Robert L Cochran on 08/14/2009 03:47 PM wrote:

How do I actually install to the hard drive from rawhide? I don't think I tried that before.

The fastest way would be to grab an installer from one of the test days going on.

An alternative is to install Fedora 11 and then disable fedora/updates and enable rawhide and perform an update.

I agree with Michael. Grab F-12-Alpha (http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-prerelease) or a recent nightly live image (http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/)

Which subdirectory under /pub/alt/nightly-composes/ should I focus on? The 'desktop'?

Thanks

Bob

On 09/03/2009 07:24 AM, James Laska wrote:

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 03:06 -0400, Robert L Cochran wrote:

...

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I agree with Michael. Grab F-12-Alpha (http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-prerelease) or a recent nightly live image (http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/)

Which subdirectory under /pub/alt/nightly-composes/ should I focus on? The 'desktop'?

Each of those sub-directories represents different Fedora 'spins'. Both 'desktop' (aka 'gnome') and 'kde' are the 2 official spins. The rest are other custom spins. The 'desktop' directory is probably what you're most familiar with. Further reading available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CustomSpins.

Thanks, James

I'm pleased to say that I downloaded a nightly compose (from September 4) and installed it to one of my spare hard drives.

At first, I noticed the "livecd-iso-to-disk" script and just had to try that and see if I could avoid burning a CD. It did seem to prepare a USB flash drive for me based off the nightly compose iso, but when I attempted to boot to the USB drive grub failed with an "Error 17" after "Grub Stage 1.5".

Then I burned the compose CD, sacrificing my last CD to do so, and it booted and put me in /home/liveuser with the small problem that Gnome couldn't create a directory named /home/liveuser/Desktop. That's because there was a file of that name already there. I deleted it and did a mkdir Desktop and that made Gnome happy.

At that point, I installed the live image to my hard drive. All went well. I was even able to boot into the freshly installed system and execute firstboot without a problem; this is always promising.

For 'yum update' to work, you have to uncomment the 'baseurl' lines in /etc/yum.repos.d for the rawhide repo...I think, since I'm going by memory!

After updating what the live image had installed and adjusting grub.conf to my liking, I rebooted to work with the updated kernel and then I spent a lot of time doing some serious package additions. The largest one was installing the "Electronics Lab" group.

There seems to be many Yum package groups for what appears to be language support. Some groups, like "Web Development", come back with an error. Some software titles that really ought to have Software Groups don't seem to, such as OpenOffice. I had to install openoffice.org packages individually.

What works: OpenOffice seems to, at first blush. It at least started and presented me with a blank document. I can log in. That's something! Firefox works. Yum works.

What's broken: the 'System --> Administration --> Firewall' application screen shows up, but is completely blank, so I can't configure the firewall with that. I suspect SELinux denials are at work here, preventing the application and also iptables from working. And I think that is affecting scp: I can't connect to a remote host with scp and then scp files to my Alpha 12 system because scp port 22 is turned off. In fact the scp utility doesn't work even if I shut down iptables. (This may show I'm really a network novice.) This meant I could not scp over some very important user files such as my .thunderbird directory and numerous documents and photos.

The ufraw-gimp application in gimp doesn't seem to work, even though I installed dcraw and ufraw. This means I can't yet edit raw images (*.cr2 files) in Gimp, but I can in Fedora 11.

The worst problem for me (it forced me to take out the hard drive that 12 Alpha is installed on and replace it with the one for Fedora 11) is that for some reason, Thunderbird on 12 Alpha won't recognize my email files in the .thunderbird directory that I had tarred up in Fedora 11 and then transferred to the 12 system. That is, I tarred up everything in my Fedora 11 .thunderbird directory and untarred it in my new home directory with the Fedora 12 box. I've done this successfully so many times while traveling, on other Fedora releases, that I'm surprised it doesn't 'just work'. Every time I start Thunderbird, it doesn't seem to notice there are mail folders in the .thunderbird directory and insists on launching an "email setup" wizard. I do have more than 1 Gb of email data...maybe this is affecting the Fedora 12 version of Thunderbird.

When I login to my user account I get many SELinux avc denial messages for abrt and iptables. I think I recall libvirt is getting some AVC nastygrams too. I notice that the AVC alert program looks very nice and has a capability for letting one file bug reports. I intend making use of the feature.

My next step (after answering some other emails) is to put the 12 Alpha hard drive back into my laptop and try it out on my Dell 24" 2407WFP LCD monitor. And also to start filing bug reports for applications that don't work. Also, I want to play with a kind of new project: migrating my Fedora 11 mediawiki database and mediawiki configuration to the Fedora 12 system.

I'm very impressed by the availability of the nightly composes. These composes will have the very latest Fedora packages in them -- is this correct? And this can minimize the number of packages that a post-install 'yum update' must take care of?

Thanks

Bob Cochran