Well, I went ahead and reloaded FC3 after re-burning the ISOs. I also
made sure to check all three disks before installation. In my defense, I
had always checked the ISOs before installation either by checksumming
the burn in xcdroast or using the pre-installation media check in the
last few revisions. I hadn't done it this last time because I'd read
that the media check could fail if the disk was not written with padding
enabled. Sure enough, the disk failed on the media check but I
attributed it to how I'd burned it.
Installation was smooth, but *long*. I installed the stuff I normally
do, including Gnome, KDE, dev tools, publishing, etc.. I turned off the
SELinux options because this was a desktop system. I will enable it for
the next server reinstallation next weekend. The system rebooted and
then went through the initial configuration steps. Everything on my ECS
K7S5A was detected properly.
I ran the update process first. This required me to import the Fedora
keys from their website. I also grabbed freshrpms (though I understand
that it's part of the base distro now). Nice thing about the newer yum
configuration is the include directory which allows you to just move
files into a directory to configure a new repository. There were some
huge upgrades, including new kernel and xorg packages. Updates got all
the way to the installation steps before failing with a drive space
issue. Eh? I have 5Gigs on root! After subtracting about 400M for the
updates, the FC3 installation took a whopping 4Gigs.
It took another half hour to clean up junk. OK, well mostly some of the
games I'd installed plus some other unnecessary packages. I did notice
some odd dependencies (a yp package needed by some gnome component, e.g.).
Re-ran the update and it succeeded without a problem. It was also a lot
faster than previous incarnations as it seems to cache lists better.
Pulled down the latest NVIDIA drivers and installed. It built the kernel
but complained that rivafb was included as a kernel module. I went
through the trouble of re-building my kernel without rivafb, but in the
end it didn't even matter. The wording seemed to imply that just having
the module configured could cause an error (or maybe I misread). Anyhoo,
it came right up after the xorg.conf changes.
Started with KDE. I'm a diehard fluxbox user but this wasn't available
yet and I haven't gotten to rebuilding the FC1 RPMs yet. KDE is
polished and easy to use once I put in my own preferences. My biggest
beef is that it defaults to a lot of Windows-like settings which are
generally annoying to me. During the customization steps I tried out
some screensavers. Bzzt. OpenGL modules failed to load. I immediately
thought it was something with the NVIDIA/rivafb and got this sinking
feeling that I would need to finish that recompile. Turns out that the
newer security settings require you to edit /etc/security/console.perms
and disable the DRI checks. You also need to change some ownerships in
/dev. All this is documented in the NVIDIA FAQ. Though I was annoyed at
first, in hindsight this is a good idea.
Dropped into Gimp. It's the new 2.0 and is easier to use since the
common tools are now in a single window rather than in mazes of submenus.
Sound was detected properly on install, but the included helix-player
couln't handle my MP3s. I installed XMMS-MP3 via yum. It grabbed XMMS
also and even dropped in an entry in the KDE menus. The sound output
defaulted to ESD however so I had to switch it to ALSA. Volume meters
seemed to indicate it was working, but no sound. I started ALSAMIXER and
un-muted the PCM and MASTER controls. Then XMMS started blaring out some
Tragically Hip. Then the next song started and it complained that the
output device wasn't working. Fiddled with the settings for a second
then just restarted XMMS and then everything worked fine again. Dunno.
Overall, everything seems very crisp and quick. I have an identical FC1
installation (same hardware) and it seems to respond faster in the
desktop. Konqueror, for example, pops open in a second or two. I'd
thought it was file caching at work, but it's the same behaviour after
multiple exits and reloads. I believe this is the library preload stuff,
but am not sure.
Again, 'scuse the long email :D
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