Singh Spectrum

About two weeks back I set out to make my laptop a dual boot system. I already had Windows XP SP2. I decided to install Fedora 9 on another partition of the system. Below I state the steps I followed right from downloading Fedora to configuring and acquiring basic software. So lets get right down to it.

Step 1: Downloading Fedora 9 Image:

Following link has the Fedora 9 images which are downloadable through a download manager or a bittorrent client.

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

Step 2: Creating a Fedora Bootable DVD:

This is a simple task if you have either CloneDVD or Nero 7 softwares. These softwares allow you to create a DVD from an ISO image. With this feature, the whole ISO, including the boot sector, is cloned on the DVD. This creates a bootable DVD.

Step 3: Installing Fedora 9

For this, I would recommend using the default installation options that Fedora 9 provides. The only exception to this is the installation partition selection. You should change this to indicate the partition you want Fedora installed into. Default is to format all linux partitions, which will be invalid in our case, as we do not have any. You can recognize your NTFS partition by the size you allocated to it, in case of any confusion. Keep all other options, including the packages selected for partition, as default.

Step 4: Understanding the Fedora file system

This should be a piece of cake for the regular Linux users, but windows users may require a little extra teaching. In Fedora (or any Linux OS), the file system consists of a root directory, under which all your files and directories reside. This is unlike the Windows systems that allow seperate partitions as different file systems. This basic directory is indicated by a single / and is called the root directory. All the files specific to a particular user, reside inside the /home/ directory. This is like the Documents and Settings folder of Windows XP. I will mention more about the other folders and their usage in due time.

Now I will start with the interesting part – Concerns with Fedora 9 and Troubleshooting the problems.

Problem 1: Internet speed seems too slow, even with Firefox.

Solution: Fedora 9 has an autometic update system, which keeps downloading and installing updates all the time from internet. This causes the Internet to operate snail slow. The below steps will stop and disable the autometic updates.

Warning: This will disable autometic updates foreer, and you will have to update your system by running the update process manually from time to time.

1. Open a terminal window and type – yum update
2. You will get an error saying “Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit”. There will be a process ID mentioned after the error.
3. Kill the process using – kill
4. Now delete the lock using – rm /var/run/yum.pid

This will stop the auto-update process. Now you can use yum to install other .rpm packages.

(Source for this information is http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/fedora-35/another-app-is-currently-holding-the-yum-lock-603251/)

Also, for Firefox users, there are additional tips to increase browsing speeds using tunneling here.

Problem 2: Installing VLC Player for Fedora 9

Solution: The best source for software packages for Fedora 9 is the livna wiki. The problem is that the downlodable rpm file installs all the packages at the same time, which can be a nuiscance.To avoid this, here are the links to the list of seperate rpm packages and their descriptions:

Downloadable Packages:

32-bit processors : http://livna-dl.reloumirrors.net/fedora/development/i386/
64-bit processors : http://livna-dl.reloumirrors.net/fedora/development/x86_64/

Package Details:

32-bit processors : http://livna-dl.reloumirrors.net/fedora/development/i386/repodata/repoview/
64-bit processors : http://livna-dl.reloumirrors.net/fedora/development/x86_64/repodata/repoview/

Problem 3: Installing a rpm package

Solution: Open a root shell in a terminal window using su command and providing the root password.
A .rpm file can be installed in various ways stated below:

1. Using yum online:
Type – yum install

2. Using yum offline:
Type – yum –nogpgcheck localinstall .rpm

3. Without using yum:
rpm -ivh .rpm
rpm -ivh

Problem 4: Installing softwares like Acrobat Reader and Skype

Solution: The best way of installing the most used softwares in windows, along with some other important updates is to download and install EasyLife. EasyLife lets you install a lot of useful software for Fedora 9. It can be downloaded here.

Problem 5: Running jnlp files

Solution: The .jnlp files do not run by default in Firefox, even if Java is enabled. To run .jnlp files, navigate to the location of javaws on your terminal. It will most probably be at /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0/bin/
Then use the following command – ./javaws -offline -nosecurity .jnlp

These are just some basic things that I faced and recovered from.
With these steps you should be able to get the basic Fedora 9 system up and running in no time. I will be updating this post and adding more to this post with time. If you have any specific question or wish to make any suggestions, please feel free to comment on this post or mail me at prashant.coder@gmail.com

Thanks for reading.