Ironing out FC5 to FC6 upgrade...

After reading much about and seeing screen-captures of the new Fedora Core 6, I decided to upgrade to it. Unfortunately, when FC6 booted up nothing mentioned or shown in the reviews came up by default. I had to go around finding out what was missing and installing the applications that would have otherwise been installed by default (if it were a new install instead of an upgrade).

Here is a quick recap of what I did:

1. Upgraded using DVD ISO from an external USB hard drive which worked perfectly.
   

2. Had to apply a whole bunch of updates to get the system up to date.
   
   # yum --enablerepo=extras update
3. For some reason with the update, the kernel that got installed was of an i586 architecture, which was quickly resolved when installing nvidia driver and kernel module to support my NV34M [GeForce FX Go5200] nVidia Graphic Card:
   
   # rpm -e kernel
# yum --enablerepo=livna install kmod-nvidia

Note:

• This also got rid of my errors with CPU frequency scaling.
4. I was excited about the fact that FC6 now bundled AIGLX calling it "Desktop Effects", however I had to install this manually and did not come with the upgrade.
   # yum install compiz
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
# wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/projects/aiglx/aiglx.repo
# yum --enablerepo=aiglx update

   Upon reboot, you can now enable/disable the effects via: "System > Preferences > Desktop Effects".

   You can also turn on the compositing manager using command line, via:
   

   $ gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool true

   Also, make sure you have the below lines in your "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" file:
   

   Section "extensions"
Option "Composite"
EndSection

   Adding Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" to the "Device" section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf will also give you increased performance.

   Note:

   • If using nVidia card you will need nvidia driver version 1.0-9625 or higher for it to work. If you have installed the latest kmod-nvidia from the livna repository, it shouldn't be an issue.
     
   • I was getting high CPU loads when using twinview mode of my nvidia graphic card.

5. I had to install ndiswrapper kernel module and disable bcm43xx before I could get Broadcom BCM4309 802.11a/b/g, Dell Truemobile 1400 wireless card to work:
   
   # yum --enablerepo=livna install kmod-ndiswrapper

Disable bcm43xx by adding the below line in "/etc/modprobe.conf" file:


blacklist bcm43xx
6. There were enhancements in package management by way of "pirut" and "yum-updatesd", which combine to provide a notification applet, alerting the user when there is updated software available. But, I noticed that I did not get any sort of update software notification on my desktop. A little digging and found out that "yum-updatesd", also known as "Puplet" had to be installed.
   
   # yum install yum-updatesd
7. The system now comes with the excellent DejaVu Fonts Family, which increases Fedora's support for many languages that use the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets. I had to manually select the fonts from my system preferences ("System > Preferences > Fonts") which was defaulted to using Sans instead and I switched to using the DejaVu fonts. While at it, check that you have "Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)" turned on if you are on a laptop or using an LCD monitor. This greatly enhances the clarity of the fonts.

   Note:

   • Another change that I made to the default firefox browser font via "about:config" typed in the url, "font.default.x-western" was to switch it to "sans-serif" instead of the defaulted "serif" font, which greatly enhanced the clarity of pages that I visited that did not specify any font type.

8. Other applications that I installed that did not show up with the upgrade were beagle, tomboy, evince, gome-power-manager and gnome-pilot-conduits:
   
   # yum install beagle tomboy evince gome-power-manager gnome-pilot-conduits

Note:

• With the gnome-power-manager installed, you get the option to "Suspend" the computer, however I have had no success with either suspend or hibernate with my Dell D800 laptop.

Related Reading:

• Inside Fedora Core 6
  
• Introducing Fedora Core 6