Going to FOSDEM’15

FOSDEM, the annual meetup of free/libre/open source hackers is on 31st January – 1st February this year. I am attending the event this time as well.

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Yum

Many years ago, when I first saw this thing called Linux and found that I could use it everyday (in the college Lab), it intrigued me so much that I spent days and nights with it. Learning new things every day.

I remember this particular story – trying to get MPlayer work on my friend’s desktop running RedHat 9. Only the college lab had internet connection, I was downloading the RPM, finds that it is too big to fit in a Floppy disk, so I cut it into smaller KB files, doing round trips from Lab to hostel room, finally stitch them together and try to install it. Then I got into fighting the ‘dependency hell’ – MPlayer had a lot of dependencies, so I have to then search for the dependencies individually in rpm.pbone.net and download all these RPMS, copy them into the floppy and try to install them all together – of course using ‘rpm -ivh‘. That, then would result into a new level of dependency, missing dozens of libxyz.so files. The end of the story is that I did manage to install MPlayer and play videos.

And then Fedora Core emerged. With it, we found Yum as the package manager and instantly found that it can solve the dependencies for me! Ever since then, the one single command I have run most would be “yum”. Over the years it gained a lot of new features and stability.

I have recently learned the tragic demise of Seth Vidal who developed yum; and though I never knew him personally; he has touched someone’s life at the other end of the world. Thank you, Seth.

Fedora 18 : Install from ISO file

I can’t remember the last time I burned a DVD when a new Fedora version releases. The preferred way of installing a new version is the ‘diskless’ install method provided the computer already is running one or the other version of Fedora. For guidelines, see the installation guide: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Installation_Guide/ap-medialess-install.html

As of Fedora 17, the Boot Options have been changed, and the “askmethod” parameter is deprecated, it is no longer recognized by the installer. Instead you need to use “inst.repo” parameter with appropriate syntax to specify install from network (http/ftp), nfs, hard disk et al.

I have obtained the Fedora 18 DVD ISO file, mounted it loopback, and copied the vmlinuz and initrd.img from isolinux folder to /boot/ and added a custom menu entry in /etc/grub.d/40_custom with the repo method as found in the documentation. Installer starts, but unfortunately fails, probably at stage2, with a dracut message saying “Cannot boot” and “Root device not found”. There’s no helpful error message or warning as to what could cause this.

Finally figured out that the repo parameter was missing a colon after the hard disk device. This had hit me during the Fedora 17 install too, so let it be documented for future reference. The proper parameter would be something like:

linux /boot/vmlinuz-fedora18-install repo=hd:/dev/sda2:/home/rajeesh/

Where the Fedora DVD ISO is placed at /home/rajeesh. Once that is fixed, installer boots into the graphical mode just fine. The new installer seems quite unstable – it crashed 4 times before I could complete installation – at disk probing, when switching to other terminals using Alt+Ctrl+F2, Alt+Ctrl+F3 etc. But once that phase is passed, the package installation is swift. There’s no way to customize and tweak package selection during the installation, which is quite limiting. That said, once the installation is done, the desktop is quite solid and polished.