Sunday, September 02, 2007

Install and Configure Fedora Core 7

I love the distribution of Fedora Core 7 in DVD ISO format. Once download it, I can mount the ISO file access the contents of the FC7 files. There are plenty of installation methods. The most usual method I used is FTP or HTTP installation. To start the installation, I burn the diskboot.img to a USB flash drive (using dd - diskdump utility). The PC must support USB flash drive boot. Once up, the installation is easy and straight. With the help of virtual machine and ISO, I can setup my Fedora Core on virtual machine running on windows OS (2000, XP or Vista). Then I can setup FTP or HTTP server on virtual machine to serve as installation server. I then use the USB flash drive to boot the machine that support USB flash drive booting and start installing my Fedora Core remotely. This installation method is clean and easy, I only require a working TCP network environment. No DVD RW-Device and no wasting of a DVD-R disc. Help to save the earth, huh. However, there is a PXE installation that I haven't have time to explore it yet. The linux OS evolve in last 10 years. There are plenty of new things to learn and research. Some things that I used in last 10 years wasn't exist anymore. Especially for user like me who still use the bash shell to configure the linux OS instead of GNOME X-Windows. Logical Volume Management (LVM) I am not familiar with LVM and do not know why Fedora partition my hard drive LVM instead of the Primary partition that I am familiar with. The first problem I found it hard to use the LVM is it is not easy to mount a file system on LVM partition. If all mounted LVM has same logical volme name, I have problem to manage the LVM. Instead, I have to rename it or use the UUID of LVM. SELINUX I am not familiar with SELINUX, I turn it off usually. TELNET Telnet no longer come with Fedora since FC 6. It make us difficult to access the linux machine on windows desktop. To overcome this, I have to find a SSH client. SSH Client for Windows - Tera Terms Pro It is fast and easy. YUM YUM allows me to download and install RPMs from internet. It help to resolve the package dependencies. XINETD xinetd service wasn't come with FC7. I do not know if they have alternative ways. However, CVS service needs it. I YUM the xinetd to install it. SAMBA Samba that come with FC7 now use database to store user name and password instead of smbpasswd by default. Firebird 2.01 Firebird 2.0.1 needs compat-libstdc++-33 package X-Windows I used to access my fedora machine on my windows desktop. However, I always need to find X-Windows Client and configure my x-server to make both able to communicate with X-DMCP. It seems VNC is a new new ways to access.

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