Installing Fedora Core - Part II (Post Install Configuration) – 3060 days old

[Grogan]

Please see notes at the end for later Fedora releases

Reboot your machine, and the Fedora boot loader (GRUB) will appear, with its 5 second countdown.

When it comes up, you'll see a welcome screen.



Proceed and accept the License Agreement (You can even read this one, it's not evil)



Check your date and time



Now it's time to configure display settings



Hopefully your video card is supported, or you'll be using a generic VGA display driver. I did this install inside of Vmware, which has it's own virtual display adapter that is supported (they open sourced the driver), but this was just as easy on the real machine with an ATI Radeon video card and Viewsonic monitor. It was in fact easier, because it automatically detected my monitor as well.



If your monitor's manufacturer and model is not listed, choose one of the generic monitor options.



After configuring the monitor, more resolution choices may become available.

Next, you are prompted to create a user



Hopefully it has found and configured your sound card. ALSA can probe for most audio cards and chips.



You can test your audio. You'll hear a few guitar chords.

Next, it prompts you to install additional software from an Extras CD.



If you have such a CD you can click install. It's not actually part of the distribution, so most likely you will just click Next to proceed.

This concludes setup. After some more agonizing progress bar screens, you can finally log on to the desktop.

[Grogan]

Now we arrive at the login screen.

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This is actually GDM, the Gnome session manager. If you click the Session button down near the lower left, you can choose to start the other desktops, KDE or XFCE if you installed them. It defaults to the Gnome desktop.

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The Gnome 2.8 Desktop is fairly nice, in Fedora Core 3. They've done a nice job setting up the menus.

The first thing I'd want to do is turn off some horrible startup services. In the Applications menu, go to System Settings, and Server Settings and choose Services. All of these configuration utilities will prompt you for the root password before they launch.

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The more of these you turn off, the faster your startup is going to be. On my system, I disabled everything except "network", the "syslogd" daemon (for logging system events) and "sshd". You might not even want sshd.

There are hardware probing utilities like kudzu for detecting new hardware that you don't necessarily need to run at every boot.

You should leave "iptables" enabled, because it is what turns on your firewall rules.

Read the descriptions of the services and decide whether you need to run them or not. When you are finished, you must click Save. Note that this is just for runlevel 5 (the system default). If you want to change runlevel 3 or other runlevels (you probably don't need to), then you must choose it from the Edit Runlevel menu.

If you forgot something during the package selection, you can get back to those same selection screens by running Add/Remove Packages.



You will find this in your Applications Menu, under System Settings.

Now, that irritating flashing red icon with the exclamation mark, at top right near the clock, is telling us that we need to update our system. With a few clicks and (more than) a little time, it is easy enough to do. You really should do this before you get too carried away making system modifications and installing software.



Take a look at the long list of package updates available (294 on my "everything" install... the more things you have installed the more updates there will be), sigh, curse, do whatever you need to mentally prepare yourself and click Launch up2date. Click OK. Say yes to creating the "GPG Keyring" entry.



Accepting the defaults (it will automatically hook you up with a Fedora yum channel mirror), click Forward and it will start retrieving the update header info.

Next, you're prompted to select the kernel update package.



By default, packages starting with kernel* are skipped. You should install the kernel update. Check the box to include the kernel update.

It's not really anything to worry about at this stage (you haven't compiled a custom kernel yet), for it will preserve the original kernel in your boot loader's configuration. If it doesn't boot, then you just go back and choose the old kernel from the grub boot menu. If that were to happen, you would press the any key and use the arrow keys to select other installed kernels.

Now you get a similar prompt for the rest of the update packages.



Just check "Select All Packages" to update all the available packages that you have installed.



It will first download all the packages, and when it's finished downloading you will have to click to install them. After it is all complete and the packages are installed, that irritating red exclamation mark icon turns to a green icon with a check mark.

I would recommend that you reboot your computer as soon as the update process completes.

[Grogan]

This should get you going with Fedora Core 3. Explore all the applications and configuration utilities.

I hope you enjoy working with Fedora Core.

[Grogan]

The steps shown here haven't changed appreciably in Fedora Core 4, so the information and screens here are still applicable.

[Grogan]

Post install configuration hasn't changed drastically in Fedora Core 5, but the look and feel has changed somewhat and you also need to use Yum to install updates instead of the old redhat up2date application.

For starters, the menus have changed a bit. For example, to get to the services configuration:

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You have to go to System/Administration/Server Settings and choose Services. You may disable services you don't need. For example, I disabled everything except Network, sshd, syslogd Haldaemon and Message Bus. (Hal and Messagebus are more important now). Note that this does not mean that you should disable all of those. Judge what is important to you.

Using YUM to get your Fedora system up to date

YUM is a very easy to use command line utility

Gain root privileges, by typing

su -

in a terminal, and supplying the password.

To check for updates, and download necessary indexes to set up your repository, type:

yum check-update

If this is your first time running it, there will be a sizable number of updates available.



It will list the available updates.

To install all the updates, simply type:

yum update

It will download all the package headers for the updates



It will then present you with a confirmation. Say y and it will download all the updates for the packages that you have installed and install them:



While yum only updates installed packages, it may need to install a few new packages to satisfy dependencies. On mine here, it's going to update 42 installed packages. This is not the first time I've run this... it's just the number of new updates in the last few weeks, since I last updated this system. I'd advise you to keep up with it more regularly, for Fedora is updated often.

After it finishes downloading, it checks the transactions and proceeds to install the updates:



Don't be alarmed by the number of transactions because it includes the cleanup operations and stuff after it finishes installing them as well.



When it's done it dumps a messy list of all the packages it has installed, and returns you to the root prompt.

After installing major updates, you should reboot the computer even if the kernel wasn't updated. Uptime is just for egos, and it's best to reboot after libraries have been changed out from under foot. Whether it's really necessary or not depends on what has been updated, of course.