FC5T1 VMWare Image
by Simon B
Hi list,
Since some people don't have a spare box to test FC5T1 on, I've put up a
Fedora Core 5 test 1 VMWare image for people to play with. You can load
it in VMWare Player.
It's a snapshot taken immediately after the default install, choosing
all the defaults, but before the machine is restarted, so firstboot
config has not yet run.
You can download using the torrent from http://tinyurl.com/cqw4r
or linked from www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/
The root password is "thoughtpolice".
Be careful of bugs though - they might not be Fedora's fault :)
Have fun!
Simon B
18 years, 5 months
Automount /etc/auto.net /etc/auto.smb
by MJang
Just wondering if there is any guidance / docs on the use of these
scripts, /etc/auto.net and /etc/auto.smb. I understand that I can run
these as executables, e.g.
/etc/auto.smb remotesmbserver
/etc/auto.net remotenfsserver
to find shared directories, but I can't tell how to use the automounter
to mount the output, presumably using /smb and /net.
Thanks,
Mike
18 years, 5 months
Installation report 2 for beta 1
by John Summerfield
Same system as before.
This time I burned a heap of CDs to try a CD install. Fairly uneventful
(I knew
what to do about the disk partitioning by now), and the display is much
better
with "resolution=1280x800"
Actually booting was a problem. The system atorebooted about immediately
unpacking the kernel.
Finding an SMP kernel as the only one was a surprise.
No matter, boot CD1 in rescue mode. Eh? No kernel on CD1? Damn, never mind,
I'll install off the LAN.
Why did that fail? Did that duff signature matter? No? Why's that scriptlet
failing? --noscripts doesn't work? some mumble about recon<something> rang a
bell. How to I disable selinue? The likely commands get errors.
Reboot, selinux=0 and all's well, I can install the kernel and the new
kernel
boots.
I was writing this as the system booted, so I don't know what happened to
firstboot; when I turned back to the laptop it was at the GDM login.
I've not had a chance to create a user account.
Okay, I logged in to create a user account.
Quick question, why's "terminal" not in the "Accessories" list where a
Windows
XP user would expect to find it?
I create /home/userd (meaning /home/users) then used to GUI to create
"summer"
and O iverrode the UID to 1000 and and home to /home/users/summer. There
was no
error reported (recall /home/users didn't exist) and summer was homeless.
Previously, when I've create a user accound on FC/EL systems I've used
the CLI
tools (useradd|adduser and passwd). When UID 1000 is used, as here, the next
UID used it 1001, not 500. I prefer to continue from 1000 (compatible with
other distros, those that run from 1000 might break if a sysadmin forced
500).
Something needs to be done about wireless. SuSE 10.0 and Ubuntu can both
configure my Atheros wireless, Mandriva knw the wiresless there and
wanted to
ser up ndiswrapper for me: I couldn't coz I don't know where in Windows the
driver is, but at least it tried.
Fedora Core 5 beta 1 doesn't even know the thing is there, when I try to
configure "wireless" the only choice I have is "other wireless" and that
leads
me to a selection of drivers including NE1000 and many other (not) wireless
devices.
At the equivalent point in SuSE, Yast recognised the device and asked me to
configure it, installed the driver and set it up. I don't recall exactly
what
Ubuntu did, but the driver was ready installed and it was just a matter of
configuring it, just like any network device.
There's also the question of the infernal modem. Again, SuSE lead me to it,
installed the driver and configured it.
I wish to use the Atheros driver; I understand RH won't ship the HAL, but it
needs to make it easy for users to implement their right to choose to
use it.
Same for the internal modem. Ordinary users cannot be expected to have the
skills or desire to hunt round the Internet for the driver.
I could argue FC5 and EL4 are ready for the desktop, but they certainly
are not
ready for the laptop.
Plugging in a PCMCIA Orinoco 11b wireless card resulted in two! interfaces,
neither the eth1 I expected (and get on FC3). Instead, I have wlan0 and
wifi0.
Further they have the default essid "test" and I cannot set it to "" or
"any."
Nore can I set the WEP key:
# iwconfig wlan0 essid anaglorious key s:secre
Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.
There are also lots of these messages:
search_node dbd094b4 start_node dbd094b4 return_node 00000000
ACPI-0508: *** Error: Method execution failed [\_SB_.BAT1._BST] (Node
dbd098d4), AE_NOT_FOUND
ACPI-0339: *** Error: Looking up [Z004] in namespace, AE_NOT_FOUND
search_node dbd094b4 start_node dbd094b4 return_node 00000000
ACPI-0508: *** Error: Method execution failed [\_SB_.BAT1._BST]
(Node dbd098d4), AE_NOT_FOUND
fwiw Ununtu and SuSE have them too. Google showed some discussion on lkml.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
1aaaaaaa(a)computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa(a)computerdatasafe.com.au
Tourist pics http://portgeographe.environmentaldisasters.cds.merseine.nu/
do not reply off-list
18 years, 5 months
Re: Up2date replacement
by Don Springall
>From: Jesse Keating <jkeating(a)j2solutions.net>
>Reply-To: For testers of Fedora Core development releases
><fedora-test-list(a)redhat.com>
>To: fedora-test-list(a)redhat.com
>Subject: Re: Up2date replacement
>Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 10:24:24 -0800
>
>On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 10:19 -0800, Dan Hollis wrote:
> >
> > It would be nice if there were some repository config manager, which
> > pulled a master "authoritative" list from somewhere and let you select
> > repositories via ncurses/x11/etc. The directory would list the
>repository
> > name, its intended function, its geographic location and link speeds,
> > etc. to make sorting out the whole mess a bit easier.
> >
> > I have thought about writing such a beast and calling it "yuk" to
> > complement "yum" :)
>
>Such a tool, or such information that the tool uses to get the list of
>repos must live outside the scope of Fedora. Fedora tools/content
>cannot link to, point to, or otherwise enable the use of repositories
>that may include illegal or ForbiddenItems content.
>
>--
>Jesse Keating RHCE (http://geek.j2solutions.net)
Anyone can add repo's to yum now in /etc/yum.repos.d. A lot of people do
this to add missing codecs from alternate repositories to play things like
MP3 files. Last I heard Fedora was supporting Yum. They just don't want to
be party to providing links to sites that may have legal entanglements
themselves. They leave that up to the users of yum. How would a tool like
this be any different ?
18 years, 5 months
Installation report 1 for beta 1
by John Summerfield
Acer Aspire 3503WLMI
SiS chipset, shared memory graphics, 1200x800 "Crhystal Brite"
display, 512 Mbytes RAM, 80 GB disk, DVD-dl burner
Atheros wireless
Software modem
No floppy
No serial
As the baseline, SuSE 10 detects all the above and installs drives and
attempts
to configure everything including dialup.
I'm doing a manual install from a local http server, booting from the
boot.iso
supplied.
The first point I wish to make goes to the use of dhcp options. I raised
this
on anaconda-list, but as I wasn't sufficiently persuasive then I will
take it
up again. Anaconda/pump can (and last I looked) did set vendor-options. This
allows a DHCP client to ask for non-standard information from a DHCP server.
DHCP3, a standard part of recent Red Hat/Fedora and many other
distributions,
and generally available for Unix, can be configured to recognise the vendor
options and formulate its reply using that information.
"vendor" in this instance means Red Hat: organisation creating the vendor
option gets to describe (or not) what specific vendor options are
available and
what they mean.
In the case of Anaconda, it could be used to specify the source of a
kickstart
file, or to request information to fill in the information required to
complete
various on-screen forms. In this specific instance, where I am
testing/evaluating a new (beta) release, it would be convenient for me to
specify the source URI for the installation media, maybe
http://fedora.example.lan/beta1/i386/ - and, of course, timezone,
keyboard and
language choices.
Okay, I booted the CD, chose a graphical install, chose language and
keyboard,
told A where to get the stuff, progressed to the partitioning screen. It's
ghastly, see pic: http://redhat.cds.merseine.nu/imgp0474.jpg
I muddled my way through that (by double-clicking the Linux paritions and
making proper choices), and turned my attention to starting this report.
Now, the installation has died and there's a traceback. This brings me to
another gripe. I have a scrollable window of four lines. This
impossiblly small
(and persuaded me to not read the release notes). Someone needs to go to
usability school!
At the end of the traceback is the message, 'AtttributeError:
UrlInstallMethod
has no instance of switchMedia."
Fortunately, as I'm on a LAN where I have an account, I can "save to
remote,"
but the menu should tell me what the requirements on remote are: it could be
mounting NFS, CIFS, maybe using http POST (which makes some sense). I
guessed
ssh/scp and it seems I was close enough. The dialogue should (clearly)
give me
a choice of what to call the file on remote, the suggested name should
include
the host name (for those silly enough to do more than one at once), and then
tell me what name was used so I don't have to search (/tmp) for it.
A broadband user could be installing straight off the Internet. If I
were doing
that, I'd have no means of saving the anaconda dump.
Additionally, it looks like now I've saved to remote I'm now forced to
reboot.
I'd like to poke around a little first.
Log at http://redhat.cds.merseine.nu/FC5_B1_t1-anacdump.txt
Okay, I had a poke around. It seems that A's selected a screen resolution of
800x600 which goes to esplain why it's so hard to use. I've not had a
screen in
over ten years that couldn't do at least 1024x768. Can't something better be
automated/ _I_ _might_ be able to override it from the bootscreen, but not
everyone can do that: my boss installs OS X, but that would probably defeat
him.
Finally, when I allowed the installer to proceed, it said I could safely
reboot
(as if there were something to reboot to!) but didn't eject the CD.
Thoughts on future updates.
I was one of those testing the first release of Ubuntu, before going back to
when it was called "sounder" and the name "ubuntu" had not been cleared for
use.
I liked that program.
They had daily builds, so there was every prospect that problems reported
today were fixed tomorrow or the day after.
There were many "betas" I just saw reference to "sounder 8" and as I
recall there
were warty betas and release candidates after that.
To save download time, access was via rsync. It helped that only one CD
image
was involved, but it would still have worked well with a FC-sided DVD.
The team
didn't handle it as well as it might, at various times the name of the image
changed. For maximum ease of use the images needed to have constant
names and
locations, so "latest-daily-build.iso" "latest-beta.iso" (once there is
a beta)
etc. Also, for easy of tracking bugs, each build needs a unique
identifyer, in
this series, maybe 'FC-4.9.1.1' where the final number increases for each
build, the second last for each beta, release candidate and preview.
Then testers can download whichever milesstone suits, and the greater
sense of
action at the ranch promotes a feeling of excitement and involvement. And,
judging from the Ubuntu results, the outcome can be pretty spectacular.
Postscript
I thought to try a wireless network install. Booting with an Orinico 11b
card
causes a SEGV immediately (in the log) after "Running /sbin/loader" while
inserting it later leaves the installer (despite there being no wire in
place)
insisting on trying to use eth0.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
1aaaaaaa(a)computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa(a)computerdatasafe.com.au
Tourist pics http://portgeographe.environmentaldisasters.cds.merseine.nu/
do not reply off-list
18 years, 5 months
Re: Up2date replacement
by Don Springall
> > Anyone can add repo's to yum now in /etc/yum.repos.d. A lot of people do
> > this to add missing codecs from alternate repositories to play things
>like
> > MP3 files. Last I heard Fedora was supporting Yum. They just don't want
>to
> > be party to providing links to sites that may have legal entanglements
> > themselves. They leave that up to the users of yum. How would a tool
>like
> > this be any different ?
>
>if you package and include that list of repos in a package provided from
>fedora core/extras then it is contributory infringement
>
>-sv
No one said anything about getting Fedora/extras to package a list of
alternate repo's that might contribute to infringement. Just a Gui for
adding repos was suggested. Something like what is available now in extras
such as kyum-0.7.5-1.
18 years, 5 months
RE: Wireless - Intel 2200BG
by Matthew Carter
It appears that with Kernel 2.6.14 I have to use ipw2200 firmware v2.4
to make use of the wirelss, as soon as I got NetworkManager running (I
used to use NetworkManagerInfo &) the wireless was detected and worked
sucessfully!
Matt
18 years, 5 months
4k Stacks
by Don Springall
I have been reading and article (http://lwn.net/Articles/159934/) that is
advocating doing away with 4k stacks in the kernel in the 2.6.16 release. I
currently rely on the kernel Hacking option to use 8k stacks so my stupid
Linksys WPC54g wireless card will work with a Linuxant version of
ndiswrapper. Is Redhat going in this direction as well ?
18 years, 5 months