Benavent

As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago I’ve installed Fedora 9 at my laptop.

I’ve used for the very first time a different method. My laptop (buyed 04/11/2002) is unable to boot from a DVD, I allways have been using the set of CDs but now I downloaded a ISO that allows you to install from the network. This is not new for Debian fans.

So if you look for Fedora-9-i386-netinst.iso you’ll find it has only 144Mb, for sure you’re gonna need a quite good internet conection. It tooks me around 3 hours to finish the whole process, including type of installation (Workstation, development or webserver), packages selection and download and so on.

Once the boring part was finished then comes the amusing process… as long as I keep my personal home filesystem untouched this part is easier.

By now I’ve done a couple of customizations quite usual among Fedora’s users:

• Livna repos: download livna rpm…
  1. got to http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/
  2. pick up http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm and install it
  3. type yum update and install mplayer (I used for see movies, many people prefers vlc software, both of them are a good option) by typing yum install mplaer
  4. do the same for ffmpeg (I used it for convert video files); yum install ffmpeg
• Flash plugin for Firefox: download flash-plugin-9.0.124.0-release.i386.rpm from Adobe’s site and install typing rpm -i flash-plugin-9.0.124.0-release.i386.rpm
• Solve some problems with HAL daemon… Pablo has told me that hal doesn’t get very well if you use both network and Network-Managed daemons so he tolds me to use the second one or at least one of them, but not both at the same time… I keep myself on tune it accurately

There’re more thong to be told but that’s enough for now. Soon a second part, ’till then have a look to http://hacktux.com/fedora it keeps a lot of tricks that you were thinking of.

I upgraded from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 without problems… ’till the day mplayer doesn’t run anymore. A very competent guy from Red Hat who’s working at our office told me to use livna repos … I told him about how upset I feel about livna repos vs. freshrpms repos, they both does not run very well together

I believe him and I try livna repos… then begins the show: hal-daemons stops, autorun needs hal-daemon… and don’t want to remember that hell. I know what to do: to get disable livna, also freshrpms, uninstall and reinstall hal-daemon (just in case it helps) and so on,…

Since I have been a Red Hat devoted users since Red Hat 7.2 (passing through all Red Hats 8.0, 9s, and Fedoras) I thought some other distro deserves a chance… so I keep my home and I install Debian. I also keep a server running CentOS, if you don’t know it, try it.
I’ll post more in a not too distant future but my first impression is that everything is clean, well organized, a little bit more fast, and quite different, I mean, there’s no /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ or apache configuration file is under /etc/apache2/... and also their start up script is different but, time to learn, which is always good to keep us alive

At ending of October I was suffering this error when I try to make yum update and I answer yes in order to install all that yum purposes to me:

Running rpm_check_debug
ERROR with rpm_check_debug vs depsolve:
Package up2date needs python(abi) = 2.4, this is not available.
Package rhnlib needs python(abi) = 2.4, this is not available.
Complete!

It has been easy at the end… as you may see, that messages shows that my Fedora has yet installed a up2date package. Since I really don’t use at all I took it out by typing: yum erase up2date and so on…
But the questions are two:

1. Why are there an up2date package in Fedora? a legacy question comming fron the ancient RedHat 8 and 9 ages?
2. How many others useless packages do I have installed?

So I was thinking all around this stuff I two mini-projects come to my mind:

• Writte a couple of scripts that retrieves what packages do I have ordered by use: I have no idea if there’s some method to retrieve package use frequency, but as I’ve just say it’s just an idea, let’s see if it possible or it isn’t…
• Writte a couple of scripts that retrieves for every single package what other packages depends on it and viceversa, by the way, I’ve imagine the reports writed under some xml strict DTD so may open it in a browser or read from some other script or import it in a database

No news about Fedora Project: there’s a new version, they switched from Fedora Core to Fedora (since there’s no separation between a core and other repositories) and also there’re more and more exciting news:

• Fedora Release notes in english
• Fedora Notas del lanzamiento en español

but what I think its really useful for all of you it’s to use smolt.

If you wanna help free software easily and you’re running Fedora and you’re a non tech profile then you can do this:

1. become root on you machine and type “yum install smolt”
2. type “smoltSendProfile”

easy, isn’t it?

This instrucions were copied from Fedora announce list about Fedora Hardware Profiler and by doing this you’re sending an anonymous email to enrich the Smolt Project Result.