[ILUG] RedHat Fedora Core 3 Installation Gotchas...

[Gareth Eason]

	   Hi,

	I've finally bitten the bullet and upgraded my trusty workstation which 
has been running RedHat 9 for the last $long_time. Since I don't plan to 
upgrade again for a similarly long time, I went with Fedora Core 3 - and 
spent a goodly chunk of last night and this morning fixing it after the 
installer broke stuff. For the world in general, here are the things I 
learned. They may be posted elsewhere, I've not googled, but here they 
are again, just in case :-)

Horribly broken display & failed boot
-------------------------------------
- If you have a mix of SCSI and IDE drives, the installation process is
   quite likely to put the SCSI drives at the end of the chain when it
   writes the grub.conf file. Upon reboot, however, the SCSI drives go to
   the start - and thus the bootloader cannot find where to boot from.
- There is a simple fix (thankfully.) If you are booting off SCSI (as I
   was) simply change the following lines to point at the correct disk:
- "splashimage=(hd2,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz"
   should become --> "splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz"
   (Your numbers might be different, but it's always the first number
   (the disk number) that will be wrong.)
- title Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.681_FC3)
         root (hd0,0)
         kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.681_FC3 ro root=LABEL=/1
         initrd /initrd-2.6.9-1.681_FC3.img
   THE "root (hd2,0)" line should become "root (hd0,0)"
   (Your numbers might be different, but it's always the first number
   (the disk number) that will be wrong.)



Fails to start X and locks up keyboard and mouse
------------------------------------------------
- I run a dual-head configuration, and I discovered that the rhgb
   (RedHat Graphical Boot) breaks this horribly for some reason.
- It's very simple to turn off. Just remove the "rhgb" from the kernel
   boot line in grub.conf
- "kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.681_FC3 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet" should
   become "kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.681_FC3 ro root=LABEL=/1 quiet"
- NOTE: I also removed the 'quiet' since I rarely reboot linux boxen and
   I like to see what they're doing when I do.


Dual Head Configuration
-----------------------
- RedHat (bless their little cotton socks) have provided a nice
   graphical tool for configuring dual head setups - but activating
   the dual-head option seemed to deactivate the ability for it to
   write out a config file for xorg. Not too helpful :-(
- I use 2 x Nokia 446XPro monitors, hung off an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro
   128MB graphics card.
- Rather than go through the details, here's the config I put together.
   It seems to work well for me. Feel free to adjust to taste, etc.

----------[ START - xorg.conf / Dual Head Setup ]----------

Section "ServerLayout"
         Identifier     "Dual Head Layout"
         Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
         Screen      1  "Screen1" RightOf "Screen0"
         InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
         InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
         Option         "Xinerama" "On"
EndSection

Section "Files"
         RgbPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
         FontPath     "unix/:7100"
EndSection

Section "Module"
         Load  "dbe"
         Load  "extmod"
         Load  "fbdevhw"
         Load  "glx"
         Load  "record"
         Load  "freetype"
         Load  "type1"
         Load  "dri"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
         Identifier  "Keyboard0"
         Driver      "kbd"
         Option      "XkbModel" "pc105"
         Option      "XkbLayout" "gb"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
         Identifier  "Mouse0"
         Driver      "mouse"
         Option      "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
         Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
         Option      "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
         Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
         Identifier   "Monitor0"
         VendorName   "Nokia"
         ModelName    "Nokia 446Xpro"
         DisplaySize  360        270
         HorizSync    30.0 - 107.0
         VertRefresh  50.0 - 150.0
         Option       "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
         Identifier "Monitor1"
         VendorName   "Nokia"
         ModelName    "Nokia 446Xpro"
         DisplaySize  360        270
         HorizSync    30.0 - 107.0
         VertRefresh  50.0 - 150.0
         Option       "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
         Identifier  "Radeon 9000 Pro Head0"
         Driver      "radeon"
         VendorName  "Radeon"
         BoardName   "ATI Radeon 9000 Pro"
         BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
         Screen      0
EndSection

Section "Device"
         Identifier  "Radeon 9000 Pro Head1"
         Driver      "radeon"
         VendorName  "Radeon"
         BoardName   "ATI Radeon 9000 Pro"
         BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
         Screen      1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
         Identifier "Screen0"
         Device     "Radeon 9000 Pro Head0"
         Monitor    "Monitor0"
         DefaultDepth     24
         SubSection "Display"
                 Depth     24
                 Modes    "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" 
"1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
         EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
         Identifier "Screen1"
         Device     "Radeon 9000 Pro Head1"
         Monitor    "Monitor1"
         DefaultDepth     24
         SubSection "Display"
                 Depth     24
                 Modes    "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" 
"1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
         EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
         Group        0
         Mode         0666
EndSection

----------[ END - xorg.conf / Dual Head Setup ]----------


	Hope this provides some help for other people who have difficulties 
installing and configuring FC3 on slightly non-standard setups. I'm 
pretty happy with the setup now - most things are back the way I wanted 
them and the 2.6 kernel is treating me well.

	Usual disclaimers apply, IANAL, YMMV, etc.

	Best regards,
	-->Gar