Known Bugs and Issues

There is a current issue that when installing Fedora Core 6, on some systems it installs the wrong architecture, as it configures the i586 architecture on i686 systems.  This does not affect out the system much in general, but where it is important where you need to install and/or compile third party kernel drivers.  Such example would include the video driver.

To check which kernel package architectures are currently installed, execute the following command:

    rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}\n"|grep kernel|sort

If i586 is configured, the following will demonstrate how to configure using i686.  The program ``yumdownloader'' is part of yum-utils in Fedora Extras, which allows you to manually download kernels.

     su -c "yum install yum-utils"

Then, once you have yumdownloader installed, simply issue the following commands:

    yumdownloader kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.i686

    su -c "rpm -Uvh --replacefiles --replacepkgs kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.i686.rpm"

You should now have the correct kernel installed.  For more information, please visit http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC6Common

Update of Fedora Core Linux for latest Software and Patches

Currently, we will just be using the stardard mirrors for the core and updates. A list of optional mirrors can be found at http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html.

For Australian Access Grids, it is recommended to use the Aarnet Fedora Mirror. You can simply download the fedora-core.repo and fedora-updates.repo files and place them in the /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory, as the Aarnet mirror has already been configured.

1. Log in as a normal user account. To do this, simply type your username in the box and hit the "Enter" key on your keyboard. Then type your password in the box and hit the "Enter" key again.

2. Run terminal. Do this by clicking on the Fedora Symbol "F". Go to "System" and then click on "Terminal". This will bring up a white command prompt. You may want to add a shortcut on your desktop for Terminal. This may be achieved by going to the terminal option in the menu, dragging it onto the desktop and then selecting "Copy here".

3. Switch to "super user" mode. Do this by typing 'su –' at the prompt and hitting the "Enter" key. You will then need to enter the root user’s password and hit "Enter" again. You will know that you are in super user mode because previously at the end of the command line there was a $ whereas now there should be a #.

4. Run yum update. Do this by typing yum update and then hitting "Enter". You may wish to use yumex for your updating which is detailed further on this page. During the installation of the updates, you will be required to hit yes to continue the installation process of updates. "Note" this process may take a few hours, depending on machine and network speed.

5. After "yum update" has finished, you will need to reboot the system for the system updates to take effect. Make sure you are still the root user. To do this type reboot and hit "Enter". This will reboot the system.

Using Local Repositories

For Australian Access Grids, it is recommended to use the Aarnet Fedora Mirror. You can simply dowload the fedora-core.repo.txt, fedora-updates.repo.txt and fedora-extras.repo.txt files, rename them to *.repo files and place them in the /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory, as the Aarnet mirror has already been configured. 

Additional Repositories

As part of your installation of Fedora Core 6, you might wish to include the livna and the freshrpms repositories. These repositories contain additional software and drivers.

For example, the livna repository contains things like:

• Nvidia display drivers

• Mplayer

• VLC

• Various media players and plugins

And freshrpms contains things like

• Various media players and plugins

• Emulators

• Programming languages additions

To install these repositories, you simply run the following commands :

    rpm -ihv http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/i386/livna-release-6-1.noarch.rpm
    rpm -ihv http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/6/i386/RPMS.freshrpms/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

Yum Extender

A piece of software that makes it very simple to update, install and remove software is Yum Extender which is known as yumex. It is basically a graphical user interface for yum.

To install yumex, start up a terminal session and as root issue the following command :

    yum install yumex

  

As you can see from the images below, the program is quite intutive.

 

You can select all packages to update, or simply select the particular packages you wish to up date. Once you have selected the packages, click on the “Add to Queue” button to begin the update process. 

By clicking on install, you can easy search for a particular program/application by typing something into the filter section and hitting the enter button. For this example gkrellm was used (Which, by the way is a good tool to be able to watch your cpu, memory and such usage). By selecting the packages and clicking on the “Add to Queue” button, the selected packages will be pleace in the queue to be processed.

To remove a piece of software on your computer is basically the same process as installing software when using yumex.  Select the package/s you would like to remove and then place the request in the queue.

Once you have slected all the packages you would like to update, install and/or remove, click on the Queue button on the left hand side of Yumex. 

 

By clicking on Process Queue button, you can then process all of the queued items.

 

 

 

 

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