[RULE] Interesting laptop install; upgrading to Gnome etc

[M. Fioretti]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 16:13:35 PM +0000, Philip Rhoades
(phil at pricom.com.au) wrote:
> People,
> 
> I finally got around to testing slinky v0.5 with FC3 on a PIII 450MHz  
> laptop.  As an exercise I thought I would do an NFS install from a RH9  
> machine's CD drive not realising I wouldn't get prompted to change CDs  
> like that.

Well, with any remote install (NFS, FTP...) every package must be in
the same place from the beginning. So you should copy the content of
all cdroms on the hard disk _then_ start. This is a really rough and
incomplete description!!! To do it well, check the FC3/RHEL docs on
this issue, and follow their instructions.

> Anyway the minimal install still seemed to work even though it
> missed a few (X?) things from CD2 but I couldn't get the laptop to
> boot.

This probably doesn't depend (only??) from slinky. It used to be that
the first CD of several distros was enough to do their minimal
install, but if this is still true with FC3 I don't know. So, the
first thing to check here is if FC3 minimal can be installed by
Anaconda using only the first CD. In any case, which error messages
did you get at boot?

> So I just went to a straight FC3 install from the laptop's CD drive but  
> it failed on CD3 (I think) with an anaconda error message.

which one?

> So then I tried a slinky install using the local CD and that worked
> fine. I then tried to upgrade to a full Gnome environment by
> manually installing the extra rpms.  I think I have installed
> everything that would be necessary but I can't get the desktop to
> come up

again (sorry to be verbose...): any error messages anywhere? I also
think that maybne you have to add something to the .xinitrc file, but
I don't know Gnome in that detail, sorry. The place to look for this
particular answer is the Gnome "install from source"
documentation. From there we can start to look what is missing in your
system.

> 
> Is there a convenient way to add more packages to a basic slinky
> install?

The way is the same as with normal Fedora, that's the whole point of
RULE: rpm, apt, synaptic.... So, basically, from a minimal install you
should install by hand apt, yum and/or synaptic, solving the
dependencies by trial and error. When them are up, they will pull in
everything else.

HTH,
Marco

-- 
Marco Fioretti                    mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 3 for low memory      http://www.rule-project.org/

The three most dangerous things are a programmer with a soldering
iron, a manager who codes, and a user who gets ideas.

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