Fedora 11, for whatever reason, is named Leonidas
I added the rpmfusion repo using instructions that I got online, and installed the gstreamer plugins (good, bad and ugly). Since then, media playing has been spectacular.
Fedora's been great right from the moment I got it completely configured (however, as you'll find in the post below, that's no easy thing for a first-timer sitting behind a proxy). Gnome-aplications look amazingly good! Firefox looks really nice and linuxdcpp never crashes anymore.
Also, in Kubuntu, when I used to press the shutdown button, the system almost always locked up at a black screen. I'd have to press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and then login and execute
sudo shutdown -P now
to get it to shutdown
I've never had that issue in Fedora.
Also skype never worked for me on Kubuntu, but it works just fine on Fedora.
Even the wireless internet support is Fedora is a level higher than that of Kubuntu. In Kubuntu, I could connect to public networks without any problem, but I could never get it to connect to a WPA-secure wireless network, despite supplying the correct key in Network Manager. In Fedora 11 the process was a breeze.
However, it must be remembered that
1) I went through hell installing Fedora
2) Getting yum to work from behind a proxy was also quite difficult.
3) I had some audio problems - amarok raced through some songs and played them in a garbled manner, but I remedied this by removing pulseaudio
yum remove pulseaudio
4) I have to manually add lines to the menu.lst file in Kubuntu when Fedora undergoes kernel upgrades (I never managed to specify a config file for Fedora from Kubuntu's menu.lst, I always got a file not found error). But I've gotten so used to this, that I find it quite an easy process. Plus, I don't know if there are too many people out there who have both Fedora and Kubuntu installed on the same system (for the record, I've got windows xp as well, for occasions when I'm forced to use it!!)
Anyway, I haven't used Kubuntu in a long while now (a whole month), so I guess I'd say that I'm a Fedora convert!! I like Kubuntu a lot for the ease and the support network, but right now, I'm a Fedora fan!!!
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Installing Fedora 11
Fedora 11. Where do I begin? It's been such a fabulous journey!!!! Installing Fedora 11 was no piece of cake. In fact, I nearly decided to try some other distro midway. The thought makes me shudder! The installer was really nice, right until the partitioner. After that, all hell broke loose. I selected ext4 as the root filesystem but upon clicking 'Next' I was confronted by the message that Fedora 11 could not boot from an ext4 partition.
I scratched my head a little, selected ext3 for the root filesystem and clicked 'Next' only to be informed that the root filesystem could only be ext4, or some other message to that effect. Now totally bewildered, I decided to give Google a shot at solving the problem. I found out that scores of people had had the same problem and that what was required was
1) To create a separate ext3 boot partition
2) An ext4 root filesystem that had all the usual stuff excepting /boot
I went back to the installer, did the aforementioned, chose to install Fedora's GRUB Bootloader (I had the Kubuntu GRUB Bootloader until then) and soon had Fedora installed. However, surprise of surprises, I found that Kubuntu had disappeared from the GRUB menu. I popped in the Kubuntu CD and reinstalled Kubuntu's GRUB Bootloader (a process quite familiar to me thanks to Windows) only to find that now Fedora had disappeared from the list.
I then
1) swore never to use/install Fedora again
2) solemnly aimed oaths at the rest of the world in general
Finally, after a few minutes, when my blood pressure was back to normal. I decided to add the fedora entry manually into the menu.lst file that was on Kubuntu.
I rebooted into Fedora and began the slow process of configuring a distro that you've no clue why you're configuring in the first place, because you already have one that works.
At this point I ran into a major hurdle
My institute has it's own repository for ubuntu (ftp.iitm.ac.in) and no proxy is required to access this repo. However, a proxy is required to access the internet. The Ubuntu jocks in my institute get apt running first and then install stuff via synaptic. One of the first things on the install list - cntlm
cntlm is a proxy client that provides proxy authentication settings for applications to connect to the internet through a proxy server. For Ubuntu/Kubuntu users in my institute installing cntlm is as easy as pie
First - set ftp.iitm.ac.in as the updates server in ubuntu
and then
sudo apt-get install cntlm
However, to bring this discussion back to Fedora there was no Fedora repo in my institute. Therefore, I had to download all packages from the Net. Big Problem
The package manager for Fedora is called yum (yellowdog update manager). yum needed cntlm to be installed so that I could get yum to install stuff from the net. I needed yum to install cntlm. Beautiful. I nearly gave up, then and there. Also, Konqueror, the default browser for Fedora (KDE, to be more specific) had no proxy support (It did have a space where proxy settings could be specified, but that never worked). So absolutely no access to the net. I gave it my last shot. I booted into Kubuntu and managed to find an rpm package for cntlm on SoftPedia. I downloaded this, booted into Fedora and installed it using rpm (red-hat package manager)
I edited the configuration file for cntlm and voila, I finally had net access! Konqueror was finally running!!! I wish I could have said the same for yum. No go. yum gave me an "unable to retrieve repository metadata" message.
My institute proxy was hproxy:3128 (an authenticated one)
After configuring cntlm I had made konqueror work with the proxy
http://localhost:5865/
I added the same proxy line to the yum config file but I still got the same error
After several hours of googling, I finally found the cause of the error on a red hat forum. yum's repo files had https:// links which would not work when a proxy was specified in yum's config file (at least that's what was mentioned on the forum over there)
All I had to do was change the https:// links to http:// links and finally, yum worked!!!
Then I finally begin playing around with Fedora. More on that in the next post!
I scratched my head a little, selected ext3 for the root filesystem and clicked 'Next' only to be informed that the root filesystem could only be ext4, or some other message to that effect. Now totally bewildered, I decided to give Google a shot at solving the problem. I found out that scores of people had had the same problem and that what was required was
1) To create a separate ext3 boot partition
2) An ext4 root filesystem that had all the usual stuff excepting /boot
I went back to the installer, did the aforementioned, chose to install Fedora's GRUB Bootloader (I had the Kubuntu GRUB Bootloader until then) and soon had Fedora installed. However, surprise of surprises, I found that Kubuntu had disappeared from the GRUB menu. I popped in the Kubuntu CD and reinstalled Kubuntu's GRUB Bootloader (a process quite familiar to me thanks to Windows) only to find that now Fedora had disappeared from the list.
I then
1) swore never to use/install Fedora again
2) solemnly aimed oaths at the rest of the world in general
Finally, after a few minutes, when my blood pressure was back to normal. I decided to add the fedora entry manually into the menu.lst file that was on Kubuntu.
I rebooted into Fedora and began the slow process of configuring a distro that you've no clue why you're configuring in the first place, because you already have one that works.
At this point I ran into a major hurdle
My institute has it's own repository for ubuntu (ftp.iitm.ac.in) and no proxy is required to access this repo. However, a proxy is required to access the internet. The Ubuntu jocks in my institute get apt running first and then install stuff via synaptic. One of the first things on the install list - cntlm
cntlm is a proxy client that provides proxy authentication settings for applications to connect to the internet through a proxy server. For Ubuntu/Kubuntu users in my institute installing cntlm is as easy as pie
First - set ftp.iitm.ac.in as the updates server in ubuntu
and then
sudo apt-get install cntlm
However, to bring this discussion back to Fedora there was no Fedora repo in my institute. Therefore, I had to download all packages from the Net. Big Problem
The package manager for Fedora is called yum (yellowdog update manager). yum needed cntlm to be installed so that I could get yum to install stuff from the net. I needed yum to install cntlm. Beautiful. I nearly gave up, then and there. Also, Konqueror, the default browser for Fedora (KDE, to be more specific) had no proxy support (It did have a space where proxy settings could be specified, but that never worked). So absolutely no access to the net. I gave it my last shot. I booted into Kubuntu and managed to find an rpm package for cntlm on SoftPedia. I downloaded this, booted into Fedora and installed it using rpm (red-hat package manager)
I edited the configuration file for cntlm and voila, I finally had net access! Konqueror was finally running!!! I wish I could have said the same for yum. No go. yum gave me an "unable to retrieve repository metadata" message.
My institute proxy was hproxy:3128 (an authenticated one)
After configuring cntlm I had made konqueror work with the proxy
http://localhost:5865/
I added the same proxy line to the yum config file but I still got the same error
After several hours of googling, I finally found the cause of the error on a red hat forum. yum's repo files had https:// links which would not work when a proxy was specified in yum's config file (at least that's what was mentioned on the forum over there)
All I had to do was change the https:// links to http:// links and finally, yum worked!!!
Then I finally begin playing around with Fedora. More on that in the next post!
Open Source Ahoy!
First off, I'm quite new to Linux, I've been tinkering around with it only for about a year and a half now. However, the experience has been riveting enough for me to realise that I'm probably never going to be even remotely comfortable with Windows again.
I had tried Linux almost three years back, to begin with, but that experience
was quite a bad one. I had tried to install Suse 9.3, which was a 4-CD pack that had come with my laptop (a Compaq Presario V2000). However, the resolution was way off, and I could only see a quarter of a window at a time. Being a total noob at the time, I panicked and installed Mandriva 6 the next day.
Mandriva 6 was quite nice, but I never managed to figure out how to install packages. There was a package manager, but I never figured out how to get it to work. This may have been due to the fact that, in my college, access to the net is through a proxy server. Well, that was that and I used Windows XP for the next two years.
Then I got bitten by the sality bug. The sality virus, for the uncompromised (lucky you!), is a virus that affects all exe files on the system. I reinstalled windows twice, but the virus returned despite me formatting the entire disk both times. It was only during my third re-installation that I figured out that my driver files (all exe files of course) which I had made a backup of much earlier were corrupted with the virus and that they were the source of the problem reappearing each time. The third time round, I downloaded all the drivers off the net.
However, I was sick and tired of windows after all the trouble that I had taken and I decided to give Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) a try. I didn't like the default look, but I soon realised that everything was customisable and after discovering Gnome-Look.org I fell totally head-over-heels in love with Ubuntu.
A few months after that I switched to Intrepid and shortly after that I moved on to Jaunty. However, I chose to install Kubuntu over Ubuntu. KDE 4.2 totally changed the preconceived notions that I had had about a desktop.
I had quite a few problems with Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) though. Gnome applications looked terrible, most notably, firefox looked terribly unseemly, with black boxes around radio buttons and what not. The problem was somewhat mitigated by an install of the qt, qtcurve, human and human-clearlooks themes, but Gnome apps still looked bad in the main. Another problem was that linuxdcpp(the linux app that's used in place of the windows app dc++), kept crashing all the time. Still, I was quite satisfied with the KDE-Jaunty combo.
Since I had quite a bit of free time on my hands, I decided to give Fedora 11 a spin. More on that in the next post!
I had tried Linux almost three years back, to begin with, but that experience
was quite a bad one. I had tried to install Suse 9.3, which was a 4-CD pack that had come with my laptop (a Compaq Presario V2000). However, the resolution was way off, and I could only see a quarter of a window at a time. Being a total noob at the time, I panicked and installed Mandriva 6 the next day.
Mandriva 6 was quite nice, but I never managed to figure out how to install packages. There was a package manager, but I never figured out how to get it to work. This may have been due to the fact that, in my college, access to the net is through a proxy server. Well, that was that and I used Windows XP for the next two years.
Then I got bitten by the sality bug. The sality virus, for the uncompromised (lucky you!), is a virus that affects all exe files on the system. I reinstalled windows twice, but the virus returned despite me formatting the entire disk both times. It was only during my third re-installation that I figured out that my driver files (all exe files of course) which I had made a backup of much earlier were corrupted with the virus and that they were the source of the problem reappearing each time. The third time round, I downloaded all the drivers off the net.
However, I was sick and tired of windows after all the trouble that I had taken and I decided to give Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) a try. I didn't like the default look, but I soon realised that everything was customisable and after discovering Gnome-Look.org I fell totally head-over-heels in love with Ubuntu.
A few months after that I switched to Intrepid and shortly after that I moved on to Jaunty. However, I chose to install Kubuntu over Ubuntu. KDE 4.2 totally changed the preconceived notions that I had had about a desktop.
I had quite a few problems with Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) though. Gnome applications looked terrible, most notably, firefox looked terribly unseemly, with black boxes around radio buttons and what not. The problem was somewhat mitigated by an install of the qt, qtcurve, human and human-clearlooks themes, but Gnome apps still looked bad in the main. Another problem was that linuxdcpp(the linux app that's used in place of the windows app dc++), kept crashing all the time. Still, I was quite satisfied with the KDE-Jaunty combo.
Since I had quite a bit of free time on my hands, I decided to give Fedora 11 a spin. More on that in the next post!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)