My system’s a pretty straight forward Intel i7-based setup with some kind of nVidia graphics adapter. Honestly, I don’t remember which model, but I don’t think it makes that much of a difference. Its rather large and looks more like a vacuum cleaner than a electronic device for producing shiny pixels. The box has 6GB of RAM and two monitors attached via DVI. There’s a Logitech HD webcam attached too. Other than this, it’s pretty much plain vanilla.

First issue: After burning the 64 bit install DVD, I rebooted and found that the installation process (Anaconda?) failed to provide me with the bottom part of the dialog window, meaning I can’t see the Back and Next buttons. I tried to make it through the process just by counting my tabs, but I finally gave in, rebooted and started the install with VNC by adding the parameters ip=dhcp vnc vncconnect={ip of laptop}. This issue could perhaps be is due to my dual monitor setup, and it could be a showstopper for many people who want to give Fedora a spin.

A picked a pretty basic installation – Graphical Desktop on a freshly formatted root partition with my old home partition preserved. I rarely do a lot of system wide customization on my office box, so reinstalling like this really isn’t a big deal for me.

Besides the dual monitor issue and the general confusion about the new data/install media dialog box – which didn’t seem to work – the installation process itself went without a hitch. When completed, I rebooted my system, and was presented with a blank screen and a blinking cursor.

I rebooted from the installation media in rescue mode, mounted the system and ran this:

That seemed to do the trick – I expect my three hard drives got in each others way. First boot drags me through a lengthy SELinux relabelling, which annoys me since I’m probably going to disable it anyway.

After relabelling, the system rebooted and presented me with a text-mode login. Logging in as root and issuing “init 5″ seemed to fix that problem, and presented me with the usual graphical “Welcome” dialogue. I’m not sure if my previous boot problems caused this? Changes in the system now means that /etc/inittab isn’t the place to fix this – instead a symbolic link is required:

Next up – installing the right repositories:

Then make sure the system is fresh:

Install drivers for my nVidia graphics card:

Make absolutely sure the open sourced nVidia driver – Nouveau – does not conflict with the proprietary driver:

Disable (or partially disable) SELinux to allow Gnome Shell to use the nVidia driver:

Reboot, and the proprietary nVidia driver should be rolling. If you need dual monitor support, run nvidia-settings as root.

Various multimedia stuff that isn’t distributed with Fedora itself:

Stuff that Fedora thinks I can live without, but I really think I need:

That was easy, wasn’t it? I’m not so impressed with the installation process of Fedora 16 – even if it’s due to multiple hard drives and monitors on my system, someone should have caught the issues mentioned above before it was released. Once fixed though, the system seems to work find. Can’t seem to find the new “j” command mentioned in the release notes though.

UPDATE: Tried to install the office printer (HP Color LaserJet CP2025n), but the graphical setup tool said it couldn’t detect network printers without installing, enabling and starting firewalld. I did so, but it didn’t help much – I still had to select Search by address and punch in the printer’s IP.

UPDATE: Xorg seems to take up ~99% CPU at times according to top, and it’s really sluggish. Not sure what’s causing this.

UPDATE: VirtualBox-OSE seems to be broken – I get this error:

UPDATE: This morning my system greeted me with one black screen and one half gray. It turned out this was the locked screen dialogue, so entering my password and hitting return brought my desktop back. Still horribly slow, especially when changing focus to another window. Switching tabs in Firefox is just unbearable. I miss Fedora 15.

A reboot was required, as I had done some kernel upgrading and the installed nVidia module didn’t match the running kernel. If direct rending is enabled, you’ve got the driver properly installed:

Enjoy.