Peregrine

Last night, while flying from Salt Lake (SLC) to Kansas City (MCI), I used a Fedora 8 x86_64 DVD I had burned earlier in the day to reinstall my notebook. Probably not the smartest way (that is, on an airplane without an Internet connection available) to do such an installation.

First, I tried to do an “Upgrade Install”, which didn’t surprise me by not working. Upgrading from 32-bit F7 to 64-bit F8 isn’t something that anaconda knows how to do, and I didn’t expect it would. Still, I tried it and know we know for sure. So, I did a fresh installation. I removed the root Logical Volume (I’ve been using LVM for my notebooks and workstations since long before Fedora started to default to it) and created new LVs for / and /usr/ LVs. Previously, under F7, /usr/ was on the root LV.

The install phase itself went just fine. 1478 packages were installed, including 389 32-bit (i.e. i386, i486, i586 and/or i686 RPMs). I ran a simple command to find and then remove all of them:

# rpm -qa --qf "%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n" | grep "\.i[3456]86$" | xargs rpm -e

If I need any 32-bit stuff later, I’ll just reinstall as few such packages as are required.

My next issue was the same video problem as I had when I installed Fedora 7. The graphical installer couldn’t run and the resulting system had no working X server configuration. This was very easy to fix:

# wget http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
# rpm -qp --qf "%{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n" livna-release-8.rpm
livna-release-8-1.noarch
# mv livna-release-8.rpm livna-release-8-1.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh livna-release-8-1.noarch.rpm

(NOTE: I renamed the package file back to what it should have been in the first place. Though rare, if they update it, I’d like to notice the difference and be sure I’m using the latest one on some other machine in the future.)

After setting up the Livna repository for Fedora 8, I was able to install and activate the ATI driver:

# yum install kmod-fglrx x11-xorg-drv-fglrx
. . . output omitted . . .
# fglrx-config-display enable

Notice that the command name changed from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8; it used to be ati-fglrx-config-display.

The next thing I need to fix is to re-associate my Logitech Bluetooth mouse with the notebook. I had a script in /root/bin/ that would have taken care of that very easily. Unfortunately, I forgot about that until after I had installed Fedora 8, thus obliterating that file. Oh, well. This time, I’ll also document it elsewhere (perhaps here?) once I get it figured out again. I hope that will be tonight.

One last thing; with Fedora 7, I did my very best to stick with an all GNOME system. It was very irritating using applications that just couldn’t handle lots of basic things that I take for granted using other apps (mostly KDE). For Fedora 8, I’m going back to KDE, where things work much better.