I finally decided to give Fedora 6 a whirl considering that it has been out since September 14. So, I downloaded the DVD yesterday. Unfortunately, for some reason, the download was corrupted (a first) since Firefox has never corrupted a download before. So, I downloaded it again, ran sha1sum on the download, checked it against the published hash, and burnt it onto a disk.
One very nice feature of the dv8000 is that has two bays to put 2 hard drives into the system. This is extremely useful if you consider all the ramifications of this fact. I loaded another disk onto the bay so that I can test other OSes, which I have been doing in my quest to get 3D working on this machine. Needless to say, no luck even with the latest ATI drivers. Of course, another thing you can do is load it with Windows, if you want to keep it around. Lots of usage. You can simply use it as storage for all your Videos and audio files. I have a server to do that for the whole house, so I don't need to do that.
I popped the DVD I had burnt, into the drive bay and rebooted. While rebooting, I took the precaution of making sure that the second bay was selected to boot from, since i wanted to boot Fedora 6 when I am done installing. To change the boot order, you hit F10 during the boot process (it will tell you when), navigate to Advanced, and select the boot options. Now hit enter after selecting the hard drives, To reverse the order of drives to boot from, hit F6, hit F10 to save and it will reboot. Of course, it will still boot from the installation disk since you did not change the overall order.
The computer booted from the DVD, and presented me with the boot prompt. I hit enter, and it was off to the races. Anaconda went through the routine of picking the language and keyboard (there are enough videos out there, so I am not posting any screenshots), Then it asked me whether I wanted to wipe everything off this machine. One weird thing, the mouse is extremely finicky or maybe it is me. Almost all my clicks were interpreted as clicking twice, it kept asking me if I was sure that I wanted to wipe all the disks, or not want to read the license agreement etc.
Anyway, I preferred to custom partition the hard disk as I had the home directory on it that I did not want to wipe out. I also did not want lvm, a subject of another article. So, I chose my own partitions for the boot and the / directories. This also gives me the opportunity to wipe off any OS without messing with the /home directory. Remember, this is all happening on the second disk while the first disk holds my FC5 installation.
I then chose to customize the software being loaded. I prefer to install all the development tools as opposed to "office and
productivity" which is a strange selection for a home computer. Anyone see the Mac and Windows commercial recently?
So, I eliminated Office completely (not sure what the "productivity" is all about) and proceeded to select my own combination.
I prefer to use all 64bit applications and so, I can always install
After it completed all the installation (it said that it would take 20 minutes and it did), it congratulated me, and told me to remove the media and hit reboot. It rebooted. Now it comes.
This is where all the trouble started. The computer went into an infinite loop of boot - reboot. Finally after 3 such reboots, I stopped it and went back to my Fedora 5 installation and headed over the Fedora-test-list. Here I found out that this is a known problem and that Anaconda had forgotten to create the initrd image. Since, you can't boot Fedora without it, it was constantly booting / rebooting.
So, back to my installation of Fedora 6. I popped the installation DVD into the drive, and rebooted. At the prompt,
I typed in
chroot /mnt/sysimage
and proceeded to create an initrd image.
mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.17-1.2630.fc6.img 2.6.17-1.2630
This created the initrd needed, Then I had to edit the grub.conf to point to this initrd image. What do you, no emacs!! Since
I am not a fan of