fedora

For those eager beavers out there, you can now get hold of Fedora 19 Alpha from the pre-release location.

The release notes can be found here. I’m keen to check out the improvements to MATE in version 1.6, as this is now my standard desktop.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: It installs in Oracle VirtualBox and the guest additions install correctly, so it’s looking good so far.

I’m a few days into Fedora 18 and I think I’ve come the the conclusion that the desktop that best suits *me* is MATE. The journey to this point has been a rather long and meandering one. Let’s cut it short and start at GNOME2.

I’ve just got to the end of a real upgrade of a Fedora 17 server to Fedora 18. The basic process goes like this.

• Download the Fedora 18 ISO.
• Update your current Fedora 17 system by issuing the “yum update” command and restart once it is complete.
• Install the “fedup” package. “yum –enablerepo=updates-testing install fedup”
• Run the fedup command pointing it to the Fedora 18 ISO you downloaded. “fedup-cli –iso /home/user/fedora-18.iso –debuglog=fedupdebug.log”
• Check for errors in the log and correct if found.
• Reboot the machine and select the “System Upgrade” option from the Grub menu.
• Wait!

The system came up OK after this, but there are some gotchas. The first thing I did on completion was to run a “yum update” and lots of things were broken. Why? Well, after a lot of messing around and manually updating individual packages I finally figured out:

After several abortive attempts I finally got hold of Fedora 18 last night. Those mirrors are getting a real battering at the moment.

The first job was to do a basic installation.

• Fedora 18 (F18) Installation

I’d seen a few things written about the new installer, not all of which were positive. IMHO the installation was a really nice experience. It is very different to previous installers, which probably freaks some people out, but I think it works really well.

It’s been a few days since the final release of Fedora 17. I’ve been running it on VMs since the alpha release, but the day after the final release I decided to upgrade a real Fedora 16 machine. That’s where all the fun started…

I’ve now attempted Fedora 16 -> 17 upgrades on two physical servers and both have been destroyed by the process. In both cases, I had to do a fresh install, which worked cleanly and left a fully functioning installation. Perhaps I’m just very unlucky, but with a record of 0 for 2, my conclusion is that the upgrade process on Fedora 17 sucks so much ass it’s untrue.

As followers of the blog know, I try to keep my host machines pretty clean and do anything of significance in VirtualBox VMs. As a result, the recovery of both systems has been fine, if a little slow. In both cases, I did a clean install, then copied back all the VMs and that was pretty much it.

Fedora 17 was released yesterday. I mentioned in a previous post I had run through the installation of Oracle 11gR2 on Fedora 17 alpha. With the arrival of the final Fedora 17 release I ran through the articles again last night to make sure everything was OK. You can see the finished versions here:

• Fedora 17 (F17) Installation
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) Installation On Fedora 17 (F17)

As always, installing Oracle on Fedora 17 is just for fun and totally not supported. For anything proper you should be using Oracle Linux or RHEL.

Cheers

Tim…

Following on from my post on AntiVirus Software and Apple Macs, I decided to add antivirus to my desktop machines also. I chose ClamAV because it is part of the Fedora repository. I wrote a quick note about installing ClamAV on Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, Oracle Linux, CentOS etc.).

• Linux Antivirus (clamav, freshclam, clamscan, clamtk)

Not surprisingly, scans revealed no viruses on any of my Fedora machines.

Cheers

Tim…

I have been playing around with Fedora 17 beta in preparation for my server upgrades when it is released at the end of the month. While I was at it, I did my typical articles for Fedora.

• Fedora 17 (F17) Installation
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) Installation On Fedora 17 (F17)

I’ll run through them again when the final release drops, then officially put them live.

Cheers

Tim…

I’ve just tried the alpha of Fedora 17 to see if the GNOME 3 software rendering works and it did. You may recall, since updating my graphics card I’ve been forced to use the fallback mode on Fedora 16. I’m quite keen to move back to proper GNOME 3, which looks like it will be possible when F17 is released.

On a VM it seems a little on the slow side, so I hope this isn’t an indication that it will be annoying on my desktop. I guess time will tell. Fingers crossed though.

Cheers

Tim…

UltraEdit 2.3 has just been released for Linux. It now has a Fedora 16 build, which is nice.

Cheers

Tim…