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!