Workarounds for Problems Upgrading to Fedora Core 1

Workarounds for Problems Upgrading to Fedora Core 1

Tom Bylander
Email: bylander@cs.utsa.edu

I upgraded my computers from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 1 during the Christmas 2003 break, and I decided to write down my workarounds to the problems that I experienced. The problems weren't difficult enough to make me look them up on the net so probably these workarounds are available elsewhere.

Here is some background information.

I bought Fedora Core 1 from Cheapbytes.

I upgraded 4 Intel machines. At work, I have a Dell Workstation and a Dell laptop. At home, I have an old Gateway (still running Window 95 dual boot) and a new "Neocomputer". Neocomputers is one of those places that will build your machine from the parts you select. I picked Neocomputers because their selection matched what I wanted, their price was good, and their customer satisfaction seemed ok, though not great (based on online customer comments from various sources).

For my machines, I use KDE and try to load as few GNOME packages as possible. Ths time I did not have many issues with Red Hat's infamous GNOME/KDE integrated desktop probably because I was doing an upgrade rather a brand-new installation.

I waited until Christmas for a couple of reasons. I don't like to upgrade immediately after the new version comes out in case there are major problems. The other reason is that I don't like to upgrade during the middle of the semester; if major problems occur during the upgrade, then life becomes too complicated.

Monitor Information

If your monitor is relatively old, then you will need to know the ranges of the monitor's horizontal sync frequencies and the vertical refresh frequencies when you install. I have never been able to find the monitor I have in the lists provided by the installers. You can use xvidtune to find out what the current frequency values are.

Package Micromanaging

The installer doesn't let you micromanage the packages are upgraded/installed. It's a little disconcerting to just get a yes-or-no question of whether to install or not, especially when past Redhat upgrades have tended to install many new packages. Two of my machines do not have much disk space, so I was a little afraid at this point, but the installer included few new packages if any.

LILO

For many years, I have continued to use LILO as the boot loader on my machines. Fedora's most severe problem is that it botches up the LILO setup. You will probably only see the LI of the LILO prompt when you first boot up.
  1. Before installing, save a copy of your /etc/lilo.conf file because the installer overwrites it.

  2. When you are installing, make a boot floppy when you get the opportunity. On my laptop, I did not have its floppy drive attached when I installed, and I didn't get a chance to make a boot floppy.

  3. If you can make a boot floppy, then booting up to fix /etc/lilo.conf is not a problem. Otherwise, you need to boot up from the Fedora Core 1, Install #1 CD. When you get the boot: prompt, type in linux rescue. Eventually, you will get to a command prompt where you can type in chroot /mnt/sysimage.

  4. Edit /etc/lilo.conf (you will need to be root to do this). The major changes that I had to make was to delete the line message=/boot/message (don't worry if you don't have this line), and to replace the line that begins with a tab and append= with the line that begins with a tab and root= from your old /etc/lilo.conf file. On the machine I am on right now, this line is root=/dev/sda3 because /dev/sda3 is the root partition of the linux installation. You can run /sbin/fdisk -l to list your partitions.

  5. Finally, install the boot loader as configured. Use the command /sbin/lilo -v -t to test your configuration file. When the output looks satisfactory (as far as you can tell), use the command /sbin/lilo -v while crossing your fingers at the same time. You should be able to reboot without the boot floppy or the installation CD.

Fonts

A feature that was introduced in Red Hat 8.0 was the addition of the fontconfig, freetype, and other packages for managing fonts. This is a nice idea, but it's still not well-integrated with the rest of the system.

I have used the Lucida Sans Typewriter font from the XFree86-75dpi-fonts package for many years. I have found this font to be the most readable fixed-width font for shells and editors, especially lucidasanstypewriter-12. This font initially works sporadically, apparently not working at all for programs that depend on fontconfig and freetype. Here are the steps to get this font back again, which will probably work for any other fonts that you want back again.

  1. Edit /etc/fonts/fonts.conf (you will need to be root to do this), changing: 
     <dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1</dir>
    to: 
    <dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir>

  2. Perform the following command: 
    fc-cache /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts

After you run these commands (and possibly having to restart X), the Lucida font should appear in all of your font menus. However, the sizes are a little messed up. For many menus, I needed to choose size 9 to get lucidasanstypewriter-12. Hopefully, the fonts will work better in later distributions, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Sendmail

On my machine at school, I run sendmail to receive and send mail. I don't do any relaying. Sendmail is probably overkill for this task, but I've been running Redhat for a long time, and I've always managed to get Sendmail to work after each upgrade without too much trouble. However, this time I had a little bit more trouble than usual.

The modification that I've had to do the past few upgrades is to change a line in the /etc/mail/sendmail.mc file from: 

DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl
to: 
dnl DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl
This change allows incoming mail over the network. Run make -C /etc/mail and /etc/init.d/sendmail restart afterwards.

This time, I also had to change my /etc/mail/access file, which controls the mail that is received by your machine. My old version didn't work, and it was a mess. Besides comments, my new version contains: 

localhost.localdomain		RELAY
localhost			RELAY
127.0.0.1                       RELAY
ai.cs.utsa.edu			RELAY
129.115.30.61			RELAY
This lists all the possible names of my machine (local and global) and appears to specify that a message from myself can be sent to myself. It doesn't quite make sense to me, but it works. Again run /etc/init.d/sendmail restart after you make this change.