Critical Exponent

It’s been pretty cold and rainy in Boston. Perfect time to upgrade Linux to Fedora Core 5.

DESKTOP UPGRADE: I began upgrading my desktop system using ISO images I burned onto CD RWs. On the second CD, installation failed saying the media could not be read. I re-burned disk two and retried it, and it kept failing. At that point I rebooted into the partial FC5 system (the kernel and core packages had been updated, but not the rest of the packages) and follows the unofficial directions on upgrading via yum. From there, it went without a hitch.

I like the new FC5 system, and everything seems to work, albeit with some changes. Evolution 2.6.1 took a while to migrate everything over, but it did, eventually; I like its new “Memos” feature. The automatically mounted USB hard disk is mounted differently than with FC4 (now it does not automatically mount all the partitions, though it thinks it has; this is a small bug). My flash card reader is now mounted as a VFAT system, which means all the names are uppercase; I took this as an opportunity to upgrade my scripts to accept uppercase filenames, though I would still like to find out how to revert back to the FC4 behavior here. Lastly, I noticed that the gramps entry in my application menu disappeared, though the package and binary are still installed.

LAPTOP UPGRADE: I began to update the VAIO VGN S580 laptop using yum, but ran into exactly the same dependency issues mentioned there. I figured I’d switch over to the CD installation, but I had media problems consistently on the third disk. All these media problems make we wonder whether the CD burner is bad or the CD RW media are bad.

At any rate, I figured that since I had the first two CDs installed, I might as well tried switching over to the yum installation again. I ran into a known boot udev problem that caused the system to hang. I followed the directions here to disable udev:

# cd /mnt/sysimage
# mv sbin/pcmcia-socket-startup sbin/pcmcia-socket-startup.bak
# cd ..
# reboot

Rebooting from the hard disk did not start up my network automatically (I am using an ethernet cable rather than the wireless for the upgrade), so I rebooted and ran

# /usr/sbin/system-config-network-cmd

I was then able to update the pcmciautils package

# yum update pcmciautils

and continue with the yum-mediated FC5 upgrade.

Once this one done, the system would not boot up the XOrg server (nor the network, since I had the setwork configured to not start up automatically). This was true even if I tried to install the nVidia driver. I rebooted with the rescue CD, did

# chroot /mnt/sysimage
# yum remove xorg-x11-server-*

to remove the XOrg packages, and

# yum install xorg-x11-server-*

to reinstall them. I then re-installed the nVidia server, and then rebooted. I got the nVidia splash screen, and then the graphical boot scrren but the login manager did not show up– the system seemed to hang. Looking at the nVidia forums, I came across a set of directions. I followed these to the letter and had the same problem. After a few days of tinkering, I tried running startx from runlevel 3 as root: I got the nVidia splash screen. This provided the crucial clue: nVidia was installed correctly, but somehow the gdm package had gotten removed. Grrrr.

All systems go at this point. Now I will make sure that the packages on the desktop and the laptop are in sync.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Programming & configuration, Sony VAIO VGN S580. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.