Tag: fedora

Posted on

Fedora transition

It’s been a few days working with Fedora at home, and so far it’s going well.

Unfortunately I’m not able to completely dispose of Windows since I still need to use Quicken and there isn’t anything comparable available for Linux yet (that I’ve found anyway). Fortunately, thanks to the magic of virtual machine (VM) technology, that was one problem I was able to get around relatively easily. Downloaded and installed VirtualBox, followed the instructions to create a new virtual machine and booted it up with my Windows CD. Took a couple of days to get Windows and all the updates installed, but now I have a working Windows VM running in my Fedora install. This VM thing is pretty cool. A little slower than an actual computer, but not so much that it’s unusable. Now I just need to figure out how to get the VM to grab USB devices so I can use my PDA and scanner to get things into Quicken.

Posted on

Moving on to Fedora

After experiencing numerous inexplicable problems (not seeing anything connected to the USB ports, not finding the DHCP server, no sound…the list went on and on) trying to get Windows XP running on the home computer (with new e-Bay’ed motherboard), I decided to wipe everything clean and install Fedora 8 on the darned thing.

Wouldn’t you know it, everything that wasn’t working in Windows worked again. USB, sound, network, the works. It’s almost like having a brand new computer. The only problem I ended up having was discovering a few things that got left off the backup I made. Nothing critical though.

Now I need to figure out how to get my PDA syncing, get Quicken up and running, and work on keyboard and mouse mappings.

Posted on

Fedora at home?

I’ve had Fedora on my desktop at work for a few months now, and now I’m thinking about dumping Windows at home too.
Except for a few apps like Quicken, and maybe a few games, I think I should be able to make the switch to Fedora at home pretty seamless. I might be able to get around that by using Wine, or maybe even doing the virtual machine thing. I will probably lose the cool function keys on my new keyboard though, unless I can find a way to make them work in Fedora.
Before I make the switch, I’ll need to do some research and see if anybody out there has posted any experience with some of my more commonly used apps under Linux.

Posted on

Upgrading Fedora sans DVD

The Fedora LiveCD image is pretty cool for new installations but as I’ve discovered, not much good for upgrading an existing Fedora. Fedora’s done away with the CD ISO images (probably a good thing, since Fedora 6 consisted of 5 CD ISO images) and only makes DVD images available now. Since my desktop doesn’t have a DVD burner or reader, I thought I was going to be stuck. After doing a bit of research and experimenting, I’ve come up with a procedure that let me upgrade my desktop from Fedora 8 Test 2 to Test 3 that seems to have worked. It’s based on this message from fedora-list.

Disclaimer: The following steps worked fine for me on my system. Since it was a relatively minor upgrade from one test version to another, I’ve encountered very little breakage (so far). You may have to adjust things a little to get it to work on yours. YMMV.

  1. Download the Fedora ISO for your architecture
  2. Mount the ISO using the loopback device:
    mount iso_filename /mnt/Fedora -t iso9660 -o loop
    replacing iso_filename with the filename of the Fedora ISO you just downloaded
  3. Create the directory /boot/Fedora and copy the contents of /mnt/Fedora/isolinux there
  4. Add the following to /etc/grub.conf (add it to the end of the file):
    title Fedora
root (hd0,0)
kernel /Fedora/vmlinuz
initrd /Fedora/initrd.img
  5. Copy the ISO image to another computer and mount it to some location as in Step 2 (I used Fedora in my home directory). I had to do this step because I couldn’t get the upgrade process to find the DVD image on the local hard drive. I think it may have had to do with the image being on an LVM partition. If you don’t have any LVM partitions, you may be able to skip this step.
  6. Create an NFS export for the mounted Fedora image you just created.
  7. Reboot and select the Fedora boot profile. If all goes well, the computer should boot up using the new Fedora image and the upgrade process should kick off.
  8. Follow the prompts to the point where it asks where the Fedora disk image is
  9. Select the NFS option and provide the host and full path information to where you mounted the ISO on the remote computer (from Step 5).
  10. At this point the upgrade should proceed as if you were upgrading from a physical DVD

If anybody knows a better way, feel free to enlighten me.

Posted on

Next Fedora desktop task

Figure out how to sync my PDA to the desktop. The cradle I have is a little flaky and for some reason doesn’t always establish a reliable connection (works fine for power though). I do have a Bluetooth USB adapter though, so maybe I can get a sync going through BT. Don’t know if it’ll work though because the BT on the T3 is supposed to be somewhat limited. Worth a shot though.