Now that I’ve been using Fedora 8 for a few days, I can comment a little more on it. I’ve been regularly running “yum update” and I can see that the packages are being very actively updated. The issue of the kernel-header was resolved as I predicted as f8 caught up with the kernel in f7.

Unlike my experience with f7, once I got the system up I did not have to do much reconfiguring. The services are all working as they should and some of the apps feels like they’re running a little more robust then f7. The small visual changes to the Gnome desktop is a noticeable improvement to my eyes, but this is all subjective.

F8 feels more “modern” then its predecessors. It might not be as hip as Ubuntu, but for all practical purposes it’s on-par. I still like Fedora and while the upgrade path is not as smooth as I would’ve liked it, for those looking to perform a clean Linux install I wouldn’t hesitate to suggest that they look at Fedora.

Here are my note from upgrading Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 on a x86_64 system. The existing system is not very customized, but does pull some things from the Livna repo. It runs a nvidia video card and one of the video output is connected to a LCD TV to be used as a secondary monitor.

Following the recommendation of some of the posts online, I first did a yum update on fc7 to make sure I got the latest packages. In hindsight, I’m not sure if this was the best thing to do since it might have pulled a kernel version that is more current then the Fedora 8 version.

Right off the bat, I encountered the Upgrade Hang bug. The fix is listed in the link. When booting from the DVD, at the first menu when it asks you whether you want graphic or text installer, hit “TAB” and append the line to what is shown.

Once it finishes installing, it then reboots.

The video setting changed to using the open source nvidia driver which looks crappy on my monitor, but I figure I can always changes after I get the latest update from Livna.

Just like last time, I did a “yum upgrade” and just like last time it failed due to dependency issues from Livna packages. The upgrade is suppose to recognize third party repos, but never fully does. I had to remove them. vlc and xine to get past the dependency problem.

I noticed that there are a lot of fc7 packages still hanging around. The update didn’t have that many new packages (suspicious) and it kept trying to grab the fc7 kernel. I had to reboot the machine before yum started to grab updated Fedora 8 packages. No where did it ever ask me to reboot, so it took a while before I was able to get this to work.

Still, after the update, Livna’s Nvidia package still didn’t work. Gnome’s Display applet didn’t show the right monitor or video card and it was missing the native resolution. I was able to select my monitor manually, but it still didn’t give me the right resolution option. I finally removed kmod-nvidia so I can re-install it.

Fedora simply wouldn’t let me sett the correct resolution even after I rebooted and re-installed kmod-nvidia. This time I first to the Display applet and changed to using the vendor supplied Nvidia driver. Then I used Nividia’s (nvidia-settings, and make sure you run it as root or it’ll just tell you that you don’t have permission) app to change the display settings. Another reboot showed me an login screen that was working, but whenver I log in the resolution messes up. Finally, I just deleted all my Gnome settings and finally got things working! (I should’ve backed it up since my terminal fonts don’t look quite as good now. It’s possible I made a change but forgotten about it in the pre-F8 days).

Fedora 8 upgrade leaves a lot of fc7 packages hanging around. Most of them are orphaned packages since they either got moved to another package or no longer maintained in f8. The one remaining is kernel-headers which is fc7 but most of the dependency issues were caused by f8 packages when I tried to remove it or upgrade it. The version of the kernel header is newer then the f8 kernel that is installed… Maybe when the kernel gets above the f7 version on f8 then I’ll be able to upgrade it.

Like F7, I faced enough trouble that I wished I didn’t try to do an upgrade so soon especially since Fedora 7 was working fine for me. The upgrade process is still not as mature and it probably would’ve been easier if I just installed a fresh new copy instead of trying to upgrade.

While Fedora 7 has stabilized since its release, I continue to find minor problems which I don’t remember encountering in the past. The latest is when I tried to use the UI tool to configure Samba. I wanted to add another share drive, but it does not seem to work. When you click on the “Add Share” button, the dialog pops up but the “Save” button doesn’t do anything. The dialog stays open unless you cancel and so nothing gets saved.

On a recent trip to Hawaii, I got introduced to Apple’s iPhoto software on OSX. I thought it was a decent piece of software, but a bit basic for me and there were a couple of minor bugs. My trip did show me that I probably should use something to help me manage my digital photos as my collection has gone past hundreds to thousand(s), so once I got back I tried out Picasa. Picasa is a photo management software that was bought by Google and then released free. I heard good things about it including that it was a better iPhoto then iPhoto. It runs on Windows with a Linux version in beta.

My experience so far with Picasa has been good. It is as simple as iPhoto and has the same basic functionalities. When it is first installed, it asks you if you want it to search your computerfor all graphics files (pictures and movies) or limit the search to the “My Documents” folder. I wish it allowed me to enter a different location since I don’t keep my photos there For some reason, PNG files aren’t enabled by default, so you have to enable that yourself.

Overall, a neat program with a great price. If you take a lot of digital photos and need a quick, fast and easy program to management those photos then definitely give it a look.

One of the problems I had with Fedora 7 was that it couldn’t automatically detect my external USB drive on start. I had to either manually run ‘modprobe usb-storage’ (or turn the drive off-and-on) and then manually mount the drive after it finish booting. This weekend I grabbed the latest kernel package and the bug has been fixed! I can now put the mount entry back into /etc/fstab and have my drive loaded and mounted automatically.

It took a little bit longer then I expected for Fedora to fix this bug, but now that it’s ready I’m happy.

Doing an upgrade from from FC6 to F7 doesn’t seem to remove or upgrade all the FC6 packages as I continue to run into conflicts with the fc7 package not being able to be updated because the fc6 package and an i386 package still remain on the system. The latest conflict was the ltrace package which was solved by first removing the existing package with yum and then re-running yum update.

Now that I’ve had a day to soak in F7 here are my initial impressions of the new distribution.

While F7 should be more of significant upgrade, I’m not sure if the average user would feel that way especially if they just upgraded from FC6. At least, I felt a bigger leap was made between FC5 and FC6. One problem with Fedora’s upgrade process is that all it really does is to upgrade your existing packages to newer versions. If you were running Firefox or Thunderbird, you get version 2.x instead of 1.x. Fedora’s upgrade process never asks if you like to try the new things they’ve added such as Xen virtualization which is a pretty major portion of the new version. The same thing happened in FC6 where the much heralded Compiz desktop effect didn’t get installed if you just do an upgrade from FC5 so the user would have to know to find the package and install it themselves.

Obviously, my very first impression of F7 wasn’t that good because it didn’t boot up! It wasn’t too difficult to fix it, but still annoying especially because my FC6 instance was working fine and I didn’t upgrade to fix a bug.

Beagle might be a good desktop search system and I do appreciate desktop search tools that Google and Yahoo provides, but I don’t like Beagle or more specifically how it tries to do stuff without you knowing. First, it runs at the most inconvenient times and slows down the system. It doesn’t make it easy for you to turn off because even after “turning it off” it still have scripts that runs without telling you. I had removed Beagle in FC6 and it appeared again in F7.

For those with a stable FC6 system and isn’t dying to try the virtualization elements of F7, I’d suggest waiting a bit for all the bugs to be worked out. This is the first time I’ve recommended that for a Fedora release but it is only the second time where the kernel it comes with actually has a bug that effected me.

Today, I optimistically decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 7. Given how smooth going from FC5 to FC6 was, I thought I could do it quickly in the morning before everyone was up. When will I learn…? ^^;

The install went pretty well initially. I popped in the install DVD, did a media check on it and let it work its upgrade magic. Everything looked okay when it said it was done and ready for a reboot so I let it. That’s when I hit the first problem. For some reason, it did not update the GRUB loader so that it still defaulted to the FC6 kernel which no longer existed because it was upgraded to F7. Getting around it was easy because GRUB comes up again and ask you to pick another selection so I just picked the F7 kernel.

The next problem was that almost immediately as it start loading, it complained about a corrupted drive. Oh, oh… Fortunately, I quickly realize that it was talking about the external USB drive not being available. For some reason, F7 is unable to load USB devices at startup so my fstab entry that mounted the /dev/sdb* device failed since /dev/sdb* doesn’t exist! This seems to be a pretty serious bug in F7.

Boot with the DVD again, I went into repair mode and commented out the entry in the /etc/fstab and restarted. It continued with the load and failed when it tried to start X. I had it retry the XConfig for my nvidia card and had it use the open source nv drivers which brought up X. I tried to switch to the nvidia vendor driver and it also failed resulting in me going back to the nv driver until after I did an ‘yum update’ to pull the latest changes.

‘yum update’ also had some issues. There was a FC6 package (kdebinding) that were more recent then the F7 ones and it confused yum so I had to first remove the FC6 package. There were also some i386 package installed along with the x86_64 ones that had to be removed in order to get past the dependency checks.

Once I got all the latest updates, I was able to reboot into Fedora (still no USB support at start-up) everything seemed spiffy except that for some reason the nmb service was not enabled to start up at boot which resulted in my windows machine not being able to find my shared drive. This was annoying but once I figured it out was easy to fix.

It wasn’t a painless upgrade and I’ll have to admit that I’m a bit disappointed after my good experience with FC6. The USB drive issue is big although for now I work around it by manually powering off-and-on the drive after Fedora boots and then manually mounting it to where I want it to be. [Update] Instead of reconnecting the external drive or powering it off-and-on, I ran ‘modprobe usb-storage’ which will get Fedora to recognize the device so that I can mount it where I want. For some reason, Fedora on start-up does the same thing but gets a “module not found”.

There are some other bugs such as the firewall settings not taking into effect even after you “apply” and “ok” the changes. Hopefully these things will get resolved soon.

Today I noticed my hard drive spinning a lot and so I did a “top” to see what was running. A process called beagle-build-in was the highest resource consuming task and a “ps auxfw” showed that it was started by a daily cron job called beagle-crawl-system. Beagle is a Mono-based desktop search engine so I guess what this is doing is to index files on the system, but the thing is that I had not enabled Beagle on my service so I’m not sure why Fedora kept this daily cron job…

This weekend, I decided to upgrade to Fedora Core 6 since M sent it to me on DVD. This would be the first time I’ve “upgraded” to a new version rather then start with a clean install and I was curious as to how clean it would be. As we all know, Windows can be a nightmare to upgrade and it’s often easier to just do a clean install and re-install all the data and application.

My system was a Shuttle SN95GV3 with a Athlon 3500+ (64bit) CPU with Fedora Core 5. I haven’t customized it very much and beyond my original spec that I detailed previously with the exception that I added another 1Gig of memory for a total of 2 Gigs. I’ve installed most software through yum and kept up with the latest packages.

Before I started, I ran yum update just to make sure I got the latest packages on FC5 in case the upgrade had some dependencies (don’t think this actually mattered). I popped in the FC6 DVD and rebooted. I selected “upgrade” from the menu (as opposed to clean install) and from there it was pretty automatic. I had to verify a couple of settings in the menu (language, keyboard, etc.) by clicking “Next” and then it started the upgrade.
It took about 1.5 hours before everything was installed and ready for a reboot. The system came up fine until it tried to load up X which it failed because of nvidia video driver (I was using Nvidia’s from livna rather then the stock nv driver). I didn’t worry too much about this and just ran yum update since I figured it didn’t have the latest version for the kernel that fc6 uses. Yum identified nearly 700megs of files that needed to be downloaded and updated so I said ok and let it run. I ran into one problem with the yum update because of a dependency problem with OpenOffice. This was resolved by me telling it to not update OpenOffice. Everything else got updated and following a reboot, I was back into X where I uninstalled the existing Open Office and then had it install the latest version.

My previous settings were all preserved and everything seemed to be working and then I noticed something… In the GUI boot up message, I noticed the following error message:

/lib/modules//kernel/arch/x86_64/kernel/cpufreq/acpi-cpufreq.ko

FATAL: Error inserting …acpi_cpu_freq.ko …. No such device

Now, this is wierd… I never seen this in FC5 and FC6 still worked even though it had this error. After some research, I discovered that the error came from the cpuspeed daemon which I don’t remember using before so I suspect it was activated through the FC6 upgrade. This daemon is what will switch the speed of the CPU depending on load to save energy and battery life. I decided to turn this service off even though it should be working since the Athlon has the Cool ‘n’ Quiet feature.

Two things bothered me, though, and I spent quite a bit of time researching even though they weren’t critical to the workings of the server. First, the error message I saw only was in the GUI boot message display. Nothing was written to the log and somehow the boot.log file in FC isn’t updated. I’m not sure why that is, but seems to happen in Fedora.

Second, why was cpufreq failing even if I didn’t want to use it? In the logs that was written to, I noticed this:

powernow-k8: BIOS error - no PSB or ACPI _PSS objects

Research on the web seems to point that the kernel was having problems with Cool ‘n’ Quiet. Since this fails, it’s no wonder cpuspeed failed later. I couldn’t find any solution other then to try to upgrade the BIOS. This caused me two dilemmas. First, I never put in a bootable floppy drive in the Shuttle. Second, Shuttle makes it so hard to 1) find the bios version and 2) enable/disable Cool ‘n’ Quiet. For (2), people said Shuttle makes it always available if the OS supports it so there is no BIOS setting (stupid). For (1), I realize that Shuttle always show their XPC logo rather then the useful bootup messages (i.e. the BIOS version) but the way around it is to hit or unplug your keyboard so it’ll stop the boot on error and display the boot messages (this work ’cause the default behaviour for the Shuttle is to stop on all errors).

I found out that my BIOS is a bit old but without a boot floppy drive I’m not sure how to upgrade the bios (might go buy a USB floppy). Whether this will fix the kernel error, I’m not certain but it’s worth a shot someday.

Overall, I feel the install went extremely well and the upgrade was for the most part very smooth. It made me aware of a few problems that wasn’t related to the upgrade so the bulk of my time wasn’t trying to upgrade but to figure out some long standing problems.

Update: Instead of buying a USB floppy drive, I made a bootable CDROM with the latest BIOS update from Shuttle, but even after flashing the BIOS with the most recent version, I still see the same error message so it didn’t seem to help.