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Fedora Core 3 Installation Notes

Some notes about the trials and tribulations of installing FC3 on my laptop.

  • I checked the ISO files against their MD5SUMs and everything was ok, but having burned the images to CDs, the only CD which passed the media test was CD1. I tried a couple more times with different CDs, but still got the same failures. Eventually, I noticed online that there are issues with some changes to the kernel which might affect the media-check stage (one post mentioned booting up with linux ide=nodma to see if things worked). Eventually I just installed and things worked ok.
  • I chose to re-format the existing root partition and install from scratch, rather than updating, since I'd only recently installed FC2 on a fresh HD and all my user data was backed up. I insisted on manual partitioning after the automatic partitioning (with manual override) warned that all data would be lost. Manual partitioning allowed me to specify that I only wanted the boot, root and swap partitions to be reformatted and to leave the home partition alone.
  • Even after choosing all of KDE, there were still KDE stragglers in some of the other sections.
  • After installation, I thought entering a new user into firstboot might delete the user's home directory, but everything was ok.
  • The login manager (gdm, by the looks) messed up the login because it tried to run gnome, but I switched it to KDE.
  • So far, the PCMCIA wireless card has worked fine; I chose to ignore eth0 and have eth1 use DHCP. Would be nice to have something more descriptive.
  • Good to see that the touchpad works as expected again.
  • Copied rhubarb:/etc/profile.d/colorprompt.sh.
  • Problems installing nvidia drivers, not sure what's going on. Stuck with Xorg drivers for now, putting DisplaySize 304 230 in monitor section to get DPI right.
  • Missing KDE system tray added back by right clicking K/PanelMenu/Add/Applet/SystemTray.
  • Updated using up2date because I haven't sorted out apt properly yet.
  • Managed to get nvidia driver working at least once. Had to add the /dev/nvidia* manually then copy them to /etc/udev: 
      mknod /dev/nvidia0 c 195 0
  mknod /dev/nvidia1 c 195 1
  mknod /dev/nvidia2 c 195 2
  mknod /dev/nvidia3 c 195 3
  mknod /dev/nvidiactl c 195 255
  chmod 666 /dev/nvidia*
  cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices/
  chown root.root /etc/udev/devices/nvidia
  • Made sure to read the nvidia installation docs and configured /etc/X11/xorg.conf properly, removing DRI.
  • Added floop and jpackage to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
  • Installed msttcorefonts, java
  • Downloaded freetype SRPM in order to recompile with bytecode interpreter switch on with: 
      rpmbuild -bb --with withhout_bytecode_interpreter=0 freetype-2.1.9-1.src.rpm
(keith: this didn't work for me, try)
  rpmbuild --define "without_bytecode_interpreter 0" --rebuild freetype-*.src.rpm
  • Still can't get acpi sleep to work properly. Seems to wake up, but nvidia is hosed.
  • Fixed gdm issue by adding the line DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE" to /etc/sysconfig/desktop.
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