I happened to install the 64 bit edition of Fedora Core 5 on my computer a few days back. Here's a log of all that transpired during that time before I could finally wipe the sweat off my forehead, heave a sigh of quiet satisfaction and watch GNOME load in all its resplendent glory!

22nd July, 2006 - 15:00 hrs
Received Fedora Core 64 bit bootable DVD via courier that I'd ordered through Buylinuxdvd.com. This is a great site for buying Linux distros in India by the way. You will not find fancy shmancy payment gateways though. But the service is just great.

15:30 hrs
Step 1 was of course, to carve out some space on my hard drive where I could install Fedora. Since I had lots of free space on one of my partitions I decided to hew it out of that partition and thus began my search for a free disk parition tool that could create paritions out of free space on existing partitions.

I went ahead and burnt the GParted LiveCD ISO image onto a CD-ROM and rebooted, only to find GParted indefinitely scanning for hardware! Ran out of patience and tried to see if PartitionLogic was any better. Well it wasn't! It had an issue with crossing a certain line called A20 (whatever that is!).

But this time I read somewhere that while GParted might take a while scanning things it will eventually deliver. Deciding to give it another shot, I rebooted into GParted, got the scanning thing going and went to watch my favourite TV show. By the time I came back (around 30 mins later) it had managed to figure out where my hard drive was and how it was laid out. God bless GParted developers! From there on it was a piece of cake (creating the partitions that is).

The lesson learnt here is of course that, "GParted's mill grinds slow, but sure."!

20:00 hrs
After a failed attempt at getting Fedora's Anaconda installer to start in GUI mode I successfully got Fedora installed using the plain jane character mode interface! Hurray! I now had Fedora Linux installed and it didn't mess up my XP installation! The experience so far had been so smooth and bump free that the only way forward was - down!

It all started when I decided that I had to have a GUI!

23rd July, 2006 - 02:20 hrs
Still no GUI :(. Got a few Nvidia display drivers for Linux downloaded on my XP system and was wondering how to access them from Fedora (my Windows partitions are all NTFS formatted you see). Turns out that some brilliant folks have actually reverse engineered the NTFS file system and written drivers for Linux that'll let us mount NTFS partitions on Linux in read-only mode! These guys rock!

I happily issued the command:

yum install kmod-ntfs

Only to be informed that I needed to upgrade my kernel and must download and install a 21 MB package before even thinking about kmod-ntfs. I had already started using stilts by this time to prevent falling face down on the keyboard before I finally got the hint my body had been trying to give me all along, that I needed to grab some sleep and that getting X to work on Fedora could actually wait (what blasphemy)! I let the download progress however and fell into the closest bed that I could find, falling asleep long before actually hitting ground (or well, bed)!

11:00 hrs
No Sir. Still staring at the dang white blinking cursor on the black dang screen! I installed kmod-ntfs (finally!), copied the Nvidia drivers over and even got them to build and install. But doing an init 5 continued to cause X to go nuts! After scouring all over the internet and trying 20 different home-brewed solutions I was almost ready to give up and accede defeat when I suddenly decided to take took a look at /var/logs/Xorg.0.log.

As it turned out, X was having trouble locating where exactly the module "nvidia" was to be found. I searched for "nvidia_drv.so" and found it easily enough in /usr/X11R6/lib64/modules/drivers. What I really wanted to do then was to give X a thorough shake and beat it into its puny brain where the driver lived. Grrr.

24th July, 2006 - 00:00 hrs
While I was thus considering the modalities of how such a shake could be administered I suddenly noticed that X was loading keyboard and mouse drivers from a different location - /usr/lib64/xorg/modules! Voila! That was of course the problem! I immediately decided to copy the nvidia driver files from /usr/X11R6/lib64/modules to this location. I did that first, then checked whether xorg.conf was configured right, ran nvidia-xconfig again just to be sure, checked whether the planets were aligned just right and ran the command:

startx

No words can express the joy I experienced when a beautiful screen like this opened up in 16-bit splendour!

Only then did I wipe the sweat off my brow, heave a sigh of quiet satisfaction and rest my weary head for well-deserved sleep.