I'm wearing my "blue" Fedora...more Fedora info

Well, I was able to successfully install Fedora Core 5 on an old Pentium II laptop. I was able to configure my wireless network card on the laptop using ndiswrapper, but I get a kernel panic every time I try to connect to a network. (It c/b that I'm using a too new version of ndiswrapper.) I'm not worried about being able to use the network card because this was just an experiment anyway.

I was also able to successfully install Fedora Core 6 on my Centrino laptop as a dual-boot between Windows XP and Fedora. However, I didn't allocate enough space for what I wanted to do with it, so I'm somewhat limited to what I can install and what I can't install (I only allocated 5G space, and after installing the office tools and the software tools, it took up 3.5G space - eep!).

Anyhow, I wanted to post some helpful links for those of you who are converting to Fedora:

• The Fedora Project's Presentations Site - While some of the presentations are aimed at people who will be doing kernel development for Fedora, there are some interesting presentations for end-users and Fedora administrators as well.


• Fedora Core 6 Tips and Techniques - A very nice site giving some generic tips on how to work with Fedora Core 6.


• Fedora Core Getting Started - Aimed at Windows users, this nice article explains the basics of Fedora. This article focuses on the end-user applications with Fedora.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with Fedora or other flavors of Linux.

Fedora Users: Help with the "make" command

In a few weeks, I'll be teaching a Linux Administration class, and I'll be preparing for my vendor-neutral Linux certifications as well. One of the experiments that I'm doing before class starts is installing Fedora Core 5 on a Pentium II machine. (I got it installed and working, but it was a pain to do!) I digress, though.

While I was working on my install, I was inspired to do a few posts on using Fedora. One of the most popular questions that I found on the Internet was people who were having trouble with using the make command. Particularly, when they use the make command, they get a Can't find kernel build files in .... type of error.

The reason why the Can't find kernel build files in .... occurs is the kernel-devel package is not installed on your machine. So, how to fix the error?

• If your Fedora machine can connect to the Internet or you are on a network that has a yum server, use the command yum install kernel-devel.


• If your Fedora machine cannot connect to the Internet, you will need to get the package and use RPM.
  
  This is the link to Fedora's RPM page
  
  
  
  
  • To get the actual kernel installed on your machine, run the command uname -r. You want to "jot down" the number that returns to you. For example, on my machine, the number that returned to me was 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5
  
  
  • You are going to need the kernel-devel-your kernel number returned from uname -r.rpm file. If this is not in your disk distribution, then you are going to have to find a machine with an Internet connection and download it.
  
  
  • Once you get the correct file, assumming that you are in the same directory as where you put the file, run the command rpm -ivh kernel-devel-your kernel number returned from uname -r.rpm
  
  
  
  

Hope this helps.