The installer still doesn’t support LVM. To be able to install Ubuntu on my LVM partitions I had to follow the steps described in one of my previous posts.

Previously I installed the i386 bit version of distributions on my laptop although it is a x86_64 system. But this time I went for the amd64 version.

You can check if you really have a 64bit processor by checking if there is a “lm” flag for your processor:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep lm

Using the 64bit version gave some problems, but they are all fixed now:

thunderbird-lightning

The lightning plugin you can download from the add-ons site of thunderbird is the i386 version which doesn’t work with a x86_64 thunderbird. Ubuntu provides a lightning package but this contains some old version. Luckily you can find the x86_64 xpi here: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/0.9/contrib/linux-x86_64/

sun javaws

The sun javaws isn’t available for x86_64. The openJDK version is available but not all java applications work with that Java WebStart. You can manually install the i386 version of sun-java6-bin:
sudo apt-get install ia32-sun-java6-bin
You can now find the working javaws in following directory: /usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun-1.6.0.10/bin/javaws

BTW … Fedora 10 will be released in 18 days

One of the big annoyancies I noticed during the installation was that it didn’t recognize my lvm partitions. And I really need that, as my home and root partition are on lvm and I didn’t want to repartition my complete drive.

Luckily I found some explanation for lvm support during the installation. This is the summary of the actions you need to perform.

Become the root user:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo -i

Load the dm-mod module:
root@ubuntu:~# modprobe dm-mod

Install the lvm2 package on the live system:
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install lvm2

Activate the logical volumes of your volumegroup
root@ubuntu:~# lvchange -a y <volgroup name>

At this moment you can perform a normal installation, your existing logical volumes will be recognized and can be used during installation.
After the complete installation process you have to install lvm support for you new installation.

Mount the partitions of your new installation:
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/volgroup/root /mnt
root@ubuntu:~# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
root@ubuntu:~# mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev

Chroot into your new installation:
root@ubuntu:~# chroot /mnt

Install the lvm2 package:
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install lvm2

You can now exit your chroot environment and reboot your machine. If everything is OK, you can boot your fresh ubuntu installation.

As one of my desktops was still running Fedora 7 it was time to upgrade to the current stable Fedora, Fedora 8.

On the Fedora wiki you can find a list of instructions to upgrade your machine using yum. It will list the general actions but also the execptions for each upgrade.
You can find these instructions here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

The upgrade went very smooth, but isn’t recommended for non-technical users as it all happens on the command line.
For those non-technical users a graphical user interface which guides you through the complete process would be very handy (Ubuntu has it already, don’t know if it is available in Fedora 8/9).
I prefer the upgrade with yum as I want to know what my machine is doing.