Kainaw's Journal: Fedora 7 - the day after

You'd think I'd be used to it by version 7, but Fedora is a real love/hate sort of Linux distribution.

First, I do not have a DVD burner or a DVD player in my computer. Since some brainchild decided it was too hard to put the CD isos online, I had to download the rescue CD and do a network install. It took over 12 hours to do the network install because everyone was downloading off the network. Now, if they'd allow a bittorrent install... Really, they just need to put the CD isos online.

I know the argument - "Go out and get a DVD burner! They are cheap!" Well, I spent my money on a 64bit system. How about getting some support for a worthwhile upgrade? As it is, I keep running into the argument - "Not everyone has 64bit machines, so there's no reason to support them!" So, everyone should just get a DVD burner, but screw those who got a 64bit system.

First thing after the install is to get my Nvidia dual-head card working. I know, the nv driver doesn't work well for dualhead displays. So, I added livna and installed the nvidia driver. It failed. I messed with it for a while. I gave up. I downloaded the driver source from Nvidia and compiled it. It failed. Then, I remembered the golden Fedora rule: "If you can't fix it, it must be an SELinux problem."

How do you fix an SELinux problem? No, you don't disable SELinux. It is there to protect you. Instead, you use audit2allow to find and fix the problem. But, audit2allow requires checkmodule. For some reason, checkmodule is not included with Fedora 7. So, you can't run audit2allow. I broke down and disabled SELinux. The nvidia driver works fine now.

I'm back in again. I copied my .mozilla, .thunderbird, and .ssh folders back. Unlike FC6, that didn't crash my whole system. I got my email, no problem. My saved passwords in Firefox are still there. I installed mp3 capability (because I refuse to re-encode my ITunes music in ogg). It is 5:38pm. I started at 11:00am yesterday. This is a record for me and Fedora - back online in about 32 hours. I hope I will be able to cut it down to less than a day next time.