Fedora 10 Linux

Installation notes for Fedora 10 on my AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+. As usual, you can find more complete Howtos on the Net, so I won't repeat this here.

Download

Via one of the ftp mirrors. Burn to DVD, done.

Basic install

As with my previous installation, I did not do an update but a complete reinstall. I just scraped the old FC8 installation, keeping the home-directories and manually installed software.

Tweaking

Installer

The installer had issues with hardware detection and configuration, I was able to get it running by adding acpi=off to the startup commandline:

linux acpi=off

The downside: Currently I do not have auto-shutdown by default, I have to tweak this a little bit further.

See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KernelCommonProblems#Crashes.2FHangs for hints on how to solve this problem.

None of the kernel argument switches did it, but I got an error-message on boot, stating "8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC", googling that gave some hints, and the final sollution was to disable ACPI functionality partly in the BIOS. Hideous crap.

Java

Install Sun Java as described here:

<bash> $ sudo sh jre-6u11-linux-i586-rpm.bin </bash>

Enable it via alternatives, otherwise, the default OpenJDK will be used by default:

<bash> $ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/default/bin/java 20000 </bash>

Same for the Mozilla plugin

<bash> $ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so \ libjavaplugin.so /usr/java/default/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so 20000 </bash>

Now, if you want java, you also want Java Web start

<bash> $ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/javaws javaws /usr/java/default/bin/javaws 20000 </bash>

You can check the default Java version by typing

<bash> java -version </bash>

on the command-line.

Issues

Again Fedora managed to fuck up Java (or Sun did, who knows):

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=476619

Alt Gr does not work with German LANG-settings and Swing applications (Eclipse works flawlessly though.

Here are some sollutions:

Put this into your ~/.bash_profile

<bash> export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit </bash>

This fixes the issue for e.g. IntelliJ Idea, but there have been reports, that it freezes that app after ~ 10 min or so. Can't confirm that.

You can also write a wrapper script to start the app with this environment.

Other solutions (untested):

<bash> export XMODIFIERS= </bash>

see http://brianp.de/2009/01/26/probleme-mit-alt-gr-unter-netbeans-65-und-ubuntu-810/

Although this is a general Java or Fedora/Linux problem, some major Java apps suffer from it, among them IntelliJ Idea and NetBeans, see http://editor.netbeans.org/doc/KeyboardIssues/KeyboardIssues.html.