I’m going to cheap out and review FC8 in a VM as I don’t have a partition to dedicate to a full-on hardware installation (I’ll pay for this choice a bit later) at the moment.
FC8 was downloaded directly from the fedoraproject.org site in ISO DVD format.
The first part of this post discusses some pains in getting Virtual PC to play nice with FC8… scroll ahead if you don’t care about installing under Virtual PC…
A previously installed copy of Microsoft Virtual 2007 will be used to host the FC8 install. The VM will be allocated 512MB of RAM and a 32GB virtual drive. The host OS is Windows XP on an Intel E6600 with 3GB of RAM.
Right off the bat, the graphical installation seems to be out of the question. Once beyond the bootloader, the generic framebuffer doesn’t seem to be handled well by Virtual PC 2007 but I’m sure this is fine on real hardware (in hindsight, this probably isn’t true, if you specify the kernel parameters described below during the installer’s kernel boot, the graphical install should work just fine).
The text installer software is the ever familiar Anaconda installer, where the 32GB virtual disk was partitioned and formatted using defaults most of the way along. The “Office and Productivity”, “Software Development” and “Web Server” collections were selected for installation.
The installer chugged through and completed in fairly short order.
The VM was rebooted and then things got interesting.
It seems that FC8 installed and is up and running. It’s in the same unreadable/skewed colours that I experienced when trying the graphical installer.
Again, this reeks of a framebuffer problem that is exasperated by Virtual PC. A quick bit of google-research yields an important kernel parameter:
fbcon=map:9
Digging into the kernel docs, I find the description for this option: (while I enjoy finding the solution, I always question what exactly a given parameter does!)
3. fbcon=map:<0123> This is an interesting option. It tells which driver gets mapped to which console. The value ‘0123′ is a sequence that gets repeated until the total length is 64 which is the number of consoles available. In the above example, it is expanded to 012301230123… and the mapping will be:
tty | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 …
fb | 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 0 …(’cat /proc/fb’ should tell you what the fb numbers are)
One side effect that may be useful is using a map value that exceeds the number of loaded fb drivers. For example, if only one driver is available, fb0, adding fbcon=map:1 tells fbcon not to take over the
console.Later on, when you want to map the console the to the framebuffer device, you can use the con2fbmap utility.
How exactly we got to map:9 is either a well informed choice or the result of trial and error, none-the-less, we can see FC8 from within Virtual PC… well a text console anyways.
So, wanting to experience FC8 from a graphical perspective, I turned the guns onto X. Starting “gdm” does the same nasty colour screwiness experienced earlier. X will require a little tweak. Thankfully the research that uncovered “fbcon” also hinted that a reduction in X colour depth would also be needed. A quick 4 byte change to /etc/X11/xorg.conf is needed
Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Videocard0″
DefaultDepth 16
SubSection “Display”
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
EndSubSection
EndSection
Swap out the Depth/DefaultDepth of 24 for 16’s as shown above.
Another common problem with this seems to be the lack of mouse support within X when under Virtual PC. This again is mitigated with another kernel option “i8042.noloop”. Edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file and edit the following line:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-42.fc8 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
with
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-42.fc8 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet fbcon=map:9 i8042.noloop
Reboot the VM.
——————————————————-
Alright, a review of Fedora Core 8 can now proceed!
Looking at the release notes, we can expect
- Gnome 2.20 that offers mail notification in the Evolution client.
- New PDF form completion functionality from the Evince viewer
- Revamped Appearance control panel, and help.
- Online Desktop
- KDE 3.5.8
- CodecBuddy: This sounds interesting as codec installation is usually a nuisance…
- OpenOffice.org 2.3
- Improved Bluetooth devices
- Improved suspend/resume and multimedia keyboard support.
- Improved power management
- Infinity, the newest look and feel from the Fedora Art team
- New graphical firewall configuration tool, system-config-firewall that replaces system-config-securitylevel.
What’s missing from the release notes is that Asterisk from Digium is available as part of the Package Manager! I’ve dedicated a post to this that validates and begins to explore this important FC8 package
So, first order of business is to satisfy the Package Manager, and let it apply the 238 updates.
While the updates were applying I played around with the user interface, and nothing remarkable jumps up, it’s the very familiar Gnome interface with neat-o gradient-purple-arc desktop art.
The age old question of how quickly I could become productive with a given distro is always a great test.
Here’s the goal:
- a LAMP installation
- Eclipse with the PDT (PHP Development Tools)
- MySQL Query Browser and Administrator
Eclipse
For some reason, I decided to pick-up and install Eclipse first. The Europa core is easy enough, simply installed it via the FC8 Package Manager. As usual, installing the PDT is an exercise in finding the right package repositories from Eclipse. This is really a matter for another post, but you’d think that the Update Manager in Eclipse would have some way of retrieving the package source path for the plug-ins you want to install. I mean, really, it’s asking you satisfy the dependency for “org.eclipse.gef.something” and there isn’t a central directory that maps to the namespace? Anyhow, for the sake or anyone interested, to install PDT, you need to add some Remote Sites to the Eclipse Update Manager Find and Install feature.
These sites are:
- EMF: http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/updates
- PDT: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates
- GEF: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/gef/update-site/releases/site.xml AND
- WST: http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates/
(I stand corrected, all you really need to add is the PDT and in most cases Eclipse ships with the appropriate webtools packages. Pay close attention and select only the packages PDT and WST from the chooser and you should only have 2 things selected)
While Eclipse is chugging away at downloading and installing PDT and it’s baggage, let see what state FC8 leaves Apache in after the install.
A quick “service httpd start” fires up Apache and I pointed Firefox to http://localhost.
Up comes the Fedora Test Page.
PHP
I’m presuming there will be no PHP installed at this point, but I’ll create a PHP test page that will let us know we’ve got it done. Create a file in /var/www/html called test.php and add <?phpinfo();?> to the first line and save. Set the file permissions to be globally readable “chmod o+r test.php”. Navigate to http://localhost/test.php
To my astonishment, PHP 5.2.4 seems to be installed configured and ready to go!
MySQL
This is too easy, back to the Package Manager, and choose MySQL Database from the “Servers” package group.
After letting it install, I jumped back to the shell where a “service mysqld start” was issued. MySQL snapped to life and initialized it’s defaults. No annoying “mysql.sock” errors whining about mis-configured symlinks to the sockets or anything!! I always follow up with a “
mysql_secure_installation” which really tightens up the security of the MySQL server.
There you have it, MySQL extensions were installed and enabled by default by FC8 given my package selections during the initial install.
I must say, I wasn’t looking forward to this, but wow… in the end it was painless. I have a viable PHP development environment ready to go in only a few minutes with Eclipse being the (and only mild at that) nuisance.
Firewall
Given all this is running in a VM onto of XP, I pointed Firefox from my XP desktop to the VM’s IP via http://10.10.50.167/test.php to see if the Apache installation was listening or firewalled by default. The page timed out.
Assuming again that the FC8 Firewall does not allow port 80, I flipped back to FC8 and opened up the Firewall Configuration and made port 80 “Trusted”.
Upon refreshing Firefox on the XP side, the phpinfo() test page came right up. I don’t have a copy of FC7 installed to compare against, but this brand-new Firewall Configuration feels much better. It’s much more intuitive to use and the feedback seems vastly improved. Again, if memory serves me, this new version allows you to address all sorts of other devices (eth, ippp,isdn,ppp,tun) that simply weren’t available as selectable options in the previous version. The default rules seem to be fairly tight mostly allowing services that employ encrypted protocols while denying most everything else.
Finally, to satisfy the goals of this review, the mysql-gui-tools package needs to be installed as it provides MySQL Query Browser and the MySQL Administrator. Again, using the FC8 package manager, these are installed in mere moments.
This is a good spot to wrap up this post. FC8 continues to deliver a robust installation that is well thought out. The real gold of this distribution is the Package Manager that like many other distros provides a wealth of software.
More importantly: The software installed from the Package Manager is configured in a manner that just works; this hasn’t always been the case. Previous versions have not been so gentle, especially in the realm of getting a LAMP server working in minutes rather than hours of trying to dis-assemble an RPM dependency hell!
I’ll keep this VM around and document any other observations as I come across them.
I’d really like to allocate a partition on my desktop to see how the 3d desktop features run on my hardware (twin 8800GT).
- Paul