Installing another Linux distro (Fedora Core 5)

Fedora Core 5 is out and I could not wait to get my hands on it. For a relatively experienced user, I faced some problems. First of all, my upgrade from Fedora Core 4 failed. I think, it was due to the fact that I had vfat mounted partitions, but I am not 100% sure. So, I did the dumb thing and tried to reinstall it from scratch.

As fate would have it, some of CD's had bad sectors. This caused my installation to be terminated twice. I was surprised not to see the ignore option, for RPMS that failed to install. In any case, I did a minimal install to get Fedora Core 5 up and running. The development tools were completely missing.

I tried to use the new pirut tool, hoping that I would be able to install the remaining packages. To my surprise pirut uses yum as the backend and would not pickup any packages from my CDROM media. To fix this, I copied all the RPMS to a directory in /rpms. Used createrepo to create a yum repository of the RPMS. I then edited /etc/yum.conf to pick up RPMS only from /rpms. The next step was to find all RPMS not installed and install them with yum.

While, this was running in the background, I also installed the following

• Adobe Reader 7.0
• Java JDK 5.0
• Flash Plugin
• Kchmviewer (a chm viewer for Linux)
• mplayer

I am still in the process of setting up Fedora Core 5 completely. All in all, the package selection is exciting, especially

• Xen
• Systemtap
• KDE 3.5
• GNOME 2.14
• Eclipse (based on gij)
• Mono
  

I hope to keep talking about Fedora Core 5 for a while on this blog and of-course other interesting stuff. So keep watching this space. How can I leave this entry without a screenshot? Here is one for completion. I hope it shows all the pain that has gone in :-)