June 14, 2025

Fedora 42 -- fresh install on trona

I just finished a major hardware overhaul on trona, replacing everything except the motherboard, cpu, and memory. Now I want to upgrade to F42. I could do a DNF upgrade, but I really want to move my system disk from a 1T sata to a 256G mSATA card. I'll put the F41 install on the 1T drive on the shelf for a backup.

The current install on that 1T drive has: 

root@trona:/# df .
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3      527322552 31234996 469227628   7% /

/dev/sda1        2048       4095       2048     1M BIOS boot
/dev/sda2        4096   67112959   67108864    32G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3    67112960 1140854783 1073741824   512G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda4  1140854784 1953523711  812668928 387.5G Linux filesystem

root@trona:/# mount | grep sda
/dev/sda3 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)
/dev/sda2 on /boot type ext4 (rw,relatime)
/dev/sda4 on /home type ext4 (rw,relatime)
Note that there is no swap (I would like an 8G swap on the new setup).
Also I see no reason to have a separate /home on the new drive.

Put the XFCE spin iso onto a flash stick

This is: 
-rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom 2323779584 Jun  5 13:11  Fedora-Xfce-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso
We just use "dd" with a big "bs=" to copy it there.

Boot from the stick and do the install

I plug in the stick, then reboot. As I remember from past experience, the BIOS won't discover the stick if you plug it in after boot.
This BIOS wants a DEL key to enter the BIOS.

The BIOS in fact does discover the stick and defaults to booting from it. (It has two entries, "UEFI: USB USB Hard Drive" and "SanDisk Cruzer 8.01". I leave it on the first and it all boots up OK.

I tell it to test media and start Fedora 42 Live.
Once the live session starts, I find the bottom icon that says "Install to Hard Drive". I double click this, and after a longer wait than I expected, the Fedora install dialog starts.

All the work in in the "Install Destination" where I find sdb to be the TS256 mSATA drive in the list. I select it and also select "custom" partitioning, then use the "+" button to add partitions: 

/boot/efi 1M (it bumps this up to 50M)
/boot 1G
swap 8G
/ 555G (it trims this to 230G)
I have to be alert and change the partition type for / from Btrfs (whatever that is) to a standard partition with ext4.

I set up the root and tom users, then start the install. It takes only about 8 minutes, so most of the time is spent doing trial and error with the Install Destination dialog.

Finishing up

Things get confusing. The screen goes dark for quite a while, then after about a 1 minute wait, it comes back again with a button in the lower right that says "finish installation". This takes me back to the live CD session.

I pull the USB stick and cycle power. It comes up in Fedora 42. The default entry in the BIOS is "Fedora" (the second is my old F41 install which it simply labels "Samsung EVO". But I never got to set my IP number (static IP). I does have a usable IP number it got via DHCP.

Get things back to where I can use them again

I edit fstab and set things up to mount /u1 and /u2.
I make /home/tom a link to /u1/home/tom.
I edit /etc/passwd and /etc/group and change the uid/gid for tom

Now I am unable to login as tom. After some head scratching, I remember. The accursed selinux. It needs to be disabled, erradicated, annihilated. 

edit /etc/selinux/config -- SELINUX=disabled
grubby --update-kernel ALL --args selinux=0
After this reboot. And now I can login as tom! More times than not, weird problems get fixed by getting rid of selinux.

Thunderbird and chrome

Thunderbird is easy "dnf install thunderbird". It finds my prior mail setup and just works.

I am using firefox, which got installed without effort as part of Fedora. It lets me do searches to sort out issues, like this one.

Chrome is more tricky. And it has some idea of a profile for machine "trona", so I really need to get my static IP set up before it will work. 

dnf -y install fedora-workstation-repositories
dnf config-manager setopt google-chrome.enabled=1
dnf -y install google-chrome-stable

Set my static IP

cp /oldroot/etc/hosts /etc/hosts
hostnamectl set-hostname trona
nmcli con down "Wired connection 1"
nmcli con add type ethernet con-name Wired ifname eno1 ip4 192.168.0.5/24 gw4 192.168.0.1
nmcli con del "Wired connection 1"
nmcli connection show
ifconfig -a

Back to chrome

I type "google-chrome" to launch it from the command line, which les me see error messages. I get a long message: 
The profile appears to be in use by another Google Chrome process (4882)
on another computer (trona.mmto.org).
Chrome has locked the profile so that it doesn't get corrupted.
If you are sure no other processes are using this profile,
you can unlock the profile and relaunch Chrome.
Of course this leaves you asking "how do I unlock the profile".
What works is to do this: 
cd /home/tom/.config/google-chrome
rm -rf Singleton*
After this, I can launch google-chrome

Make links in thunderbird go to chrome (unsolved)

This used to work. First I check that chrome is my default browser. I go to xfce settings, then "default applications". It shows that chrome is my default browser.

Next I try various things using Thunderbird settings. At the very bottom of settings on the right is a button to open the all powerful config editor that some tips tell you to use.

I remove and install thunderbird, thinking that perhaps the problem was because google chrome wasn't in place yet when I first installed it. This does not help.

Get my temp logger going

dnf -y install python3-wxpython4
dnf -y install python3-numpy
dnf -y install python3-ephem
dnf -y install ruby
Then I need to copy rc.local into /etc/rc.d 
cd /oldroot/etc/rc.d#
cp rc.local /etc/rc.d
systemctl enable rc-local.service
systemctl start rc-local.service
systemctl status rc-local.service
I get a long error when I give the "enable" command, but "start" does work.

My server listens on port 2001, and I bet that the firewall is blocking this. Indeed, I get data with the firewall off (systemctl stop firewalld) 

systemctl start firewalld
firewall-cmd --add-port 2001/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port 2001/tcp
firewall-cmd --list-ports
OK, that is working fine now. I reboot to ensure that rc.local is getting started up as it should be. It is!! The command "temps" is a handy way to check as it does a "tail -f" on the temperature log file.

Updates

I run "dnf update" and get a new kernel among other packages (407 total).

TODO

xfce4-sensors-plugin
mount /u8
get backup mirror running
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org