A Few Notes About Installing Fedora 14

I just upgraded Bekwam's website and test lab to Fedora 14.  Here are a few problems I ran into and their simple resolutions.

Create the Right Disc

Usually, I buy a Wiley book on Fedora and use the CD-ROM that comes with it to install the OS.  This works well.  The CD-ROM lets me preview the OS ahead of time to check the hardware out.  This time, I used a Fedora 14 .iso file from the Fedora Project web site.

After downloading the files, I created a disc containing the .iso by copying the files from the C: drive to the CD-ROM.  I used CyberLink power2go, initiating the copy by dragging files.  This produced a disc that returned a boot failure message.

It turns out that you need to execute a special "Burn Disc Image" command in power2go.  This does not use the drag-and-drop as you would for a data disc.  Rather, the Burn Disc Image function selects the .iso file and burns it to something that can be booted.

Odd Network Error

After booting and verifying the Live CD, I installed Fedora 14 on the hard drive.  When I booted up, I noticed that there was no networking.  I was surprised because the Live CD looked ok and lpscsi showed my network card.  However, ifconfig and the NetworkManager didn't show anything related to the card or an Ethernet interface.

It turns out that the problem went away by a simple re-install.

iptables

I had to look up this command to open a port on the firewall for a web server.  Hopefully, it will save you some man pages.


# iptables -I INPUT 4 -m state -p tcp --dport http --state NEW -j ACCEPT


It's easy to overthink the problems with a Fedora install, spending too much time on a fruitless Google search.  The Live CD gives confidence to your install.  I've also put a .iso on a USB drive using the live USB creator which worked well.