Fedora 14 Alpha

I wanted to test the newest pre-release of Fedora in VirtualBox. I know it is not a smooth ride, but this this time it slid below my lowest expectations.

• The default install does not work: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=621893. To work around I used VNC.
  1. Create two network interfaces in VirtualBox, one with host only adapter and the other with NAT.
  2. When installing put vnc at the and of the kernel line in grub.
  3. Select the host only adapter for installation
  4. The installer will tell you an IP address with a screen number.
  5. On the host start the VNC client and connect to the IP address given by the installer specifying the screen.
  6. Install the system.
• After a successful install the graphical first boot won’t start.
• So I installed VirtualBox-OSE-guest from rpm-fusion and startx worked.
• Updated the system with yum update and now it fails to start

The update has apparently messed up systemd. I must admit that I like the idea of systemd, but now will be very cautious to update to F14. There is a related post here.

A bit of a success

The ultimate goal is to make Snow Leopard work on the following hardware

• GigaByte P55M-UD2
• ATI Radeon HD4670 (Sapphire Ultimate passive cooled) using the DVI port. I’ve lost my VGA cable (doh).
• 4GB RAM, 1TB SATA HD, SATA DVD-rewriter

The installation went great with iBoot. Had to use the -x option though. Immediately upgraded to 10.6.3 using the combo update. The problem is that I want’ to know what is getting installed and what I am modifying, so I didn’t do anything to it.

After the update just by using the iBoot I wasn’t able to boot the system. A bit of research told me that it must be the graphics card. So I replaced the cdboot with a patched one from asere v.1.1.9. I’ve only changed the 0x10029490 device id from “Motmot” to “Shrike” in the ati.c file and recompiled the whole thing and then recomposed the iBoot CD. This is a partial success, because I am able to boot the install with the recomposed CD.

The next step is to make it boot from the hard drive directly with the minimal amount of modification. I wonder if it is possible as the CD uses a custom kernel and a kext cache file. Well, I could install this on the hard drive, no problem, but then again I wouldn’t know what’s going on.

At the moment having trouble to extract the mkext file, the utility on 10.5 Leopard is incompatible. Will try it later on a 10.6 machine.

Another little nugget. The latest BIOS (F8) for the motherboard seems to be problematic. Not even grub2 is able to load the multiboot /boot file on the HFS partition. So back to BIOS F6 an that seem to work fine.

Tonight I’ll try to get rid of the custom kernel and see how it goes.

Hackintosh and Fedora 13 GPT

I was trying to install F13 on GPT formatted drive, without success. It turns out that this was intentional. Hopefully it will be fixed soon: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=572488

I want to use GPT because I am experimenting with OS X as well. Would be nice to find out how to make my Ati HD4670 work with it. I bought this card because it was cheap and the 10.6.2 had its PCI ID and also the new iMacs have it. As it turns out the iMacs have the mobility version with a different PCI ID and they use displayport. Unfortunately, no version of HD4670 has displayport output, and making the DVI work is a bit of a hassle. I don’t understand the frame buffer business, but some suggest to suggest it from ‘MotMot’ to ‘Shrike’ in PC-EFI-10.6. I also tried iBoot from tonymacx86, and it booted in the end without display output. I was rather disappointed to find out that I’ve lost my VGA cable, because it seems that’s the only output that works now. The question is, should I invest into a HD4850/70 with displayport, so that it would work out of the box? I don’t understand why aren’t these cards sold with DP output, even though monitors tend to have it (e.g. my HP LP2475w).

Installing Rawhide

I knew that installing Rawhide is not for the faint hearted. But I never thought that it is impossible.

First I tried using boot.iso. It fails on my iMac (2006 late) my MacBook Pro 2,2 and the office computer a Mac Pro that is just half a year old.

Next tried the Live CD. All went well until anaconda, the Fedora installer crashed. I could get around it, as the CD allows to update it to the latest version. I supplied the –repo option with a local mirror and the installation finished, no complaints. After reboot GRUB hangs. No way to access the computer.

Can anybody suggest something that’s working? Is it completely broken? Or any other distro that has
atlas 3.8.2 or newer
ginac and cln, but not the buggy ginac as that can be found in debian, opensuses, and fedora, too
mingw32-qt 4.5.2
mingw32-gcc 4.4.1 with gfortran
nsis
and good KDE support with the most recent stable KDE?