

[lovswr]

hmmm I must be smoking some Crack that's so good I don't even know I'm smoking it How did I completely forget about /etc/apt/sources.list.d/? Anywho... forget everything I said above. I still have a problem, but now, at least,m working on the right files in the right directory!