Fedora Core 6 & X2 3600+

A quick update on my latest upgrade & migration to Fedora Core 6.

Received an email from my sister that her computer can no longer boot up. After some troubleshooting over phone. I have confirmed the motherboard is dead. So I decided to pass my sister my current pc & took the opportunity to upgrade to a AM2 X2 3600+ myself.


The old config:
MSI K8NGM2-FID socket 939 Venice 3000+, 2X 256MB dual-channel DDR400

The new config:
Asus M2NPV-VM socket AM2 X2-3600+, 1X 512MB single-channel DDR533.

As both motherboard were essentially using the same nVdia 6150 chipset, all I did was to swapped the harddisk to the new motherboard & viola. Everything just fires up without encountering any kernel panic whatsoever. I installed the smp kernel & upon reboot, the 2 processors are detected & in operation. The only gripes it seemed is that, mplayer somehow crashed with the smp kernel for unknown reason.

Today, I had some time & took the opportunity to reinstall the OS changing from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6. To my surprise, the installation is much smoother compared to FC5. Few of the tweaks needed are as follows:

1. Enabled freshrpms repocitory to install proprietary nVidia driver by:
yum install nvidia-x11-drv

2. Install mplayer from freshrpms repo by doing
yum install mplayer mplayer-skins mplayer-fonts mplayerplug-in
copy the mplayer-codec to /usr/lib/win32 & mplayer is ready for use.

3. Install Realplayer by
yum install compat-libstdc++-33 (the old library is still needed)
rpm RealPlayer-10.0.8.805-20060718.i586.rpm

4. Installing ICA client:
The old ICA Client patch is still needed. You can get it from
http://co-lo.night-shade.org.uk/packages/fedora/5/i386/libXm3-stub-1-0.i386.rpm
rpm ICAClient-9.0-1.i386.rpm will then proceed & install ICA Client 9 properly.

5. Install skype by launching the skype FC5 rpm package.

6. Sound card tweak needed for CreativeLive soundcard to enable the recording from mic for skype:
Go to volume control, preference & enable AC97 in the volume bar & make sure the volume is not
zero.

There, my system is up & running perfectly. As I mentioned, FC6 is much more refined than FC5 were. And I am glad the transition is so smooth.