Fedora Core

The purpose of this topic is to record the configuration changes I've made after installing Fedora Core. Currently this specifically relates to Fedora Core 6 installed on Dauntless.

Sudo

Instead of managing the system logged in as root, I prefer to add myself to /etc/sudoers so I can use the sudo command.

1. Edit /etc/sudoers as root
   • My preferred method is to open a console session, become root with the su command, and edit the file with vim
2. Insert a new line at the bottom: qbfreak    ALL=(ALL)    ALL
3. Save and close the file, in vim remember to use :w! to write the file, it is read-only
4. Open a console as a normal user
   • If you used su to become root, type exit to return to your normal user
5. Try sudo ls to test it, when prompted for a password use your user's password

Installing the Livna rpm repository

Not all packages I wanted were available in the standard Fedora repositories, specifically the closed-source nVidia drivers. They can be found in the Livna repository which can be installed as shown below:

• rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm  

Using locate

In order for the locate command to be effective, the database must be updated regularly. This is done with the updatedb command. I generally add this to the root crontab.

• sudo crontab -e
• add the line 0 0 * * * /usr/bin/updatedb
• save and quit

Configuring X for a Dual-head display

WARNING: I do NOT have this working yet! Do NOT do these steps! In fact I even ended up losing my kernel.

I have an nVidia Geforce FX5200 video card with VGA and DVI outputs, I like to run the card with both displays enabled. After installing both Fedora Core 5 and Fedora Core 6 I found that the DVI output displayed random garbage. The first thing I tried was enabling Dual-Head under System > Administration > Display. Sadly X could not even start that way.

Once I had installed the Livna repository (see previous section), I attempted to install the nVidia drivers with sudo yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia, although the proper package to install is likely kmod-nvidia (they depend on each other). Once I okay'd the dependencies, I got an error: Transaction Check Error:   package kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.6.5.fc6 is already installed. For whatever reason, the nVidia kernel module needed to reinstall my kernel, but couldn't because that version was already installed. This was fixed with a sudo rpm -e --nodeps --allmatches kernel. While that gave the error grubby fatal error: unable to find a suitable template, it still worked and I was then able to install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia. Sadly once I rebooted, that grubby error came back to bite me: grub was not configured for my kernel. I booted the Fedora CD in rescue mode, removed the offending kernel, and installed a new one with yum install kernel, however I still got the grubby error. I ended up adding the proper entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst by hand to get the system to boot.

I now have X working in single display mode with the nvidia driver. I had some issues initially where the system always started with a resolution of 640x480, but would be ok if I restart X. While trying to fix it, I broke xorg.conf and X rebuilt it for me, now everything appears to be fine.

-- JasonHill - 11 Mar 2007