Fedora Core 15 & Gnome 3

Over a year ago, the hard drive in my primary desktop at home bricked itself and rather than going through the hassle of reinstalling Win7 on the new disk, I decided to go with FC12. I’ve been pretty happy with it in general, since I’ve always been partial to Red Hat and use CentOS primarily at work.

Last week I got the great idea to upgrade to FC14. In hindsight I can’t even recall what led me to try this, but it didn’t end well. I tried the “preupgrade” procedure, which appeared to do the entire upgrade from FC12 to FC14 in place. I left it overnight, and when I looked at it the next day it looked like it was done. I was in FC14 and everything looked ok. But then I tried syncing my photos over NFS and discovered nfs wasn’t running on my desktop. When I tried starting it, it failed. After some trial and error, I used the Google and found that this is just what happens when upgrading to FC14 due to changes between FC12 and FC14, namely the introduction of systemd.

In all the threads I read, the “solution” was a clean install of Fedora. I tried doing this without formatting my / (root) partition, since that had 500 gigs of my stuff on it, but it kept failing. What I ended up doing was downloading partedmagic, which is a totally awesome partitioning tool. If you’re familiar with Partition Magic, this is similar but Linux-based and free. I burned the iso to disc, booted to it, and shrunk my / partition from 900 GB to 850 GB, and created a new 50 GB partition at the end of my disk without losing any of my data:

Once this was done, which took surprisingly little time, I did a net install of FC15. I opted for a net install rather than downloading the ISO because I feel that with FiOS it’s actually faster than reading a DVD, and avoids having to run “yum update” afterwards.

So, I ended up with FC15 clean-installed to the new “/” partition. I moved everything around so the old partition is mounted at /docs and has all my stuff in it. I’d heard that FC15 was causing an uproar but until I logged into Gnome 3 myself I didn’t really understand the fuss. It’s going to take some getting used to, but after adding the tint2 taskbar it’s not too awful.

But back to systemd. In FC15 I wanted to ensure Samba started at boot, since that’s how I share docs between my VMs and host. Chkconfig is still there, but based on my problems with NFS and systemd on FC14 I decided to look into it a bit and see if there’s a “new” way to enable stuff at startup. There is!

Instead of:

# chkconfig smb on

The command is:

# systemctl enable smb.service

Of course, when I did this it apparently fell back to using chkconfig for smb:

[root@evan-fedora ~]# systemctl enable smb.service
smb.service is not a native service, redirecting to /sbin/chkconfig.
Executing /sbin/chkconfig smb on

It does say in the Fedora wiki that systemd respects chkconfig and vice versa, so I guess this post is kind of pointless and I should have just linked to the wiki. But, whatever.