Fedora 7 (Core is no more)

[Void Main]

http://fedoraproject.org/

Fedora 7 Release Notes

Guess I'll start my downloading now. Should have all my machines upgraded by tonight sometime. :)

[Tux]

Think I may go for a clean re-install. There are certainly some stray packages that I don't need anymore.

[Void Main]

I was able to "yum upgrade" my laptop from a local yum http repo I just created. It was similar to the way the wiki shows how to upgrade from FC5->FC6. It was a fair amount of work and upgrading from a booted DVD would probably be much easier, but I was able to continue working on my laptop while the upgrade was going on which is nice.

First thing I noticed is I didn't have to compile my madwifi driver after upgrading. It seems to be included now and my linksys wireless card came right up on first boot to my surprise. Second thing I noticed is my hard drive is now known as sda instead of hda so I had to change a couple of my mounts in /etc/fstab and after applying my vmware-any-any patch for VMWare I had to edit my guest config file and change the hard drive references from hda to sda. So far it looks like everything is working. I still have a lot of work to do on 3rd party things (MythTV, etc) but so far it's looking pretty good.

In addition to downloading and burning the DVD and Rescue CD I also downloaded the Live CD and booted it up. Pretty nice, and has an install option. There is also a KDE version of the Live CD but I didn't download it.

[Void Main]

Third thing I notice is the new firefox makes image text look craptastic. I notice my site looks much crappier than it's usually crappy look in the new firefox. I must have some setting wrong. Images are really ugly and spaced funny. Maybe I have some HTML tweaking to do as well but considering even the phpBB forum images are all out of alignment I'm thinking it's a firefox issue and not a coding issue.

EDIT: Didn't take long to fix it. I just renamed my ~/.mozilla directory and started Firefox and all is good.

EDIT2: I didn't want to lose all my firefox preferences so I renamed it back to ~/.mozilla and figured out what the real problem was. Turned out to be an ImageZoom extension I had installed that must not be 2.x compatible.

[Calum]

and after i only recently installed 6 as well! i don't know why they can't just call them uipdates instead of making them a totally new operating system. it'd be a lot easier to keep your system updated using apt or yum or whatever you're supposed to use these days.

To be honest things like bash, firefox etc that i use don't seem to have changed in years anyway, so all this frantic upgrading doesn't seem like a high priority to me.

but good luck to them, i'll probably give upgrading a miss till about 9 now though, 6 is working fine for me, and they put xfce back in so i'm happy. they totally arsed up the mini command line for the gnome panel though and the current xfce one's not much better, but i managed to get one that appears to do what it's supposed to on my xfce panel, don't know how, i think it's the old gnome one. i really am losing track of what changes from one to the next. so long as it works and supports programs to do what i want, i'm fine.

[cdhgold]

I just tried doing an upgrade using the DVD and had 2 errors
1) at the boot menu to do upgrade or boot locally it did not respond to keyboard had to let it time out to boot into upgrade .. i use usb keyboard which did respond both before and after the boot menu screen.

2) even though it booted from the DVD when i told it the install media was local cd drive ( no dvd drive option) it says it does not detect the fedora cd

any ideas?

[Void Main]

I just tried doing an upgrade using the DVD and had 2 errors
1) at the boot menu to do upgrade or boot locally it did not respond to keyboard had to let it time out to boot into upgrade .. i use usb keyboard which did respond both before and after the boot menu screen.

I haven't done an upgrade from DVD or CD yet but I did run into a similar issue on the Live CD when I booted it. I thought I was going crazy but after it went through the 60 second countdown it booted and the keyboard was then functional. This was in a VMware session.

2) even though it booted from the DVD when i told it the install media was local cd drive ( no dvd drive option) it says it does not detect the fedora cd

any ideas?

I'm don't recall if it specifically says DVD when you install or if it uses "CD" generically but I recall with certain hardware combos this has been a common issue. If I recall the common solution was to pass the "ide=nodma" kernel param when you booted the install CDs. You might give that a shot.

[Void Main]

I just upgraded my MythTV box. In fact I replaced my 250GB drive with a 500GB drive and did a fresh install of Fedora 7 in a 10GB partition and made the rest an XFS partition for Myth. It appears they don't have an ivtv_xdriver package working yet but I was able to hack the xdriver source and make it work. I'll create an RPM for it and pass it along to ATrpms today sometime so they can get theirs built.

EDIT:

f7 RPM created:
http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/files/RPMS/ivtv_xdriver/

Told Axel about it over at ATrpms:
http://lists.atrpms.net/pipermail/atrpm ... 07368.html

[Void Main]

Well, just upgraded the Void Main web server which makes a total of 5 of my home machines now done. I upgraded all of them via yum. The upgrades went pretty smoothly overall but just ran into a problem on the Void Server. I have a SCSI drive and an IDE drive in the box (along with a couple of other IDE devices). For some reason when I boot with the new F7 kernel it only sees my native SCSI drive. I am currently booted with the latest FC6 kernel. I tried a couple of things but haven't been able to get it to work.

[Void Main]

Someone at work mentioned a problem they had when they did a yum upgrade from FC5 to F7. Basically they upgraded their computer and when they went to reboot it made it just past the grub menu and crashed. It would still boot the FC5 kernel just fine. I knew it probably had something to do with the way the new kernel now handles IDE devices as SCSI and as he described the problem I remembered having the exact same problem on one of my machines. Most of my machines do not use logical volumes but on the one machine that I do have set up with LVM I did have the issue.

What happens is when the new kernel is installed it builds the miniroot (initrd) and creates an 'init' file in that miniroot with the old 'hda' device name instead of the new 'sda' device name so when you try and boot the new kernel the hda devices do not exist and it crashes right there. This will only happen on a yum upgrade and will not happen when you upgrade from CD/DVD because when you upgrade from CD/DVD you will be booted with the new F7 kernel and your devices will already be seen as 'sda' so the init file is properly created when the initrd is built.

You could extract the miniroot and edit the init file manually to fix this problem but the easiest way to fix it I figure is to boot into rescue mode from the F7 rescue or install CD and then reinstall the F7 kernel. This did work for my coworker. To do this you would:

- copy the latest F7 kernel into /tmp (or someone on your hard drive)
- boot into F7 rescue mode and have it mount your file systems
# chroot /mnt/sysimage
# cd /tmp
# rpm -i --force /tmp/kernel*rpm

That's pretty much it. You actually could get by with just running the mkinitrd script and wouldn't actually have to reinstall the kernel but reinstalling the kernel is slightly easier to explain and will run the necessary scripts to rebuild the initrd.

[Basher52]

good to know, thanks

[worker201]

My understanding was that Red Hat had a core development pool that future versions of RHEL were based off, and Fedora Core was basically a release snapshot of that development core. By no longer calling it Core, are they implying that there is no longer a relationship between Fedora code/development cycles and RHEL code/development cycles? What does it mean for the future of both RHEL and Fedora?

I guess it could just be a simpler name

[Void Main]

I never liked the "core" in the name anyway. To be honest I didn't like the name change to "Fedora" at first. I do like it now though. I doubt there will be any changes significant enough to be noticed on the user level regarding releases and release schedules anywhere along the line.