Rolling my own Linux Distro
I’ve decided to take the plunge and try rolling my own Linux distribution based on Redhat’s Fedora Core 3. I’m including many thirdparty RPMs from Fedora RPM services like FreshRPMS, DAG, ATRpms, and jpackage as well as some customized applications that i’ve been playing with.
It’s been very interesting reading and learning exactly how to do this and each step opens up a cool new world of things that can be done. The Anaconda installer is an incredible piece of software. I believe that it’s going to be relatively easy to script the creation of a new DVD ISO almost daily.
Some great links I’ve been reading on this are:
I hope others find these articles useful
Fedora Core 3 Fresh Install
Well, it looks like there’s either something wacky with my hardware. After 11 tries, I could not get the Fedora Core 3 installation done on my Dell Dimension. I had to revert to some old Redhat 8 CDs I had, install a basic installation on a tiny partition and manully add a reference to boot into FC3.
I wish there were some logs or something that would tell what the error was but this was definitely a strange one.
What a Pain!
Wow…I have never tried 7 straight installations of any OS before.
I wound up needing to re-install Fedora Core 3 on my Dell Dimension at home and reinstalled it 7 times. Each of those seven times, the installation went fine, but the boot loader wouldn’t install. I’m presuming that FC3 has a bug and can’t properly create a boot loader. Not entirely sure how and how to even file a bugzilla for this.
I’m going back to the only other CDs I have which are for Severn Beta 1 and installing that on a different partition to build the bood loader. Let’s see what happens ….
Another FC2 -> FC3 upgrade
I just upgraded my FC2 desktop to FC3 and again, absolutely smooth!! This time, I didn’t even have the problem of evolution not migrating my 1.4 data over to 2.0. Also, I like the way evolution 1.4 looked, felt, and worked. I know there are tons of RSS/ATOM feed agregators available, but I really like the “Summary” tab in Evolution 1.x
I haven’t yet tried burning any DVDs or CDs but I am not getting any sound after the upgrade unless I first run system-config-soundcard. I know other people have mentioned similar problems so I’ll have to dig through the fedora mailing list.
I’ll post more findings as I continue to use both FC3 machines …
Fedora Core 3 Upgrade ( con’t )
After a bit more playing with my upgraded laptop, I found that not all my FC2 packages were upgraded. I tried opening OpenOffice Writer and found that it wouldn’t start. After getting various library errors and checking the RPMs, I saw that the RPMs were old FC2 RPMs.
I made sure yum was setup correctly commented out sites that didn’t yet have FC3 repos, and ran a “yum update” to force all the packages to be updated. Over 200 individual packages, including OpenOffice were upgraded using yum. Not sure why the Fedora installer didn’t upgrade them.
Most of these RPMs were standard Fedora Core 2 RPMs and not RPMs from other sources so I believe they should have been upgraded during installation. Maybe I will do an upgrade of my desktop at home before doing a fresh install. Overall, I am still very happy with FC3. I still have to find out all the nuances but a custom web application I’ve been working on had absolutely no problems running after the upgrade. That definitely made my day!!
Keep up the great work!
Fedora Core 3
Fedora Core 3 was released on Monday. By early Wednesday morning I had the DVD ISO downloaded and burnt onto a shiny new DVD+R.
I popped the freshly burnt DVD into my laptop ( an IBM Thinkpad T40 ) and upgraded an existing Fedora Core 2 installation. The installation ran longer than I hoped it would but it also ran much more smoothly than I had anticipated. An hour and a half after popping the DVD in, I had Fedora Core up and running with NO, yes I said “NO” problems.
The only thing I had to do was compile the ipw2100 drivers from scratch since no RPMs exist for the 2.6.9 Kernel yet. I also had to put the ipw2100 firmware into the new location on Fedora Core 3 which is /lib/firmware from the FC2 location /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware.
It’s only been about an hour since upgrading to FC3 and so far no problems at all. Even CrossOver office with Quicken 2004 runs as smoothly as it did with FC2.
Thanks to all the great folks working on FC3. It’s been the easiest upgrade so far.
My next step will be to do a completely fresh install on my home PC …
