Fedora 8 Linux
Installation notes for Fedora 8 on my AMD Athlon64 3200+.
The most recent version of Fedora looked to good to stay with the old one.
Contents
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 FC6 installation, keeping the home-directories and manually installed software.
There are tons of installation instructions out there, so I will only list the stuff, which did not work out of the box.
Tweaking
Network
Currently, my box runs with a direct connection to a PPPoE-modem, a fact, that was not recognized by the installer (altough I guess it is not that uncommon). Installation had to be finished without online-connection therefore.
PPPoE could be configured on the commandline with
pppoe-setup
nVidia driver
Via livna as described on http://www.mjmwired.net. I had to add the noapic option to make it run (as per the nVidia manual) to /etc/grub.conf.
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-49.fc8 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet noapic
nVidia driver for the nVidia GeForce 8800GT
Recently I bought a new rig, which got the (at the time of writing) brand-new nVidia GeForce 8800GT graphics board. nVidia states on their website, that this chip is supported under Linux by their newest graphics driver. Unfortunately, the livna.org package of that driver does not recognize the chip and fails to start the X-server.
To install a working graphics driver for the nVidia GeForce 8800GT you neet to enable livna-testing:
<bash> cd /etc/yum.repos.d vi livna-testing.repo </bash>
edit the line <bash> enabled=0 </bash>
to
<bash> enabled=1 </bash>
after that, install the testing nVidia driver from livna as usual, and everything should work.
CD-RW/DVD+-RW
FC3 and FC6 had issues with my Plextor-PX712A, which are really solved with the new version -finally!
@todo More to come
Conclusions
Fedora 8 is a nice and stable system, which installs without problems (almost boring ;-) ). The new design (icons, wallpaper, colour scheme) is also quite nice (except for the window borders I'd say). Great work, Red Hat!