Installing Fedora Core 6

Installing FC6 was pretty straightforward but there were a couple things that needed to be straightened out. At first I tried using the graphical interface to Anaconda to do the install. However, when the X server started it left artifacts all over the screen and I wasn't able to get rid of it. After a few iterations of this, I just installed using the text interface. It isn't that bad to use, especially if you are making minimal customizations as I was.

I blew away all the preloaded partitions on my hard drive. This always gives me a lot of satisfaction even though Dell forces me to pay for the Windows installation that I don't use. I created a logical volume to manage my disk. With the 100 GB hard drive I don't have a lot of space so I didn't want to give a lot of room to my home directory. If I had used partitions to create my home directory it would have been very difficult to change its size later if I needed more space. With the logical volume manager changing size should be a relatively painless experience.

Here's my partition list:

[bloomsbury root ~] /sbin/sfdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 12161 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 0+ 12 13- 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 13 12160 12148 97578810 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sda3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty


The rest of the install went very smoothly. I installed a minimal number of packages. Using the pirut software installer in FC6 is very quick and easy. I have just been adding sofware as I need it. You can access pirut from the "Start" menu - it is called "Add/Remove Software". Some people complain that pirut is slow and hard to use but I really like it. My only other experience with a graphical front for managing software on a Linux system was with Yum Extender. Pirut is certainly an improvement over that.

A couple days after I had completed the install, I got quite a scare. I rebooted and the logical volume that held my home directory was wiped clean. I sent an email to the lvm mailing list but never did receive a reply. I haven't had any problems since and it's been about a month with probably ten reboots. The good thing to come out of this is that my backups are getting done regularly!

In the next post, I'll talk about getting the ATI X1400 card set up.