Sunday, March 26, 2006

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 :-)

4 comments:

kattricker said...

Hey Balbir, I'd be really interested in all your fedora blogs coz I got started with fedora core 4 on my laptop couple of months ago. I have so far configured my pcmcia wi-fi card and have installed yahoo, skype, mplayer, some windows look alike fonts and some browsers. I was wondering if I could make the graphics look more crisper. Any ideas?

Balbir said...

Hi, Karthik,

I have moved on to Fedora Core 5, it is very nice and the fonts work very well. You seem to have done a good job with the software.

What is crisp? Do you mean better resolution? Better UI? Better fonts?

kattricker said...

I guess by crisp I mean better fonts and better control over their rendering. For some reason the same fonts (same font names) appear less smooth in linux. They will have sharp edges that stick out - overall makes it look less smooth. Dunno if its just my laptop.

Balbir said...

Karthik,

I hope you have truetype fonts enabled (using freetype or something better).
Please go to http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ and get mscorefonts.rpm and install the required fonts.

My fonts look amazing on my LCD, at least the ones that are well supported.

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