Sunday, August 5, 2018

FEDORA Rawhide Install - August 5, 2018

This blog is about my experience today, August 5, 2018, installing the very very latest public version of Fedora Rawhide.

     Disclaimer:

     The iso used to create the install USB thumbdrive, was the latest
     unofficial nightly and was not yet listed as having been confirmed
     as a "good" image.

     Shown as "Fedora-Rawhide-20180802.n.0"
     downloadable from the following website:

     https://www.happyassassin.net/nightlies.html

Background:

     I wanted to distro-hop today in order to learn about new Linux desktop
     concepts.    I have been living in Fedora Rawhide ( fc29 ) for about
     2 months on a old Intel i5 3470 mini-ITX computer
     using DDR3 memory.

     After looking at my options for a new distro, it seemed for me that my
     best option was to do a new install of Fedora Rawhide and look for new
     things I had not noticed before.     I did not choose the Workstation iso
     but instead the "Everything Boot" iso, and then I used the custom settings
     to see if I could get an install more to my preferences.

The installer options were new to me.    It offered all sorts of desktop environments.     I did not choose any desktop environment thinking it would default to Gnome, since Gnome was not an option.   I chose the music option which turned out to be a mistake as it installed over 15 musician apps for guitarist and keyboardist.   Things like "frescobaldi."    I do not yet see an easy graphical way to remove these music packages.

Unfortunately, for me this was not the distro version I was hoping for.   I must have chose the wrong things, even though I tried hard to read all the options.

For example, I did not get Gnome Display Manager, nor dnfdragora, nor even a terminal.     That was super bizarre, but I managed eventually to get them installed.   But, a new Fedora user would have given up at that point and either reinstalled the iso again, but differently, or erased the USB thumbdrive and instead installed the Fedora Rawhide "Workstation" iso on it, or maybe even tried Fedora 28 or, even a different distro.

I had to type "startx" at dollar sign just to get into my system.    Wayland is not installed and I could not figure out how to get it installed.     That was a bummer for me, as I have been using Wayland without issues for 2 months.

The newly revamped Anaconda Installer installed 1664 packages.   Among them were the very latest kernel 4.18.0.rc7, and Gimp 2.10.4, and LibreOffice, Darktable, Inkscape, Pitvi, Shutter, Shotwell, Blender, Scribus, and Audacity.      Components like bash 4.4.28 and mesa 18.1.5 seemed to be installed.    I installed the flatpak repo.    I never saw an option for Software Center or 3rd Party repos, so I installed Gnome Software Center.    I opened it, but it seemed to freeze up.

Wi-Fi did not work.     But keyboard, monitor, mouse, and ethernet, worked out of the box.   I had to install Firefox ( 61.0.1 ).    I have not yet tested the printer.

I just ran an update and it said nothing to do and listed a module of GIMP that could not be installed.

There is only one background choice - a dark solid blue.

At this stage, I do not know whether I should continue or do a new install, but I will tinker with it some more.

***After 2 more hours of tinkering***

I seem to have Wayland installed, but the display manager still will not launch and I have to use the startx command.   I have installed Gnome Tweaks, and got rid of some of the unwanted apps I initially installed.    I still can not get Gnome Software Center to launch nor have installed rpmfusion, or other 3rd party apps.    I just noticed Gnome Files is not installed.

I installed a flatpak app - the game Aisleriot and played a full game of Freecell.   So I assume the other flatpaks will work just as good.     I have 2 Fedora backgrounds installed now.


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