Installion of F10
Atheros 5007 Wireless
NVidia GeForce 7150M
Connected to a WinXP that "runs" the home network.
Specifically: onto HP Pavillion dv9000 series
Sound like you? Read on.
I was running F9 before the laptop fizzled. The freshly cleaned HD that came back with the repaired machine presented the perfect opportunity to upgrade. When the laptop went off for repairs, I burned a dvd of the f10 intallation in eager anticipation.
Upon receiving the repaired laptop, and determining that, indeed, the HD was wiped, I proceeded to insert the intallation DVD. Although I have done this a few times, it's been a while and I always seem to forget exactly how (probably because I don't know exactly why). In trying to figure out my botches, I came across the usual signs of frustration in the forum postings, so much so that I decided I was going to post a coherent picture of what I did to get stuff working (I was quite confident that I would, even though it was botched initially). But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's the story:
The first install question was: How much Windows do I leave on a Vista dual-boot? I need Vista, because the software I write runs on Windows and I need to (a) make sure it works and (b) use the laptop to show demos. I also used it for gnucash and Wink--as I couldn't upgrade to the gnucash easily in f9 a few weeks ago. (It's all ok now, I believe, so I'll be running it under f10).
Although I want as little of the Win partition as possible, I quickly remembered that
It Doesn't Matter. I can easily access the Vista partition from the Fedora side, so I use all the room I need 'over there' for development, doc, or whatever. The converse, however, is not true: I can't (that I know) access the Fedora dirs from Vista. So, I booted into Vista and made the partition as small as possible using Vista's own resize tool: Computer->right-click->manage->Storage->Disk-Management->Right-click (on Disk)-> Shrink Volume.
[Note: I kept the Vista backup partition (Why? I dunno. I already made the backup dvds when I got the box...)]
After that, I stuck the install dvd into the drive and rebooted. In Anaconda (installer), I chose something like (can't quite remember) Install on Free Space and just went with the defaults (I checked for recommendations from fedoraproject.org docs, and defaults exceeded them so, what the heck. I know I'm supposed to set up a separate partition for users, but I'll learn that detail next time...).
Next thing I know (it really didn't take all that long), I was intalled and ready to go. Now, if you are reading this then you know I had (1) crappy screen output, and (2) no wifi. [I did have a wired ethernet connection which I proceeded to break, but we'll get to that in a minute.]
Now, I made a big mistake with the next thing I did. Thinking I was better than I am at this, I entered
because I first thought that I would get the latest of everything. Uh uh.
I broke the ethernet connection, and now had NOTHING. I spent some time trying to install drivers by downloading to an xp box on a usb stick (to do that, btw: (1) put stick into usb slot; (2) go to directory /dev/disk/by-label; (3) Note name; (4) go to /media/ ;(4) perform
Code:
mount <name you noted>
and you'll be able to cd into it, etc. Again, we're doing this because we don't have a gui because we don't have a video driver.
And we didn't get one this way. Marko helped me get an ethernet connection (
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=214824) where I typed (after some trial and error)
Code:
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.101 netmask 255.255.255.0
route add default gw 192.168.1.1
After much fooling around, I realized that it was becoming an ego match that I didn't have time for. So, I decided to begin again, get the gui up, and then everything would be ok. Probably.
Take 2.
Reinstalled over the existing intallation. Went with the defaults as before. But did NOT perform yum update. Not yet. Not until I have a gui. I had seen that the update would install a new kernel, so my strategy would be to get one workable, even if not very good, that I could roll back to.
After the install, I noted that my kernel was 2.6.27.19-170.stuff I wouldn't need to know (but I wrote it down anyway).
I am remaining as root until everything after gui and wireless are installed. Probably shouldn't but I did anyway.
Following the FedoraFaq
http://www.fedorafaq.org/ I performed
Code:
rpm -Uvh http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/rpm.livna.org/livna-release-10.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
I think that allows yum to access the repositories listed in the URL, but I'm not exactly sure what it does. But I did it. And then I tried to
yum.
yum complained because it couldn't find the repo mirrors. I went to the directory /etc/yum.repos.d/ and for every file I put a "#" sign before "mirrorlist" and added a line that pointed the "baseurl" directly to a url. For example, fedora.repo looks like this (I didn't touch the "debug" & whatnot paragraphs that followed this one in the file):
Code:
[fedora]
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch
failovermethod=priority
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os/
baseurl=http://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Everything/x86_64/os
#mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch
See how I replaced the "$releasever" variable with "10" in baseurl? I did this for every variable.
Thus, fedora-updates.repo
Code:
baseurl=http://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/linux/updates/10/x86_64
rpmfusion-free:
Code:
baseurl=http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/releases/10/Everything/x86_64/os/
rpmfusion-nonfree (I suspected I needed this most for nVidia, as it was non-free):
Code:
baseurl=http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/releases/10/Everything/x86_64/os/
I don't recall doing anything with livna.
Then I
yum worked. I tried to use
Code:
yum install akmod-nvidia
but startx failed. As it did with akmod-nvidia.x86_64 and akmod-nvidia-newest. Remember, I was running an old kernel, so I wasn't entirely surprised. I didn't waste much time trying to get lucky before I performed
Code:
yum install kmod-nvidia-beta-2.6.27.19-170*.x86_64
Bingo. startx worked and I was rockin'. The screen didn't look as pretty as I expected, but I figured I'd deal with that later (incidentally, to re-start x press ctrl-alt-backspace). Next
and things were sweet.
Now, for wireless. From yumex, I tried searching akmod-madwifi. I tried to install, but I had a missing dependency (kmodtool). (by the way, madwifi.org is now madwifi-project.org, if you should have to chase this stuff around). I tried a few other things (my notes are hazy here, sorry, 'cuz I kinda knew what I needed to do with this old kernel), but I did get an error I hadn't seen and didn't show up very much in a Yahoo search: exception.KeyError. I can kind of guess at that, but I didn't take too much time. I installed (from yum) the kmod-madwifi for my kernel, and was off and running.
I created a user account.
I updated everything from
yumex
Everything worked without trouble.
Time for the printer. I use an Epson stylus photo R280, and to get the drivers I installed (from
yumex)Gutenprint-Cups drivers.
Then, from the top menu System->Administration->Printing pulls up a window. Since I'm running everything from an XP box, I select New Printer -> Windows Printer via Samba
Now, for some reason connecting to Windows isn't easy when you type the name of the server ("KEYMASTER," in my case) so I alway use the IP address. I also don't remember what the printer I want is called, so I need to browse. To do that I type
Code:
[smb://]192.168.1.100/
and click "browse" (that trailing "/" is very important). From here I follow the "wizard" to select the printer and the appropriate driver, and lo and behold, it all "just works.
A similar thing is true when you want to connect to the Windows share folders, by the way. Go to places -> connect-to-server (not network) and under "service type" select "Windows share."
For "server" type in 192.168.1.100 then specify the name of the "share" folder you want. I don't use quotes even though there is a space in the name of the folder.
OK, that's my story. I still have a few issues: (1) VERY slow boot times, and it's all mostly invisible from the screen. It's like it stops or something unless I tap on the spacebar or touchpad; (2) when it shuts down the display looks like something out of the Matrix, which is kinda cool, but not cool enough to have been done deliberately.
Now, I've got to get back to work. I hope this helps!
Linear Mode
