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Well, as soon as I realised that was the day Fedora Core 6 was released I got my hands on the work. The most anoying thing about all the process was that Fedora website was, and still is, down. Not only the website is down as at least at that day the file servers were really slow due to the high trafic.

Anyway, upgrading Fedora is not a complicated process, altough it could be improved just like Ubuntu does. Fedora doesn’t show you any message about the new release and the package manager (yum) doesn’t provide any utilities to do the upgrade in a simple and easy step. Never the less, beeing a user of Fedora since the first release, tought me this was a simple process.

Upgrading

First step is to go to a mirror like this one and download a file called fedora-release-VERSION.rpm. Note that the link is to i386 and if you own another architecture you need to browse to the correct path. After that you need to install that RPM file with rpm -Uvh fedora-release-VERSION.rpm. In this case, and getting things simpler you just need to run this command on a console:

rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm

Well, after that you just need to tell yum to update/upgrade all the system:

yum upgrade

Thats really that easy, and… slow :/

The bad part is that I had a problem with a package dependencies. Autogen was asking for libopts.so.24 that was eventually provided by the correct package but it weren’t. I had to download the autogen package and the libopts, install both with –nodeps arg in the rpm command and from there everything worked ok. by the way, to make sure nodeps wouldn’t break the system I checked for the missing file, libopts.so.24 that really didn’t exist. But there were a libopts.so.27 that I did copy just to make sure

Well, it was not that hard, then simply reboot. Also, noteworthy is that I was running another yum repos that worked fine out-the-box (livna, freshrpms and suspend2).

First Run

The first run was smooth and everything looked cooler than ever. The only thing that didn’t went well was the fact that I had the Fedora Core 5 default wallpaper and it was missing, getting a white background instead. I guess they didn’t payed attention to this small details The new theme was great and the next thing I wanted to check out was compiz in action, yet I was afraid my laptops Intel 82852/855 GM graphics card would not be able to run it, at least smoothly. It did

If you are upgrading from any previous versions, compiz was not an installed package, this means it doesn’t get installed so you need to install it to enable that option.

yum install compiz

After you have that package installed it is as easy as to go to System > Preferences > Desktop Effects and enable them. And it is super-hyper-cool. And works fast even on this card.

Well, related to the first run I also whish to say that it is running much faster, they really improved the performance this time, Mono did work without a single change (even the custom builds I’ve installed) as well as MonoDevelop and friends.

Compiz Problems

Compiz is not perfect, yet?. It does run great with 2 exceptions, while playing movies and with a second X without 3D acceleration.

First, the movies get really slow, don’t scale to fullscreen well, and got green dots. I guess this is my card problem and weren’t able to find a solution yet.

And when I use flexiserver (mainly to run movies), or when I use Xming to connect from my Desktop Windows box, Gnome starts but Compiz doesn’t (or it gets killed, or whatever). This is most likely due to the lack of 3D acceleration, but the real fault is that no fallback action is taken. Luckly it is easy to open a console and start metacity.

Mixing Custom Mono Build And RPMS

I build most of mono libraries from SVN but I do not like to build all those f-spot and beagle deps. For this reason I install them using yum. This might create some problems that I worked arround. To begin with, all my custom-build libraries and application are placed under /usr/local but RPMs are installed in /usr, this means that by setting the correct PATH environment variable values and in the right order, the system will find /usr/local applications first. Easy wasn’t it?

Well, the problem is that since the default path for running mono eventually doesn’t have all the deps installed by yum (they are installed in /usr) most mono application won’t work out the box. So I need to change them a litle to make them work, in this 2 simple cases, all I need to do is to create, or change, the scripts adding this line to them:

export PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

And this will make all the commands after to forget about the mono installation in /usr/local allowing me to have stable versions of f-spot and beagle all the time, with the stable fedora mono packages. For instance, I run MonoDevelop from subversion too, I build it, so I don’t change the script and I use the lastest and greatest. In the end I only change some nasty-to-build application or applications I don’t usually hack.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 19:26 pm and is filed under Linux, Mono. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.