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>
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.