We had an attentive 9 members present for Clint's main presentation on Fedora 12 and in addition, Clint also showed a new distribution release called Artistx .08 Live DVD, which was released on February 2nd of this week and is based on Ubuntu 9.04. More on this towards the bottom of the meeting notes.
Clint led off by commenting on his experience in upgrading Fedora 11 to Fedora 12, an in-place upgrade of an existing system. He stressed the importance of making sure that your system is fully updated before doing attempting to do the upgrade to Fedora 12. For Clint, this required 1.4 G of files be download as he had not updated his Fedora 11 in a while (a long while) and he let the computer run over night to do this little task. The next morning, he started the upgrade to Fedora 12 following the instructions found at http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-upgrade-from-fedora-11-to-fedora-12-des.... The actual process was very straight forward with only a couple tripping points. The first being that like most Fedora installations, Clint's /boot partition was too small to hold the new installation.img file but this is okay as long as you are using a wired connect to do the upgrade (no wireless!) but it did require that the installation.img file be downloaded twice. Second was that you should just let the installer do an update of the boot configuration; Clint thought it might be better to create a new which resulted in the installer terminating unexpectedly. Fortunately, the Fedora developers had provided a restart of the upgrade process in the boot menu and a simple reboot was that was required. The process took a long time, 7 hours total for the upgrade. This was largely due to the large number of packages Clint had installed on his system. 1879 packages had to be downloaded in phase I of the upgrade, and then phase II (after the reboot to start the installer), those 1879 files had to be processed and installed. Clint reported that the in-place upgrade on his system was successful and on reboot, he had a fully function Fedora 12 desktop. Member Mike B. asked about upgrading from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12. Clint referred Mike to the Upgrading Fedora using Yum - Fedora Project at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq where it states that you must first upgrade to Fedora 11 and then upgrade to Fedora 12, could be very time consuming.
Clint then commented on how he like Fedora 12 because of its speed, stability, and reliability of the repositories. He also briefed those present on the system requirements and programs installed using the Fedora 12 i686 LiveCD. He referenced the information found at http://desktoplinuxreviews.com/2009/11/30/fedora-12/ which is a review of Fedora 12. It should also be noted that the Fedora 12 DVD is also available and featured as the cover disk for the March issue (#112) of Linux Magazine.
Moving on to the installation of Fedora 12 i686 Live CD - Gnome, Clint used the pages found for The Perfect Desktop - http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-fedora-12-i686-gnome to step through all the installation screens and the installation to the hard drive of Fedora 12. Clint actually used both the pages found at the howtoforge as well as mjmwired (Personal Fedora 12 Installation Guide - http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f12.html) for doing his installation as noted below:
Install from LiveCD (http://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/fedora/linux/releases/12/Live/i686/Fedora...)
Fix sudo user immediately so you can sudo su - to root, no password. (mjmwired instruction)
Disable SELinux Immediately, it does fight updating. Edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux to disable. This needs to be done before not after as the howtoforge suggests.
Run YUM update from root prompt - as of today (02/04/2010) 389 updates, 301 MB download. Do not use the desktop GUI Software Update as it will fail! Open a terminal and get to the root prompt. Command is yum -y update.
msttfonts - use mjmwired source. Howtoforge Perfect Desktop procedure fails and you can waste a lot of time trying to do that.
RealPlayer - use package manager to install and resolve dependencies.
Clint concluded this part of his presentation on Fedora 12 by showing his laptop installation with an extensive set of applications including a full development environment and also commended on adding the "menu edit" package for the Main Menu application so he could manage the gnome menu. Menu Edit is not installed by default as it is with some other distributions.
Also shown at the meeting was the ArtistX 0.8 LiveDVD based on Ubuntu 9.04, an awesome distribution. A complete multimedia release with over 2500 software packages for creating/authoring audio/video content on CD's and DVD's plus being able to enjoy music and videos as well as commercial DVD's without any configuration or downloading special libraries. More can be found on the ArtistX website at http://www.artistx.org/site2/.
Clint conclude his prepared presentations with a short demo of the nano simple text editor which is used in the terminal or shell to edit configuration files. Much easier to use than VI because no keyboard commands need to be memorized to do basic editing and you can simply move around on the screen and edit where needed and simply save (write out) your changes when done. Command line help with all the options can be found with a simple command of nano -? which lists all the options and file commands. The most useful of these is the -w which turns off long line wrap and if you leave it enabled, it can get you in trouble when editing long lines.
Clint brought 3 Fedora 12 LiveCD's and 3 ArtistX LiveDVD's and they all found new homes as they went home with 6 of those present.