F12 network configuration

February 17, 2010

I’ve been struggling to get an F12 machine installed and working with network logins enabled for a couple of days. I think I have finally worked out what is causing my troubles. F12 uses networkmanager to start networking but that only happens after a user has logged in. That is clearly going to cause problems when you need the network up first to authenticate/authorize the user… You would think that when an installer offers the opportunity to configure network logins it would have the intelligence to switch to starting networking in the boot process. The solution is to boot single-user and run system-config-network and configure eth0 to use dhcp. This means hitting the tab key as soon as grub starts and then editting the boot command to add a -s to the boot prompt. You might also want to remove some of the graphical boot gubbins to see what is happening. A quick reboot and it should all be working.


RPM Fusion

November 6, 2008

I just noticed that a number of 3rd party RPM repositories for Fedora and RHEL have got together to form a new group named “RPM Fusion” – rpmfusion.org. Currently it is bringing together Dribble, livna and Freshrpms. If nothing else comes from this, it seems to me like a great way to reduce confusion and hassle for sysadmins. I have often seen situations where these repositories provide packages for the same software but built differently and with different dependencies which tends to make them conflict with packages from other repositories.