Questions about FC1

[Confused]

I seem to be behind, but I want to catch up. I have recently installed FC1 on my system and have many problems to sort out before I'd feel comfortable moving to FC2. My system has the following configuration:

Dual AMD MP-1800+ CPUs
Tyan S2460 motherboard
1Gb of memory
3 IBM Ultrastor 18Gb SCSI drives
1 60Gb Hitachi Deskstar IDE disk drive
Sony DVD drive
Yamaha CD recorder drive
Intel EtherExpress Pro+
ASUS V7100 GEForce2 MX graphics card
US Robotics Sportster Modem
Soundblaster PCI sound board

The questions about FC1 that I'd like some pointers to information on are the following:
[list=1]
My system is apparently too big to create a boot disk according to the installation procedure. Is there a method of creating a boot disk for my system in case I have a problem with the master boot block?
FC1 installs RHN which, with it's red exclamation point, always tells me there is something for upgrade -- should I trust it? (Tried it once and my system was not bootable after it.)
During shutdown, FC1 always seems to fail shutting down "system message bus" and "console mouse services" -- should I be worried and what should I look for?
I've heard about "YUM" and assume it is some sort of replacement for RHN updating the system as new packages are released. Is that correct? Should I use it? How do I configure it?
What is the process for upgrading FC1 to FC2? Do you just use YUM to do it? Or do you download the ISO(s), cut CDs, and boot from it to do the upgrade? Where is the best FAQ on this?
I'd like to be able to boot my system under Windows 98 as well (for the wife). Is there a way of installing Windows 98 after installing FC1 and updating GRUB/MBR to handle things properly? Is there an FAQ on this?
[/list=1]

Lots of questions, I know, but I hope some of you have pointers to the answers.

[Jman]

[list=1]
The boot image will not fit on a floppy. Hope you can boot from CD or have a recent BIOS that can boot from USB.
RHN does check for updates, like it did before. The installation must have gotten corrupted or something. I trust it.
Console mouse services enables the mouse in text mode. The system message bus is described here (http://freedesktop.org/software/dbus) . Both will be killed eventually in shutdown if they do not exit gracefully.
RHN now uses yum to update software. Try using the /etc/yum.conf file here (http://fedorafaq.org/samples/yum.conf)
Boot the installer and run an upgrade. Too many things have changed. If you see something about a seemingly corrupt partition that can be ignored cancel immediately. You got the partition bug if that happens.
Install Windows first. Windows doesn't play well with Linux.

[/list=1]

[Confused]

Originally posted by Jman
The boot image will not fit on a floppy. Hope you can boot from CD or have a recent BIOS that can boot from USB.


Why does install offer to create the boot floppy then? (rhetorical question)


RHN does check for updates, like it did before. The installation must have gotten corrupted or something. I trust it.


Where does it check for updates from? Are they updates for FC1 or RH9? If RHN/up2date works properly, what is all the talk about YUM?


Console mouse services enables the mouse in text mode. The system message bus is described here (http://freedesktop.org/software/dbus) . Both will be killed eventually in shutdown if they do not exit gracefully.


True -- I could see they were killed. Is this a known problem? Has a bug been filed for it?


RHN now uses yum to update software. Try using the /etc/yum.conf file here (http://fedorafaq.org/samples/yum.conf)


Ahh. When did the change occur? Why is it that when I click on the red exclamation point, it asks if I want to launch up2date? How do I verify that it is using yum?


Boot the installer and run an upgrade. Too many things have changed. If you see something about a seemingly corrupt partition that can be ignored cancel immediately. You got the partition bug if that happens.


I assume you mean boot the installer from a CD that I burn the ISO to, correct? Can the ISO for FC2 be put on hard disk and booted from there while in FC1?


Install Windows first. Windows doesn't play well with Linux.


I had heard that. Since I've already installed FC1 on this system, I had hoped that someone had addressed the problem of installing (at least) Windows 98 after the installation of Linux. Also, there are times when Windows gets messed up such that reinstalling seems the best option, but that would cause problems for booting to Linux.

Oh, and thanks for the help.

[Nefarious]

If you edit /etc/yum.conf you can set it up to be updated from where you want. Also it updates for FC1(if installed) and FC2.

I'm not entirely sure how, but you're supposed to be able to boot up so you can install the images from the HD or somewhere on the net.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~colohan/docs/fedora_upgrade.html

That's a link to the How-to.

[Wabbit]

Originally posted by Confused
My system is apparently too big to create a boot disk according to the installation procedure. Is there a method of creating a boot disk for my system in case I have a problem with the master boot block?


You can transfer the MBR to a diskette and boot off it.

Log in to a shell as the root user. Assuming hda is the HDD with the grub or lilo boot manager on it, you'd enter the command:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

Tony.

[Confused]

Originally posted by Wabbit

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1


Hmmm. And then, if needed, just insert the floppy to boot my machine? Or is there more to it? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, this will still look for the Linux partition on the harddrive after reading the boot block from the floppy (I can live with that -- I'm just checking my understanding).