Fedora 12 Release name as Constantine.

Fedora 11 is already released and planning for Fedora 12 is also going on. To codename Fedora 12 the red hat community gave a list of option to vote for. The options were

* Chilon
* Constantine
* Orville
* Rugosa
* Umbria

Fedora 11 is called "Leonidas" and has a link with the name of Fedora 10 as "Cambridge". Cambridge and Leonidas were both ships of the United States Navy. In the same way "Leonidas" and "Constantine" are townships in the state of Michigan, USA. It is said that the tradition is of creating linked pairs of codenames.

But the official mailing list of Fedora has a different story to tell.

As defined in the election text, the one (1) candidate with the greatest
number of votes will be chosen as the Fedora 12 Release Name.

So the greatest number of votes were put to Constantine and hence the name was chosen. So from now the Release name of Fedora 12 will be "Constantine"

Install from DVD using YUM installer

YUM is a package installer which uses internet to install packages. So what we do if there is no internet connection? If you do not have internet connection I recommend that you take one and keep yourself updated through YUM.
To install packages through DVD we need to have appropriate Fedora DVD mounted in the system. Once the DVD is mounted you have two options to install the packages from your DVD.

First, using the YUM option called localinstall. Go to the path from your terminal (to know what a terminal is check my other post here) where you have mounted your DVD. This usually should be /media/Fedora 11 i386 DVD. Replace 11 with your version of Fedora. Now go to the directory called Packages.

cd "/media/Fedora 11 i386 DVD/Packages"

Note that you have to use inverted comas. Now from here invoke this command:

yum localinstall RPM_filename.rpm

You can install a particular rpm file if you know or you can just give *.rpm in place of the RPM_filename.
This procedure will try to access the internet for any dependencies. For that the first thing you have to do is to disable the repos. To do this you should know what all repos have been enabled.

yum repolist

This will give you a list of repos with repo id, repo name and status. All you need is the repo id and use this command.

yum --disablerepo=fedora,livna,updates localinstall *.rpm --skip-broken

The --skip-broken option will exclude all packages with depsolving problems. Means those which have dependency problems. This should work with all versions of Fedora. the main drawback of this option is that you should know the particular package name. Or you can use meta-character if you dont know the exact name.

Second, and the most recommended option is by using a repo for DVD. YUM installs packages by checking the repo file. To know what a repo file is you have to check the content of an already existing repo file. Go to the repo directory of YUM.

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/

You will get a list of repo files with the extension .repo. Now use your choice of editor to create a repo file for DVD. I recommend using vi editor.

vi dvd.repo

You can give any name for this file which should end with .repo extension. Now type these line (or better copy paste it).

name=DVD for Fedora- $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=file:///media/Fedora%20$releasever%20$basearch%20DVD/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Do not do any other changes. Now save this file and run the YUM command. If you want your YUM not to check files in the internet you can edit all the repo files and disable them by changing the value of enabled to 0. Or it is better recommend that you use --disablerepo option for the YUM command as explained earlier.

The best thing about using this second way is that you can use all the option related to YUM. Example you can use the groupinstall option which you cannot use it with the first way. Again I stress the point that you use an internet connection to keep yourself updated to the latest changes in the world.

In case you have any problems installing the packages through YUM please revert back. I will try my best to solve it.

Happy YUMming!!! :)

Front Panel Mic Problem in Fedora 11

After Installing Fedora 11, I never tried my front panel microphone. But few days back when I tried to record some voice I found that it was not working. Then I tried it from the back panel, it was working and the voice was recording perfectly.

I tried to figure out what the problem is and I did some working around to fix the problem.
The solution is:

amixer -c0 sset 'Input Source' 'Front Mic'

Simple mixer control 'Input Source',0
Capabilities: cenum
Items: 'Mic' 'Front Mic' 'Line'
Item0: 'Front Mic'

This should work for everyone who is using Fedora 11.