I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile, but I’ve been distracted by other things. In any case, I have the last issue with FC2 solved on my desktop and setup some other nicities.

The most public FC2 problem was the whole “XP won’t boot now.” If I lost everything, it really wasn’t going to be much of a loss since I have XP installed mostly for BIOS updates. However, it was nice that there was a somewhat easy technical fix. This post from the fedora devel mailing list gives you a quick insite into why the problem occurs and a quick way to fix it via sfdisk. Luckily for me, my BIOS told me the “correct” C/H/S geometry. Following the instructions, XP can boot again. Now to find a reason to actually do so.

FC2 came with a udev rpm, and I’ve been meaning to play with it for awhile. udev is a userspace way to have a dynamically managed /dev directory. In theory, you’re supposed to have it manage your /dev directory. However, the default config from the FC2 rpm is to set up a seperate directory called /udev. I actually like this decision. You end up getting /dev with its everything-including-/dev/kitchen-sink directory for devies that never move, which works better for some drivers like the NVidia drivers, and /udev reflects only what’s on your system.

One of the other cool things you can do with udev is set up persistant names for dynamic devices. I’ve got it set up so my iPod always shows up as /dev/ipod and its partitions as /dev/ipod1 and /dev/ipod2. This has made it really easy to set up in fstab. I’ve also done similar with my 8-in-1 digital media reader. Compact flash, smartmedia, etc all show up with sane device names in the /udev tree.

In the future, I assume that a full ruleset for udev will be created, in the mean time, I had to create my own /etc/udev/rules.d/60-ktg.rules file that looks like this:

BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="iPod ", NAME="ipod%n"
BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="USB Storage-SMC ", NAME{all_partitions}="sm"
BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="USB Storage-CFC ", NAME{all_partitions}="cf"
BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="USB Storage-MMC ", NAME{all_partitions}="mmc"
BUS="scsi", SYSFS{model}="USB Storage-MSC ", NAME{all_partitions}="msc"

I don’t know if these rules are 100% correct, but they are working well enough for me now.

The other thing that really helps with these hotplug firewire/usb devices is that the SCSI layer in Linux Kernel 2.6 became hot pluggable, so I don’t need to run a shell script every time I add or remove one of these devices that act like a SCSI device.

All in all, once you get over the “broke XP” and “no firewire” problems, FC2 is a really solid distribution that I’m happy with. Of course, part of my happiness is due to the other apt/yum repositories I’m using, but FC2 plus those is right where I want my Linux experiance right now.