Install Fedora 6 and Build Kernel

I got one more PC and am going to install Fedora 6 on it. Some software like Intel VTune doesn't support Fedora 4, neither Debian.

There is a good tutorial about FC6 installation http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc6.html while Stanley has tutorial for FC5. Don't forget official FC6 release notes http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/fc6/en_US/. It contains lots of useful stuff. The bug report is also worthy to read http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC6Common, especially because FC6 installation program can't decide the right processor in some cases.

release notes

There are a few performance enhancement in this release, like DT GNU HASH for dynamic linking applications, ext3 performance boost and cacheFS for NFS as part of cacheFS program.

There is no difference between UP and SMP version. It supports POSIX priority inheriting and protecting mutex.

installation

I use automatic partitioning and select all three package options, Office and Productivity, Development and Web server. Fedora extra and individual package are not selected. After one hour, FC6 is ready. The Helix spiral desktop looks pretty good.

The next step is to customize packages. I follow the suggestion of mjmwired. There is an automatic updater running after installation. It has to be stopped because it locks the database. Use sudo /etc/init.d/yun-updated stop and then reconfigure packages.

I need to be patient during that as it's very slow. If I select a package group and de-select, the computer stops to response. The system monitor shows that it's running at almost 100% load. The other thing is that it's better to login as root instead of maintenance user account if you want to reconfigure packages.

The next step is to check if installation program know the right processor type. There is detailed instructions in FC6 bug report. Basically I use rpm -qa 'kernel*' --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}\n"|sort and see if the kernel type is i686 in my case.

After all, use yum update to update all packages. The kernel is updated from 2.6.18-2798 to 2.6.22-5. However both kernel images are there. You can choose during boot up.

Kernel build

Kernel source has to be installed manually after installation because it's not included. For most of cases, like add-on modules, kernel header is enough. Just use yum install kernel-devel. However in my case, there is also kernel-header package for 2.6.22. I don't know where it comes from.

To install kernel source, first you need download a tool, yumdownloader. Then use rpm to install. Next to prepare source because the Fedora core is different to Vanilla core. The last step is build and install.

1. install the tool, yumdownloader. yum install yum-utils

2. yumdownloader --source kernel --enablerepo updates-source. A rpm file is downloaded to current dir.

3. rpm -Uvh kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.src.rpm. Ignore errors about non-existent user and group.

4. Prepare the source code to apply Fedora patch.
cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
rpmbuild -bp --target i686 kernel-2.6.spec

5. Move source code as Linux convention
cd /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.17
mv linux-2.6.17.i686 /usr/src/
cd /usr/src
ln -s ./linux-2.6.17.i686 linux
cd /usr/src/linux

6. Get the right config file. I use i686 one. There is no difference between UP and SMP for FC6.
cp config/kernel.i686.config .config

7. Build kernel.
make oldconfig
make menuconfig
make all
make modules_install
make install

8. reboot, use uname -a to see if new kernel works.

The EXTRAVERSION define in Makefile is used to differentiate the one just build and the one downloaded. It's set to 'prep' by default. The kernel build as prep as a suffix.