I’ve been using Fedora Core 1 (FC1) for a few months now and have been quite happy with it. It is a good distribution with a minimal number of bugs (if any) that have caused me problems. Of course, it took some tweaking to get it just right, but I can accept that for the price.
Since I had such a good experience with FC1, why not try the latest and greatest? Gnome 2.6 sounded great, the new 2.6 Linux Kernel improved speed and brought more features for desktop users, and the big plus, for me, is the new InputMethod Switcher. The ability to enter Japanese characters is one of the few things I need Windows for. So, I was really looking forward to Fedora Core 2 (FC2).
About the computer (feel free to skip this part)
This list is according to FC2’s Hardware Browser and some additional information provided by me.
- One CR-4802TE CD Writer
- No Floppy Disk
- Two Fujitsu MPE3170AT Hard Drives
- Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 Sound Card
- nVidia NV18 GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x Video Card
- K7VMM+ EliteGroup Motherboard with on board NIC and disabled on board sound
- AMD 1300 Mhz Duron
- 512 MB RAM
In addition, I have the computer connected to a 4 port D-Link router, creating a two computer home network. A KVM switch is used to share the monitor, keyboard, and mouse between the FC2 machine and W2K machine.
The Download
I have always liked Redhat’s site for being easy to navigate and professional in appearance. The Fedora project’s site is no different and finding an official mirror to download the 4 ISOs from was easy. I had them in no time at all. I performed an MD5CHECKSUM, the ISOs were good, and proceeded to burn them to CD. I had never used the burning application in FC1 and quickly found out I could not use the basic Nautilus application (///burn). Redhat.com had some Redhat Linux 9 documentation on burning ISOs using XCDRoast which was fairly accurate and got me going (there were some discrepancies though).
The next day I tried to install FC2 and ran the media testing tool. The test failed, or at least that was my take on it. 5 seconds after beginning the test I got a blue screen filled with nonsense characters and the computer froze, needing a hard-reset. I tested the remaining CDs and received the same result. At this point I’m thinking, “What a terrible way to indicate that the CDs have a problem.” Luckily, the local Half Price Computer Books began selling Linux distributions and I could bypass what I thought was my CD burning ineptitude. $15.99 CDN later I’m back trying to install FC2. I test the media again (mainly to prove how clever I was to buy the CDs instead) and I get the same blue screen with nonsense characters!!!!!
I went ahead with the installation and that went without a hitch. So my conclusion is that the media testing utility is broken in FC2. Not too big a deal but I did needlessly waste time and money on this glitch.
On to the Installation
The installation process was virtually identical to FC1 (as far as I can remember) with a spiffy new FC2 graphic in the beginning. I chose the graphical installation, with auto-partitioning, and selected “custom” as the installation type. I was given enough control over the installation to get what I want without being overwhelmed with detailed questions that I have no idea how to answer.
One problem I did notice is that prior to entering the graphical installation mode the contents on the screen fit nicely within the screen boundaries. As soon as I entered the graphical installation mode the contents were skewed to the right. I can easily adjust this but I found it odd to have this discrepancy. My Windows machine connected to the same monitor does not have this problem so it is a bit annoying to have to adjust the monitor settings when switching between machines (a KVM switch is used to share the one monitor with two computers).
One feature that I would have liked to have during installation is the ability to set the computer’s name. I do recall an option to assign a name but the example given was something like, “computername.domainname.com” which didn’t seem applicable to me at the time. Perhaps a second example like “computername.localdomain” (with some explanation) would be helpful for us home-using networking neophytes (if in fact this does set the computer’s name)?
When the computer rebooted and went through the initial set-up phase the important stuff worked flawlessly. The video card and monitor were detected correctly, the test sound played clearly, and I had access to the Internet. Surprisingly my Windows computer was visible on the Network but I was unable to access it. No matter, I’ll fix that later.
I really would have liked my second hard drive to have been mounted automatically, but no such luck. Editing /etc/fstab is easy. So easy in fact that it seems pointless to not have it done automatically. LindowsOS 4.5 had no problem detecting and mounting this ReiserFS drive, can’t the Fedora Project do the same?
Next step: Redhat’s Update Agent
I ran Redhat’s update agent. Clicked “Okay” or “Next” in a few dialogue boxes and away it went. In approximately 10 minutes all the updates had been downloaded and applied. This was much faster than I recall from FC1 so whatever the change was, nice work. At the end I received the oh so pleasant blue check-mark icon. Instant gratification is good.
Up to this point I consider the basic installation complete and now it is just a matter of enabling services and customizing the system.
Renaming the Computer
I searched the System Tools and System Setting menu options and saw no tool that could help me accomplish this task. Oh well, I’m used to Googling for information in order to perform some basic tasks. The various queries I tried didn’t give me any relevant results nor did a search of the Redhat Web site. I did find a thread on a newsgroup that asked the exact question, but of course it went unanswered.
In my searching I did find this great site for FC2 tips though: http://home.gagme.com/greg/. I’ll be back to this site later.
Without instructions I tried the next best thing: remembering what I did with FC1. This eventually worked but not after some serious frustration. First, I tried adding the following line to /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 newcomputername.localdomain newcomputername
This seemed too easy but I couldn’t remember what else to do so I tried rebooting. The computer booted much slower and the login screen still said “localhost.localdomain” in the lower right-hand corner. Grrrr.
A little more Googling and I learned about the hostname utility available from the command line. So I open a terminal and bring up the man pages like so: man hostname. From the “instructions” it sounds like I can rename the computer by switching to root and entering the command hostname newcomputername. Seemed to work. When I type hostname to retrieve the computer’s name I get the “newcomputername”. Yeah! I reboot but alas it still boots slow and still says “localhost.localdomain” in the lower right-hand corner of the login screen. Grrrr!
Back to surfing through the tools in gnomes application launcher. I tried System Settings > Network and then select the hosts tab from the dialogue box. Changed “localhost.localdomain” to “newcomputername”, rebooted and finally it worked. Booted well and said “newcomputername” in the lower right-hand corner of the login screen. I am now elated and exhausted.
One down, more to go.
Set-up Mozilla’s Mail Client
Well this turned out to be impossible. Two mail clients are listed under Internet: “Email” and “Evolution Email”. This was the same in FC1 (although Email, a.k.a. Mozilla Mail, was listed a level lower). When I clicked on “Email”, Evolution 1.4 actually opened. Odd, I guess the menu entry is wrong. So I click on “Evolution Email”, and Evolution 1.4 opens again. Grrrr!! Fine, I can live with a screwed up menu since I was going to create a shortcut anyway. A little Googling and I find out how to open Mozilla Mail from the command line: mozilla -mail.
I thought for sure I would have solved the problem with this, but no. Instead I get the error “/content/messenger.xul cannot be found” Grrrr!!!
Seems I was destined to use Evolution Email in the end. This has been a pretty good experience so far. Quite a slick application and I much prefer it to the latest version of Outlook I am forced to use at work; however, I still prefer a more bare-bones client since I don’t use the calendar, tasks, or contacts features.
Mount the second hard-drive
FC1 didn’t do this automatically either and I took good notes from the last time I configured /etc/fstab so this went pretty smoothly. At the command line, SU to root and create a new sub-directory in /mnt. I’m unimaginative when it comes to naming hard-drives and simply named it “hdb1”.
Now open /etc/fstab in an editor and add the following line to the bottom:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 reiserfs default 1 1
Rebooted and it worked like a charm. That was nice and problem free for a change.
Get the Apache Web Server running with PHP
The main reason I have chosen to run the Fedora Project’s distribution is because of its reputation for being easy to install and configure and for its focus on the Gnome Desktop Environment. There are lot’s of other distributions that are more user friendly but they are part of the KDE camp.
Another reason for choosing the Fedora Project’s distribution is the very convenient and powerful server settings tools. I love being able to configure Apache from a simple GUI. This is not the case with FC2.
When I opened the HTTP tool under System Settings > Server Settings I was able to make all the changes I want. However, I couldn’t save any of the changes. I tried all sorts changes from extensive to hardly any (I.e. just changing the admins e-mail address) and still I could not save. I can only conclude that the save button is broken and hope that it gets fixed with a future update.
I was able to edit httpd.conf manually to make the necessary changes, and PHP was already enabled, so it really wasn’t that much of a hassle. But still, the save button really should have worked. Thankfully, the Services tool still worked and I could stop and start Apache with ease.
Japanese Language Input
While customizing the Gnome panel I found the InputMethod Switcher utility. This seemed wonderful. I envisioned an applet sitting in my panel that would allow me to click it and start entering Japanese characters into supported applications. Not so fast though. Adding this utility did not work. I see no new icon on the panel.
Why is it never easy? Oh well, I’ll come back to this later.
Closing
As you can see, setting up FC2 has not been without frustrations. I will, however, stick it out and try to get everything working. FC2 offers many great features which I have not touched on, like: speed (system feels much more responsive – this could be the extra 256 MB of RAM too), Gnome 2.6 is nice (spatial nautilus is one of the improvements that is taking some getting used to but other features are excellent).
Given my reasons for upgrading, I would not upgrade again but since I have it installed I will stick it out and try to get the important stuff working. Next stop, enabling YUM and getting all the multimedia stuff going!
About the author
I’ve been running GNU/Linux distributions for the past 2 – 3 years as my main desktop computer for personal and educational use. I’ve gone through Redhat Linux 8.0, Mandrake 9.0, LindowsOS 4.0 and 4.5 (before it changed to Linspire), Fedora Core 1 (FC1), and now Fedora Core 2 (FC2). I really like Gnome and the Fedora Project seems like the best distribution for supporting Gnome and being somewhat user friendly. I would like to try all the other distributions out there but I also have to be somewhat productive. Prior to becoming obsessed with GNU/Linux distributions I only had experience with the various incarnations of MS Windows (not counting a very brief stint with RadioShack’s CoCo III as a child). I’m a professional Web Developer living in Victoria, BC, Canada with fairly good computer knowledge but could probably be put to shame by the average Slashdot reader.
But enough about me…
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
You can get the 2.6.5 and 2.6.6 kernels with 8K stack size in RPM form here.
http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wlan/full/downloads-fc2-kernel…
That Evolution thing is really annoying. Even if you use KDE, the default mail client is Evolution. It probably makes sense if you want a uniform user experience, but if a user wants to switch from the default GNOME to KDE, they probably want to use the native KDE apps.
No, not really. Evolution is integral to the Red Hat experience, many things have been “built” around it in the product. So, even if you decide to use twm, Evolution should continue be the default mail client because of the above reason.
The screen’s shift to the right is caused by the “nv” video driver. The driver works really well, it’s just one of its quirks. All of my systems with Nvidia cards (using any distribution) have that same shift to the right.
Downloading and installing NVIDIA’s Linux video driver, which does not have the “right-hand shift” of the “nv” driver, will fix that and gives you 3D to boot!
Have you noticed that most of these articles are based on the fact that the users basically had to do a clean install? Is there a way, either via yum or up2date, which could point you to the /core/ directories to do an upgrade? Wouldn’t that be easier?
Sure, just install apt-get from fedora.us and modify /etc/apt/source.plist, and replace the fedora/1 paths to fedora/2 paths, run apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and go eat, there is about 250-300 packages to update.
You can easily set the hostname during installation when you set the network preferences.
If you didnt, just go to the system-config-network utility and then go to the DNS tab and set your hostname.
Dosn’t seem very difficult from this end…
firstly, I was disappointed that the evolution email client which has been so famously reported on for being able to work with exchange did not infact have any option for that when setting up an account
secondly, I didn’t have any problem with the media test at all – it worked flawlessly…
No, not really. Evolution is integral to the Red Hat experience, many things have been “built” around it in the product. So, even if you decide to use twm, Evolution should continue be the default mail client because of the above reason.
It still doesn’t make sense at all. However, RedHat and its derivatives are famous for its positioning about KDE…
To those interested in a nice KDE experience, keep away from RedHat/Fedora unless you’re inclined to have to struggle to make it behaves well (like I did).
DeadFish Man
“To those interested in a nice KDE experience, keep away from RedHat/Fedora unless you’re inclined to have to struggle to make it behaves well (like I did). ”
it was pretty easy to change the theme, remove the icons and replace them with my favorites. no struggle at all
It is a good distribution with a minimal number of bugs (if any) that have caused me problems.
How can it be good if it has bugs that cause you problems, that can’t be good.
“While customizing the Gnome panel I found the InputMethod Switcher utility. This seemed wonderful. I envisioned an applet sitting in my panel that would allow me to click it and start entering Japanese characters into supported applications. Not so fast though. Adding this utility did not work. I see no new icon on the panel.
Why is it never easy? Oh well, I’ll come back to this later.”
this is one of the major changes that usually doesnt get mentioned in the reviews. good job on that.
“How can it be good if it has bugs that cause you problems, that can’t be good. ”
probably because they can be classified as annoyances or because the reviewer didnt mind and found the other improvements worth while
it was pretty easy to change the theme, remove the icons and replace them with my favorites. no struggle at all
Some software made specifically to use some KDE features don’t work with RedHat even if you compile it from source. Everybody and their dogs these days knows that RedHat trashed their KDE implementation in order to make it works a little bit like Gnome since the 8.0 days.
There are a workaround for it: http://kde-redhat.sf.net
However, I couldn’t upgrade my KDE through apt with their repositories when I tried (Don’t remember the error messages anymore). So I ended installing KDE binaries by hand, broking some dependencies and having a hell of a trouble to make apt accept what I did.
“Some software made specifically to use some KDE features don’t work with RedHat even if you compile it from source”
pretty vague. name them and blue curve doesnt look very gnomish to me. i didnt like the earlier versions but the fc2 one looks slick enough. i still prefer plastik thou
In FC2, mozilla and mozilla-mail are two seperate programs, much like FireFox and Thunderbird. You have to type “up2date mozilla-mail” in a terminal to install mozilla-mail. At that point, it’s in the system menu and can be added to the panel (and Evolution deleted from the panel).
The error you encountered trying to run “mozilla -mail” arose from the fact that the installed mozilla is just the browser and composer, not the emailer. If you had done “up2date –show-available” you might have noticed mozilla-mail as one of the available packages.
Also, the media tester worked peachy on the DVD, so either it’s different on the CD, or something specific to your system caused it to go out to lunch. As long as you have a DVDRW, I highly recommend getting the DVD distro as opposed to all the CDs. One disc is so much easier to handle than four.
“Also, the media tester worked peachy on the DVD, so either it’s different on the CD, or something specific to your system caused it to go out to lunch.”
it seems to be specific to his system. media check worked fine here with 4 cds.
pretty vague. name them and blue curve doesnt look very gnomish to me. i didnt like the earlier versions but the fc2 one looks slick enough. i still prefer plastik thou
YMMV, but I’ve found some glitches with the following KDE apps and I believe they’re RedHat(9.0) only:
Juk: Don’t play anything at all.
Amarok: Same as Juk.
Apollon: The preview section don’t play anything, be it audio or video. Images are displayed fine though.
Digikam: Most of the buttons in the toolbar don’t have its proper icon.
GwenView: Same as Digikam.
These are just the ones that I remember right now. I’m sure that there are others. I’ve tried to change the prefix of these apps during the compile stage in order to match the $KDEDIR and several other little tricks and tweaks, but didn’t have success.
Of course there are alternatives for every one in that list in the GNOME camp, but except for XMMS (which is great), I’m not too fond of these alternatives.
And… Come on! There is nothing more gnome-ish in this world than BlueCurve…. 🙂
Believe it or not, I just got this working minutes before I read your review.
To get it running (for japanese, at least), launch system-config-services (called “services” under “server settings” in “system settings”), and make sure both IIim and canna are enabled and running (make sure the check box is checked, and look at the status to make sure there running. if their not, highlight each and click the ‘start’ button).
Load up a gtk app (all i’ve tested with – try gedit, nice and simple). right click in the text-entry area, then go to input methods, then select ‘internet/intranet input method’
the panel applet should now be visible (it should stay visible, i think)
right click on it, and configure to your heart’s content
just like kinput, you can hit ctrl+space to change languages, or (new) you can click on the panel applet.
“YMMV, but I’ve found some glitches with the following KDE apps and I believe they’re RedHat(9.0) only:”
i am not sure whether this is something to do with redhat but the repos specific to redhat have compatible rpms
check dag’s repos for all these apps
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/
The CD-check has been broken on my computer since RH9 (i think) and all the (CD) installs complete without any problem.
In FC1 (and FC2) you can rightclick on a .iso file and choose Burn to CD (or something like that).
You can change the default mail application: Preferences -> Preferred Applications. Choose Mozilla Mail from the dropdown list. You can use the “Evolution” icon to start the mail client. I use it to change the default webbrowser to Epiphany.
The nice thing about this is that you can click on a mailto link and mozilla-mail is started instead of Evolution (so it works in every GNOME-app).
Just a note that /etc/sysconfig/network is where the hostname is set (in the format HOSTNAME=machinehostname) – just edit that and reboot. You may indeed want the hostname in a 127.0.0.1 line in /etc/hosts as well of course.
Have two physical disks minimum in your box
Mount /home one
Mount / on another
Don’t bother with an OS “upgrade”, just reinstall.
Yes there is some time lost reinstalling some supplemental software, but you won’t have a borked install.
Inputting Japanese in FC2 works fine here. Just installed it during the installation by selecting both Japanese and English during the install. You can’t switch languages unless you install the right programs during the install. The Japanese language inputting daemons load during boot just as they should. No daemons loading = no Japanese inputting.
Juk, Amarok and the others do not play because Redhat insists on shipping Free/Open Source software only, which is not patent encumbered. mp3 playback and other video playback, except for mpeg 1, is not permissible using theri rules. its not a KDE problem on Redhat, but its a feature. Its trivial to add these capabilities to your installation.
Thanks for those instructions. They were pretty accurate and got me typing in Japanese in no time. I noticed that the Gimlet preferences dialogue box was pretty unresponsive and buggy. When I get more time I’ll contribute to Fedora’s testing effort: http://apac.redhat.com/iiimftest/
“Just a note that /etc/sysconfig/network is where the hostname is set (in the format HOSTNAME=machinehostname) – just edit that and reboot. You may indeed want the hostname in a 127.0.0.1 line in /etc/hosts as well of course.”
This is the reason for bootup being slow, likely because of sendmail it needs hostnames with a . in it much like mypc.localdomain instead of just mypc. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-November/msg06432.h…
I don’t get this guy having so much problem with mozilla
mail. Right there clearly on the internet menu is
“Mozilla Mail”. Seems pretty easy to me. Or why not run
mozilla and just select mail from pull down?
Mark
I can’t seem to get my box to connect to the internet (yes I’ve tried that net4-whatever setting where you have to turn it off.
then you should have readed that exchange-support for evolution is availlable through “ximian connector” now called “novell connector” or something like that.
search ximian/novell and you find it.
for me it works fine, except that its a bit slow if you have a huge mailbox cause connector uses OWA to do its job.
Hi
Well firstly he missed where it says to enter your Hostname – Stands out a mile, as long as you deselect DHCP (Which you need to do to set the hostname anyway).
Secondly he missed where you can set the mount point of partitions, on any disk (whether your formatting it or not). This adds it to fstab just fine, how else do you expect it to know where to put it?
Just my thoughts anyways…
Ben
“Also, the media tester worked peachy on the DVD, so either it’s different on the CD, or something specific to your system caused it to go out to lunch.”
it seems to be specific to his system. media check worked fine here with 4 cds.
Media checked worked fine here too! 🙂
I made a clean install on Celeron 1.8 / 256MB RAM, but the thing is soo slooow… of course I switched off all non critical services, but still, it takes too much time to boot.
“mozilla -mail” does work, but in the script (I think lauch-mail or so) parameters are stripped out, so only “mozilla” starts :-)))
NVidia driver included is very slow too – just try running tuxracer… not for my GeForce 2MX (but no problems with NVidia driver from NVidia, I hope there will be a way to use it in standard FC2 kernel).
And much more, I will not write it all. I was little disappointed with this upgrade.
Very nice distro though, it should try to speed up and debug all that “small errors”.
After adding another harddisc in /etc/fstab (like /mnt/hdb1), you only have to run the following command as root “mount /mnt/hdb1”. No need to reboot after changing /etc/fstab.
Want a non-Red Hat KDE? Go here –
http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/
Follow the simple steps listed on the page and use apt or yum to install it. You can still use the Bluecurve(tm) theme if you desire. There’s not a monumental difference, but there are a few packages that RH/Fedora does not build and include. If you don’t like the RH/Fedora implementation of Gnome, go here –
http://www.ximian.com/
And FC2 now comes with Xfce as an option. Or install any other GUI you want. After all, it’s Linux; lots of choices for those who take the time to learn a little.
Juk, Amarok and the others do not play because Redhat insists on shipping Free/Open Source software only, which is not patent encumbered. mp3 playback and other video playback, except for mpeg 1, is not permissible using theri rules. its not a KDE problem on Redhat, but its a feature. Its trivial to add these capabilities to your installation.
I do know that RedHat don’t ship any audio and/or video codec of any sort with their distros, but like I said before, I know my way around RedHat (been using it since 1998 and already used to its quirks).
I’ve already installed every multimedia add-on available for RedHat/Fedora from the most recognized repositories (except that from Dag Wieers… Thanks for the tip!), but I still can’t make it work. Like I said before, I am an apt user since the days of the betas that Conectiva released when they ported apt to the rpm world.
does anyone know if fedora supports a dist-upgrade like update mechanism? i never digged why i would repeatedly have to download EVERYTHING i dont even need on cdroms simply to update my system?
now i use debian, am happy with it and wonder whats all this fedora buzz is about
I recently upgraded my fileserver (no X, via Yum) to FC2, and my Samba performance has gone through the floor. When I transfer files across the network, memory usage goes up and up until the transfer stalls and I have to kill the processes.
I’m going to revert to FC1 as soon as I have some free time, as I have been unable to find anyone who’s reported a similar problem.
I have to sympathize with the author when it comes to installing from CD’s. I have had too many problems caused by bad CDs and it’s a pain. I’ve given up and started installing over the network whenever possible. The good news is that I’ve found this much easier, faster and less prone to failure than installing from CD/DVD.
The best way to do this in my opinion is to download the DVD based distribution, loopback mount the DVD iso and copy/link the files to somewhere you can get to them on your local network. If you have a second computer on your LAN with about 2.5 gigs of drive space you can do this (skipping source rpms). There is an iso included on the DVD image (boot.iso) that will make a tiny bootable CD that does an install over the network. It’s great. It installs fast, you don’t need to worry about CD-3 being scratched and having your install crash half way through. No CD swapping, you can put it in and walk away. No scratching $2 DVD-R’s and ruining them forever. If you get to the GUI part of the install, you’re pretty much golden. It supports accessing the install files through NFS, FTP, HTTP and SMB (so you can even host the files on a Windows box.) I usually use HTTP and it’s worked well for me so far.
NVidia driver included is very slow too – just try running tuxracer… not for my GeForce 2MX (but no problems with NVidia driver from NVidia, I hope there will be a way to use it in standard FC2 kernel).
Most Nvidia drivers found since Red Hat 8 were slow AFAIR because they are generic thus does not include 3D graphic accelerator. You should know this since you used to have Fedora Core 1.
Concerning Kernel 2.6.x found on Fedora Core 2, the team enabled 4KSTACK option that crashed Nvidia driver (it use 8KSTACKS). The latter is currently revised and should be out soon. Meanwhile, you can grab this kernel on http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wlan/full/downloads-fc2-kernel…
smoke: now i use debian, am happy with it and wonder whats all this fedora buzz is about
No offense but posting this on specific topic like Fedora is unecessary. This only bring useless flamebait.
Hi Ronald
At work yesterday during an installation of FC2 I came across the same problem that you had with your installation. The install kept crashing around the media check stage and I even saw the same blue screen with junk characters all over the place. I tried installing over NFS, local CDROM, and I even tried all of the same things again with FC1. Nothing worked …
So I finally thought maybe I should test the machines memory – BINGO!! – problem solved. I had a 256MB memory module that was faulty. I replaced it and the install went as smoothly as expected.
Now – how to test your memory? Boot from your first FC2 CD. At the prompt type ‘memtest86’. You will be immediately thrown into the memtest86 application and it automatically starts testing your memory. The only important thing to look for is the ‘Errors’ column in the middle of the screen. If it says anything but ‘0’ there – you have a faulty memory module. You can find out which one by removing modules one at a time and retesting …
Good luck!
Did you read the paragraph on this part? Have you tried running Mozilla’s Mail application from a freshly installed FC2?
There are two e-mail applications listed under Internet. There are two different icons which to me indicate two different applications. They both open Ximian’s Evolution. This doesn’t seem right. Yes, I can fix it with apt-get but this still seems like a bug to me.
You can check the integrity of the CDs by running md5sum on them.
# md5sum /dev/cdrom
Check the value returned against the supplied md5sums. If they match the cd is good.
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/2/i386/iso/…
here’s a tip.
download control-center it implements a “preferred applications” menu entry (it’s in “preferences” under kde – i think in the control panel under gnome). this allows you to set your:
– browser
– mail client
– editor
– terminal
the dag wieers yum/apt repository has rpms for firefox/tbird and the control-center preferred apps dialog offers these as choices once they’re installed. once you’ve set these, your chosen apps come up pretty much any way you invoke them
works great.
it’s actually even easier, actually:
– loopback mount the iso’s
– export them thru nfs
– boot from first cd and type “linux askmethod” (“linux reisers askmethod” if you use reiser, as i do)
– tell it the nfs server’s address
it’s faster than install ing from cd’s on my network.
see this for further detail:
http://fedoranews.org/dowen/nfsinstall/