Fedora Survival Guide for converts

I recently migrated from source-compiled Gentoo distribution to a binary packaged Fedora distribution. I also want to have the recent, bleeding-edge software (the reason I was using Gentoo), so I decided to go for Rawhide (Fedora Development packages). These are my experiences with it.

Installation

I really do not want to download all the ISO images (or the DVD image) of the whole distribution. I fairly know what I want on my PC, so one booting ISO with installer is enough. Fortunately I have a very fast Internet connection so I’m able to install directly from Web. So, download (I will be using polish links from now on, so please choose your mirror and stay with it) the boot.iso, burn it and start it. After Anakonda is started, do configure working network (DHCP preferably). The tricky part is installation media: HTTP source, server: sunsite.icm.edu.pl and path: pub/Linux/fedora/linux/core/test/6.92/Prime/i386/os. Anaconda downloads about 80MB and starts the installation. Install then as usual.

Package sources

After installing the FC7 Test3 (6.92), you will have YUM configured for development repositories ( /etc/yum.repos.d/ ) with all the latest Core and Extras goodies. Just wait few minutes and you will be proposed to update a few hundreds of packages. After the upgrade reboot.

Fedora is “politically correct” about licensing and patents issues, so you need some work to make it usable again. Namely adding some “unofficial” repositories. These is mainly livna repository.

First install livna repository data:

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

But this is for FC6, so you need to tweak the repo info to point to livna-development.

/etc/yum.repos.d/livna-development.repo

[livna-development]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (stable)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/development/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

Then use YUM to update the system: yum update

Building own packages

Not all packages are available precompiled. Then what?

Fortunately it’s not much more complicated than on Gentoo. First you need to install Development Tools using package manager and rpmdevtools: yum install rpmdevtools

Then you need a SPEC file that contains instructions how to build a package. Obtaining the specs is pretty simple. Either you get it directly from www or you get the special .src.rpm file that contains the spec, the sources and all the patches to build a package.

Next step (we’re modifying system under root, you know) put the msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec file in /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/ (/usr/src is an UN*X usuall place to keep sources of software).

Then just build it: rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec

It places ready RPM in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm, you just need to install it: rpm -i /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm

nVidia binary driver

You need two packages from livna repository: xorg-x11-drv-nvidia and nvidia-kmod. Unfortunately there wasn’t yet nvidia-kmod compiled for my latest development kernel version 3069. So I downloaded nvidia-kmod.src.rpm from http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/development/SRPMS/, installed it, hand-edited /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/nvidia-kmod.spec to %define kversion 2.6.20-1.3069.fc7, and rpmbuilt it. Then the module installed fine from my new RPM package. I just needed to use Livna Display Configuration to enable accelerated X.

SELinux

I had problems with it (blocking my reiserfs partition, blocking NetworkManager OpenVPN client), so I simply disabled it. Voila!