Major Fedora 11-to Fedora 12 Switch, Acer Aspire 6930G Laptop

A made a couple of installations of Fedora 12 on several laptops and had decided to find the time to make this with my working laptop as soon it looked mature enough for the production mode (provided you get install packages from the network).

I also decided not to make a continuous story but write some brief statements in the regard of migrating form from FC11 to FC12.

DISCLAIMER

The below is my notes and impressions only. Do not use on your hardware, I bear no responsibility for your actions.

– Fedora 12 boot partition should become ext4 and be not less than 320Mb

See Fedora 12 release and bugs notes for details.  I did not want to rely on ext3 to ext4 conversion and made a commitment towards attempting a clean install instead of upgrading on-line with the preupgrade utility. There were more reasons to do so of course.

– Fedora 12 x86_64 dvd was not recognized by my laptop’s DVD drive

When trying to boot from the install media, it wrote something like “Operating system is missing”. In the same time, the live KDE version was recognized and booted without problems. Both CDs were out of the same box, the images downloaded and burnt the same day using the same burner.

$ dmesg|grep Opti
ata2.00: ATAPI: Optiarc DVD RW AD-7560S, SX07, max UDMA/100, ATAPI AN
scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            Optiarc  DVD RW AD-7560S  SX07 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

However, I was lucky to have a spare portable usb dvd burner by Philipps which did the whole trick.

Philipps portable usb drive

– The install was smooth, I did not have to use any kernel parameters in addition

Network (+wireless) worked out of the box.

My partitioning during the installation had the following custom setup:

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB:
/dev/sda1            655360   [/boot, double space of the required]
/dev/sda2            81920000 [/]
/dev/sda3           4194304 [swap]
/dev/sda5           225793024 [/home]
Disk /dev/sdb: 320.1 GB:
/dev/sdb1            312568641  [/mnt/ext, second laptop HDD]

I chose network install repositories and custom packages setup.

I made the most minimalistic package choice possible with the highlight on all software development groups and the KDE environment.

Taking into the consideration my ADSL capabilities, the install took around 20-30 minutes to download and set up all of the chosen the packages.

– Post install

Look here, I was using this page as the basis

– Major difference from Fedora 11

KDE is now back. It is beautiful, man. And buggy. But beautiful.

Fedora 12 with KDE

– Tweaks

Installed additionally package kdebase-runtime-flags to see keyboard layout flags.
Set back Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart X server.
Configured KDM instead of GDM to manage user login.
Installed keepasx as main the password manager and basket as a mind trash can.

Keyboard flags and layouts in Fedora 12 KDE

KDE with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart X

– Nvidia driver

Nvidia (GeForce 9600m GS 512Mb)  driver after installing kmod-nvidia:

$ glxinfo | grep direct
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Xlib:  extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual or fbconfig

After:

sudo yum --enablerepo=rp*g install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64

has:

$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes
GL_EXT_Cg_shader, GL_EXT_depth_bounds_test, GL_EXT_direct_state_access,

But before next reboot only!

I downloaded the driver from Nvidia site and installed it manually (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-190.53-pkg2.run).

– Compiz

sudo yum install ccsm emerald-themes compizconfig-backend-kconfig fusion-icon-qt  emerald compiz-fusion  libcompizconfig compiz-bcop compiz compizconfig-python compiz-fusion-extras  compiz-kde compiz-manager

– Skype

Before using my way to setup skype, resolve its i686 dependencies:

sudo yum -y install alsa-lib-1.0.22-2.fc12.i686 libXv-1.0.5-1.fc12.i686 libXScrnSaver-1.2.0-1.fc12.i686 qt-4.5.3-9.fc12.i686 qt-x11-4.5.3-9.fc12.i686 libXp

I could not make skype produce sane click sounds in chat mode, 90% of all messages are silent.

– Migrate VirtualBox vdi images BEFORE migrating to a new system:

VBoxManage clonevdi pwd/[old].vdi pwd/[new].vdi

– Zend Studio 5.5.1 is gone because of lacking php 5.3 support, use Netbeans instead

But in case you still want to use it, append to your .bashrc:

export AWT_TOOLKIT=XToolkit

– USB drives automont issues

sudo yum -y install ntfs-3g ntfs-config

Run ntfs-config, make your choices.

More tutorials on fine-tuning Fedora 12 to come soon.