Yum is selective in FC3

[ravalox]

I can't install mplayer or VLC through YUM now, I could before? It tells me that they aren't available.

[JLF_65]

Did you remember to put livna or freshrpms in your yum repository list? Remember that the default repositories FC starts with has nothing special like that.

[sej7278]

Erm, seeing how FC3 hasn't even been released yet, I don't see how people could have built RPM's for it yet.....

Even when final does come out, it will be a few weeks before you get the packages you could for FC2, which has been out for six months.

[mattisking]

It's not like the core layout has really changed all that much... I've had very few problems with most Core 2 RPM's on Core 3.

You really oughtn't use fc2 rpms. It will make your testing efforts null, becuase it will be difficult to tracj wether the bugs come from the system or your mixing of rpms.

You really oughtn't be using fc3t# for actually use. You will need to upgrade it in three weeks anyway. You should just stick to testing the core system unless you are testing third party packages for the repo packagers.

[mattisking]

True, unless like me you have an extra machine lying around that you are using to experiement with the latest builds of Linux and Mono and have no problem at all wiping the machine out tomorrow and starting fresh.. not to mention it's a great learning tool for Linux, trying to overcome so many problems, dealing with NOT having RPM's generally available so having to go to manually install and understanding the build scripts, etc...

[JLF_65]

Originally Posted by superbnerd

You really oughtn't use fc2 rpms. It will make your testing efforts null, becuase it will be difficult to tracj wether the bugs come from the system or your mixing of rpms.

You really oughtn't be using fc3t# for actually use. You will need to upgrade it in three weeks anyway. You should just stick to testing the core system unless you are testing third party packages for the repo packagers.

The problem is that FC2 doesn't support certain RAID systems. FC3 does. If you want to use a RAID system at all on some systems, you're stuck installing FC3. Any problems I reported were there before any FC2 packages were installed.

One of the strangest is that swap seems to be disabled. The system monitor says that 0% swap is in use all the time, and any time you run enough programs to make SOMETHING go into swap space, it kills programs instead.

Here is a terribly non user friendly way to build a driver disk so you can use fc2 if you like.

About the swap problem: post your /etc/fstab. Did you create a swap partition during install? Please post your pc spec.

[LordMorgul]

It is far better to test under common usage (the things you do through the day) than a rare login on a second machine, you just come up with more bugs when using the system more. It is not a good idea to 'test' on a system you require for work or other critical purpose, but if you routinely store data elsewhere then using a test system for common daily tasks works quite nicely. Just don't update moments before needing it to work to do something.

It is also much better to add a few FC2 extras or alternates packages into the system than go to source code and build it the hard way... if you need those helpful bits to make the system useful (mp3 support qualifies in my book as necessary since my music collection is only half ogg). So, I suggest that you can carefully add in packages to use, and still test and be useful to the community. Just be sure you consider what is going on when tracking a bug and look for signs of your system changes being responsible. Obviously filing a bug in xmms dying randomly while you've installed an old version of the mp3 codecs would be jumping to conclusions, so you remove it and reinstall xmms to clean things up and test again. What I'm saying is, there is alot of software in Fedora extras that is built for FC2 that still works, and doesn't invalidate your whole testing effort, unless you deliberately ignore requirements for rpms.

[salaneking]

The biggest problem other than getting FC3t3 installed on reiserfs is a decient set of mirrors that covers all the 3rd party software out there. Can someone post a good set of conf files?

[JLF_65]

Originally Posted by superbnerd

Here is a terribly non user friendly way to build a driver disk so you can use fc2 if you like.

About the swap problem: post your /etc/fstab. Did you create a swap partition during install? Please post your pc spec.

Thanks for the HowTo. Don't know if I'll be able to use it, but I will learn something from it.

/etc/fstab:
/dev/md0 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/md3 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/md1 /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/md2 /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc2 swap swap defaults 0 0
LABEL=SWAP-sdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0
LABEL=SWAP-sda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /media/idedisk ext3 noauto,user,exec,managed 0 0
/dev/hda /media/cdrw_dvdrw auto noauto,user,exec,managed,ro 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrw_dvdrom auto noauto,user,exec,managed,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,exec,managed 0 0

I have an old drive on the PATA that has FC2 i386 that I now use for 32-bit development via chroot. I have two SATA drives on the mobo SATA (VT8237/VT6420) for the 64-bit system. Both drives are partitioned the same way (sdb = sda):
sda1 512M
sda2 8G
sda3 4G
sda5 1G
sda6 ~65G (all remaining on 80G drive)

So I used Disk Druid to setup the drive as follows:
sda1/sdb1 = 512M RAID1 = /
sda2+sdb2 = 16G RAID 0 = /usr
sda3+sdb3 = 8G RAID 0 = /var
sda5 and sdb5 = swap
sda6+sdb6 = ~130G RAID 0 = /home

This works very well in FC3 t2 or t3 with a few minor problems I have mentioned. I don't know why the swap isn't working unless it has to do with the "Enabling local filesystem quotas" failing as I mentioned in another post on my early findings.

Thanks for any help. I'm still a bit new to Linux. I may have troubles, but I'd never go back to Windows at this point.

PS: almost forgot the PC specs.

Opteron 240 (single... for the moment)
512M DDR333
MSI Master2-FAR (VIA K8T800 mobo)
nVidia GeForce FX5600
NEC 2510A DVDRW
generic PCI Netgear Ethernet (not used yet)
generic PCI Firewire card to access an external Combo drive