I installed Fedora7 on my main desktop machine and it wasn’t fun. The first install went OK. After firstboot, it couldn’t see my network card until I fudged with /etc/modprobe.conf, then it wouldn’t shut down, then it wouldn’t play XViDs. The local YUM mirror wouldn’t work as it seems the Fedora-Releases repository changes, and is not simply the RPM’s from the DVD, so I’ve ditched mirroring that and am sticking with just mirroring Fedora-Updates.

So I reinstalled, this time the installer crashed when trying to mount my JFS drives, but the NICs worked OK albeit their ID’s were reversed – fixed with fudging with the MAC addresses in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* I finally got the JFS drives working by manually creating the mountpoints and fudging /etc/fstab. The shutdown problem is still unsolved, apparently its due to a conflict with the Nvidia drivers and Compiz, so desktop effects are disabled until that’s fixed.

I did a YUM update, installed things like Nero, Acrobat, Java, RealPlayer, GoogleEarth and VMWare and then enabled the Livna, Macromedia and PPTP repositories to add the further software like codecs and media players.

Everything seems to be working now. It’s nice to have the latest 2.0x versions of Firefox and Mozilla instead of 1.5x

It seemed a lot easier to install on the laptops at work than on my desktop, however they just used the DVD, no YUM repositories.

I’ve been securing the install a bit – by removing services, locking the remaining services down to the local/LAN interfaces, using TCP wrappers and a custom firewall ruleset.

I installed the new 2Gb RAM, so its now got 3Gb. I had to combine it with the old Corsair/Kingston 512Mb sticks as the OCZ couldn’t clock down to match the CAS3 of the GEiL sticks, as they are CAS2/2.5 sticks, so the three of them will go in my rebuilt fileserver. Win2003 works a lot better under VMWare when allocated 1Gb RAM – and the host still having 2Gb free!