[Malvern] Fedora 4

[Steve Cashmore]

Geoff kindly offered to lend me a copy of Fedora Core 4 and Sarge 3.1 to 
try while upgrading the disk on my headless server.

Thanks Geoff!

I thought I'd try them both independently on another machine first to 
get some impressions.  I only want a minimum C compiler environment, 
several services and no X system.

Sarge went in quite easily and allowed me to minimize the number of 
installation packages.  I couldn't find a Radeon frame buffer driver on 
the system so was stuck at 800x600.  The installation seemed to stick 
right at the end and left a couple of packages unconfigured.
Apt-get collected a pretty large update set but worked just fine.  I 
couldn't get smbfs to work in a mount call so had to resort to smbclient.

Fedora on the other hand installed a whole raft of packages despite 
choosing a custom minimum install.  I will see if I can find or build an 
alternative anaconda list to create a smaller install.  There was 
immediate framebuffer support so I jumped straight to 1152x864 
resolution.  The Yum package manager front end to RPM downloaded about 
800Mb of packages!  After fetching my favourite console editors and file 
manager everything worked pretty well, including smbfs.  I didn't bother 
to find out the problem with Sarge.
Fedora installed the default Sendmail, but also seems to support the 
better alternative Exim.  My server uses the cyrus IMAP server and holds 
the mail for about a dozen users.  I have a customised source RPM for 
it, so I don't foresee any problem getting that working.

The next step was to duplicate the two DVDs Geoff had lent me.  My copy 
of growisofs didn't seem to work properly, and cdrecord couldn't 
identify the DVD+RW drive.  An update to a newer cdrecord, and a fetch 
of dvd+rw-tools followed by a short compile, and things started looking 
better.  A little module shuffling and a re-enable of ide-scsi had 
cdrecord locating the DVD drive.  After that I read the two DVDs into 
files of type .iso and proceeded to burn them to to blank DVD+RWs with 
growisofs.  I was pleased to see everything proceeded smoothly and I now 
have two decent copies.

So there we are - I think I'll stick to Fedora this time as it seem to 
be working better for me.

Thanks again Geoff, I'll drop the two DVDs back round sometime this week.
-- 
Steve