Fedora Core 15 - Install - Continued

I have been experiencing a number of stability issues with FC15.  Mostly to do with it not booting cleanly or firefox crashing frequently.  But also with the most recent kernel updates the machine came up with a garbled screen.  Today I have had a chance to have a closer look at it and work out what is wrong.

Firstly I noticed I am getting a number of errors from the nouveau drivers for the nvidia card I have so I decided to load kmod-nvidia from the rpmfusion repository.

I installed this, now hardware acceleration is functioning correctly and I am seeing the new gnome interface in its full glory.  Proceeded to read some online documentation about this and found firefox is now crashing with increased frequency.

Had a look and /var/log/messages and each time it was crashing it was logging a message :

 dbus-daemon: [system] Activation via systemd failed for unit 'dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service': Unit dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service failed to load: No such file or directory. See system logs and 'systemctl status' for details.

Given that I had previously attempted to disable network manager this was a bit of a puzzle to me.  After a bit of playing about with systemctl I decided to remove Network Manager with yum erase.

It appear that now firefox is much more stable.

To get the shutdown command back in FC15 I installed
gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu

And to make a few more tweaks to the interface I installed
gnome-tweak-tool

Hopefully this will give me a more stable system.

Fedora Core 15 - Install

My FC14 started to act up, and FC15 is out, so I took the plunge and decided to install FC15.

I am a believer in fresh installs of the OS, rather than upgrades :-

1. You can retain the old install (disk) intact if you have problems you can go back to it.
2. You get rid of any rubbish that may have been hanging about, that can have an impact on the reliability of the new install.

Backup your data.

I isolated the FC14 disk by removing the cable - this is to ensure, I get the right disk for the install and I get a boot loader on the disk I am installing to, otherwise I have suddenly become dependent on both disks, and I have not retained my FC14.

I did a vanilla install of FC15 x86_64  - then plugged back in the FC14 disk.

Once rebooted after install logged in

yum update

vi /etc/grub.conf 

removed rhgb and added timeout of 3 (so I get a menu if I have problems with a kernel and I can see what is happening during boot)



Changed the configuration from Network-Manager to network to get networking working at boot - edited /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to achive the settings I desired.

yum install of

• system-config-displaymanager
• system-config-displaymanager-gnome
• gconf-editor
• qcad
• scribus
• system-config-lvm

configures rpmfusion.org, rpm.livna.org

yum install of

• vlc 
• devede 
• inkscape 
• thunderbird 
• thunderbird-lightning 
• pitivi 
• agave
• fuse-encfs

vgchange -ay to activate the FC14 lvm partitions
mount /dev/mapper/<vgfilesystem> /mnt/home
copied the /home contents to new install
copied additional user information from /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/group

edit /etc/selinux/config - change settings for selinux to preferred options

Set up printers - got brother drivers from brother website
Problems with brother driver crashing from qcad was traced to requiring a2ps - once this was installed it all worked.


Over time I will get the settings refined to what I desire - but now I have notes of the process I took I can refer to them when I do the FC16 upgrade.  I suggest you try to keep notes of your build, even if it is just the packages you add as it saves a lot of time trying to figure out "What was that DVD burning software I was using?"  e.t.c.