F10 on Homebuilt Box - Absolutely Brutal...!!!!

[Christopher A. Williams]

I decided to take the plunge and install F10 x86_64 preview on my main
system at home. This was absolutely the WORST and MOST BRUTAL
installation of Fedora I have ever experienced!!! What in wide world of
sports is going on here??? I was up until midnight trying to get my
system working again.

Had I been a newbie, my impression on Fedora and Linux would have been
that it truly sucks big time. Have I gotten anyone's attention yet...?

...Good. Here's what's wrong and (hopefully) what's needed to fix it.

First here's a summary of my system config (output of lshal available):

Motherboard:
eVGA e7100/630i
This MB uses nVidia onboard GeForce 7100 video with the nForce 630i
chipset. It also uses nVidia MCP73 High Definition Audio

CPU: Intel 2.4GHZ Core2 Quad
4GB RAM
320GB Western Digital SATA drive (WDC_WD3200AAKS)
Monitor: Acer P243W (connected via DVI cable)

OK - Here we go...

Installation was a nightmare (as witnessed by a friend who also
frequents this list). The main thing that was wrong was video. Simply
put, it just doesn't work - and to the point that the Live CD is
unusable and the Install DVD will only install in text mode. What I
found (after a lot of troubleshooting) was that F10 in the default
configuration just doesn't recognize the nVidia card correctly. To get
this to even come up, I had to:

1) Build a bootable USB drive from the live CD with a 2GB persistent
overlay
2) Boot the USB drive, and (because you get a BLANK SCREEN for a GDM
login window) use Alt-F2 to switch to a different tty
3) Login as root and then install system-config-display to the pen drive
4) Switch to run level 3
5) Run the command: system-config-display --reconfig and accept the
default configuration (which meant using the VESA driver and NOT the nv
driver)
6) launch launch X via startx and then run the installer

Notes on this (after "fixing" the USB drive):
1) Loading ANY video driver other than the VESA driver fails miserably.
2) Running the autologin loads a session, which immediately goes to a
blanked out white screen after trying to load 2 "untitled" windows (not
sure what these are), but just makes the desktop unusable. You must
switch to runlevel 3, login as root, load X, and then install.
3) Prior to installing, the hard disk MUST BE MANUALLY PARTITIONED with
fdisk such that ALL partitions are removed. If partitions exist on the
drive, the installer fails when trying to re-partition the drive. You
MUST REBOOT before attempting to install after removing all partitions
because the kernel apparently refuses to use the new partition table.
4) Something in the installation process takes a REALLY LONG TIME to
finish (I mean 20 minutes or more). I later found out that it has
something to do with kernel install / updates.

After getting to a successful completion of an install, reboot from the
hard disk and X will again no longer work. You have to do the following
next:

1) Boot the system, and switch to a different tty (as before)
2) Switch to runlevel 3
3) Install system-config-display (again)
4) Run "system-config-display --reconfig" and accept the VESA driver
defaults (again)
5) Reboot the machine so that firstboot can do its thing

Next, you get F10 in all its 800x600, 16 color display resolution glory
(think Monty Python style "...and there was great rejoicing" applause
here)...

First, run all of the rawhide patches. ANOTHER PROBLEM - the kernel
update alone took over 20 minutes to complete. Why??? It only seemed to
move forward after I put selinux into permissive mode - at which point
several hal oriented messages came through. I think this is also why the
last part of the install took 20 minutes (looking like it was dead at
the time). Reboot after the patches are done.

Next, go get the RPMFusion nVidia drivers (after poking around in all of
the /etc/yum.repos.d based repository files to point them to something
that actually works). Apparently, RPMFusion is currently still confused
over if we should be looking at the rawhide or pre-F10 repositories.
Doing this multiple times last night, there was no rhyme or reason to
this I could figure out, but eventually the rawhide repos worked.

Reboot one more time, and F10 came up on my screen in accelerated
1920x1200 resolution with all of the colors intact.

So now I have F10 running and all of my data has been restored from
backups.

* Flash works kind of - there's no sound.
* Speaking of sound, the sound tests work, but I don't actually GET any
sound to play until a few seconds after something tries to play. Thus,
the login sound never gets heard, neither does the logoff sound, etc.
* Evolution Bogofilter can't seem to figure out how to look for junk
mail. Loads of "Error checking for Junk" messages. Spamassasin works,
but is impressively slow (incredibly slow if you do remote tests).

I'm sure I'll find more as I dig into this deeper.

So there you have it. A very BRUTAL installation session for F10 preview
and an upgrade to rawhide.

I really hope we can do a lot better than this. My lshal output is
available upon request.

Cheers,

Chris

--
==================================
By all means marry;
If you get a good wife, you'll be happy.
If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

--Socrates