Upgrading to Fedora Core 3

autumn, my Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, has been upgraded to Fedora Core 3 from Fedora Core 2, an amazingly easy upgrade process. It detected my previous Fedora Core install, identified the packages installed on the system, and started the upgrade, no problems whatsoever. I didn’t happen to time how long the upgrade process itself took, but I’d estimate at least an hour and a half, probably more.

After that:

  1. First observation: the boot splash screen used under Fedora Core 3 now feature the words “Fedora Core” in the lower-right, which is nice. The boot screen also seems more capable of switching back to graphical mode if interrupted by something else. X-Windows seems to have kept my display settings and NVidia drivers intact.
  2. The new Gnome 2.8 install did override my previously installed bootloader themes. X also didn’t boot into my profiles properly first time around, complaining that it couldn’t find /bin/bash2. This required logging into a failsafe terminal as root and changing the shell for my main user from /bin/bash2 to /bin/bash.
  3. The Fedora Core splash screen no longer shows the “2” in the background — now it’s just a generic “Fedora Core” splash screen. I also had problems with some icons specified in my Gnome 2.7 installation (namely my BloGTK icon) — it failed to load initially. I also lost some of the panel applets and shortcuts I had set up — all easily restored.
  4. My wireless network connection refused to activate initially, which still doesn’t really make sense. I had to clear all the available network connections in the configuration, re-add the wireless device, and try again, only to find that it still gave me a “Determining IP information for eth0… failed.” message.

    I went ahead and restarted, watching the network interfaces boot up — I notice a “Device eth0 has different MAC address than expected, ignoring” message, followed by a failure message. Hmmmm….. I also noticed a “/dev/dvd: no such file or directory” notice for the DMA setup, which is a simple fix, but will wait until after my wireless connection can be fixed.

    It wasn’t my D-Link DI-614+ router, since that doesn’t have any MAC address restrictions on it currently, I cleared the hardware available in “Network Configuration”, saved the changes, closed the wizard, then reopened it to ensure the hardware detected correctly. Thinking it might be a weird thing with the Netgear MA401 card I’m using, I swapped the card to another card slot — THAT didn’t work. I updated the system through apt by stealing the wireless bridge connection from my home FreeBSD server.

At this point, autumn’s wireless card still isn’t cooperating — I’ll be trying to fix it tomorrow morning (Turkey Day!).

The other problem is that the Anaconda installer FC3 uses didn’t allow me to resize the partition during install. I’ll probably have to use GNU’s parted to nondestructively resize the partition and load Windows XP again.

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