Fedora Core 3 Installation

2004 Nov 17 at 05:17 » Tagged as :

Just got hold of a set of Fedora Core 3 CDs and had a go at installing it on my machine that is currently running Red Hat 9. This is the first time that a Fedora CD is seeing the inside of my CDROM. That's because I have a highly customized version of Red Hat 9.00. Customized in the sense that very few of the packaged originally installed by way of RPMs now survive. Most have been replaced by packages compiled from source.

Getting back to the installation; I chose to make a fresh installation instead of an upgrade by pluggin in a hard disk that was lying around. The fact that the Reiser file system is not given as an option when partitioning is a big disappointment. That means I would have to manually convert to reiserfs later on. ext2 and ext3 cannot hold a candle to reiser.

I have a 16MB partion on my primary hard disk (which has seen three different CPUS) that I use as the boot partition. Long long ago you had to have a primary partition on your primary hard disk for many linux distros to be able to boot. It was this partition that I set as the hard disk (there is still 8MB free on it) and the installer suggested that I increase the partition to 75MB. What for the kernel is only about 2Mb, so this warning was ignored.

Going through the packages I noticed with great delight that festival is part of fedora core 3. oh boy. (In case you have not run into it before festival is a TTS (text to speech) engine) Finally I noticed a new feature SE Linux which apparently has to do with security in the same page as the firewall configuration screen. I have to hang my head in shame and proclaim that I have not heard of SE Linux till now. Having sorted things out and choosing all the packages I started the installer and grabbed the newspaper. It went through three cds (a process that took more than 40minutes) to finally announce that the Korean language pack could not be installed. The guy who wrote the installer forget to put a cancel button on that dialog. It only has an OK button, and when you click on it, the installer will attempt to install the package and keep doing this until you hit control alt delete. So I had to do the whole thing all over again this time with out the language packs and fedora started up alright but I had to edit the grub configuration file to get back to my frayed at the edges Red Hat 9 with patches on patches.