I run linux at work. It eases my conscience to not depend on Microshit. Fedora 9 was released today. I've been a Ubuntu fan for a while now, but some of the software I use for work (IMOD) isn't easily made to run on Ubuntu. I know it should be just figuring out the proper paths to tell it, but I wasted a day and decided it wasn't worth any more time than that. On to Fedora (8).

Now, with the update today, I tried the preupgrade option. It's a cool idea - it downloads updated files, reboots, does whatever changes it needs to, and bam, updated OS. It stalled at the later stage - 90.0%, something about metadata. I figured it sounded too good to be true anyway. I downloaded the new install DVD (thanks kernel.org!), and tried an upgrade install. It took forever! Why do these take so much longer? I know there are more packages to install, and maybe these have to be downloaded. That's a valid excuse. Well, ok, this time it finished. I rebooted to a pretty unhappy computer - no GUI at all. The display flickered a bit, and then gave up. Command prompt time. I checked into Xorg's log file - version mismatch on the video driver (radeonhd). Must not have gotten updated in the upgrade install (why not?) A quick yum install took care of that, and X came up. However, none of my desktops would load - not gnome, not KDE, and not enlightenment. Showstopper. I rebooted and did a fresh install. Now things are pretty good. I had to fight to get Flash working. I had to feed my Pandora addiction. For those of you wanting to know how to accomplish this feat, you must sacrifice your first born with a 32-hour old blade under a full moon...

No, really, here's what you have to do (from http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/sn-Desktop.html):

  1. Create the 32bit mozilla plugin directory using this command: 
    su -c 'mkdir -p /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins'
  2. Install the nspluginwrapper.i386, nspluginwrapper.x86_64, and pulseaudio-libs.i386 packages: 
    su -c "yum -y install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-libs.i386"
  3. Install flash-plugin as shown above.
  4. Run mozilla-plugin-config to register the flash plugin: 
    su -c 'mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v'
  5. Close all Firefox windows, and then relaunch Firefox.
  6. Type about:plugins in the URL bar to ensure the plugin is loaded.
  7. If it isn't loading, try this command (firefox 3 does things a little differently from firefox 2)
    su -c 'ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins /usr/lib64/firefox-3.0b5/'

Now sound probably isn't working yet. Run these commands next, then restart firefox if you have it running at this point.

su -c "yum -y install libflashsupport-000-0.5.svn20070904.{i386,x86_64}"
su -c 'mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v'

Thanks to http://www.derekhildreth.com/blog/how-to-fix-the-no-sound-issue-in-firefox-flash/ for this last bit.

YMMV, but I hope this helps.