So, a new release of Fedora was set free just last week, the so-called “Beefy Miracle”. A couple of releases ago (or maybe last release), I had really thought I might wait at least a month after a release before upgrading. Turns out my curiosity got the best of me, and I went and upgraded my laptop mere days after the release.
Fortunately, this release has been much much better right out of the box.
In case you haven’t heard, there was a little fork of the OpenOffice project not too long ago. They can explain the reasons for it a whole lot better than I can, so I’m not going to. Normally, I never built OpenOffice on Gentoo because I knew it would take a darn long time, and the pre-built 32-bit binaries worked well enough. With the fork, I decided to try it out anyway.
Fedora 14 was released just a day or two ago. I figured I’d be cutting-edge and upgrade on pretty much the day it came out.
Of course, as with last time, I’m trying to do so on a laptop with little room for any more stuff. This time though, I tried as hard as I could to get preupgrade to work instead of doing a new install.
The Free Space Issue /boot The first issue was, of course, the lack of free space, on both /boot and /.
Update: The ModemManager rule should really only apply to the USB device, not the TTY. I updated the rule below to be a bit more specific.
Around the end of July, I ordered a Bus Pirate from Seeed Studio. It took about a week to ship, which is pretty quick, I think. I picked it up from the post office on Tuesday.
After opening the package and plugging it in, I was greeted with nice blinky lights, and my computer didn’t start smoking, so that was a good sign.
So I recently had to create a whole bunch of invites. Not a huge number like a thousand, but more than enough that I didn’t want to make each one individually. Anyway, I decided to make them in Scribus. It’s semi-professional, and has grade-A output. After the fact, I’d say that it was a pretty good choice, except for a few annoying wrinkles.
The Good On the good side, Scribus is really stringent about printing issues (though that wasn’t as much of a concern this time).
Round about last week, I switched my desktop from Gentoo to Fedora. It took a few days to get everything the way I wanted. But it only took that long because I had lots of data to backup and (selectively) restore, and I only worked in the evenings. Fortunately, a “re-install” is way less painful than Windows, since all you really need to keep is your home directory. I just don’t know how Windows users live through it, especially without all their programs in a convenient package manager.
Well, this didn’t go as smoothly as the live USB versions, mostly due to preupgrade.
I don’t have a “standard” install, you might say. This is on a laptop that’s not mine and Fedora is not the primary OS. So it’s very space-constrained. I don’t even have the recommended 200MB (now the recommendation is a whopping 500MB) space for /boot. Personally, I think that’s a ridiculous amount of room to hold a kernel and initrd (even if they are generic), but that’s the default install size.
So there’s been quite a few new releases of distributions recently. Last month, there’s been Ubuntu 10.04 and Linux Mint 9. This month it’s Fedora 13.
Anyway, I just updated my live boot drive with all of those and everything works pretty well.
Well, I’ve been trying to boot Fedora from ISO, but haven’t exactly been successful. On the bug, you can see a possible fix, but it’s a bit complicated and requires messing with the image from an existing install.
Instead, I figured out a way to do it that uses the extracted files. It’s pretty simple. First, mount the ISO and extract three files:
the LiveOS image: squashfs.img and possibly osmin.
So, I’m still trying to figure out the Fedora boot, but in the meantime, I tried to figure out how to boot from a few recovery systems.
First off, let’s try Parted Magic. This one is pretty simple since they provide a “USB” version. If you extract that, you’ll find a boot and a pmagic folder. Copy the pmagic folder to the USB drive. In boot/grub/grub.lst, you’ll find a whole bunch of boot options.