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Set up a Fedora development box
By Jacob Cohen | June 26, 2008
I decided to switch my spare (old) PC to run Fedora for development purposes. I was able to set up a reasonable approximation using Cygwin, but this will more closely resemble the environments to which I deploy my projects.
Getting Fedora running was more difficult than I expected, though this was not entirely Fedora’s fault. The first issue I was having was that the computer did not want to boot from a burned CD-R with the installation image. I tried two different CD burners and even verified that the computer would still boot from a OEM Windows XP cd, but it just wasn’t going to boot up from the burned disc. Fortunately, I had a couple spare USB keys lying around, so I used one of them to create a bootable drive for the installation.
Installing to the hard drive was trivial once I had booted from the USB key. After installation, I rebooted, which is where I encountered my next set of hurdles. The new package manager front end that comes with Fedora 9, called PackageKit, would not show me any software to install. It just sat there with a status message saying “Waiting for other tasks to complete”. What other tasks? Can I see what their progress is? Apparently not.
I wanted to get going with git and ruby on rails, so I checked out my environment. Hmm. It barely comes with anything. Not even make or gcc. I added myself to my sudoers file to make installing my necessary software easier. At least I appear to have yum installed, so I used that to get myself back to a reasonable starting point.
(snipped the password prompts and output from these for brevity) [cohen@localhost ~]$ sudo yum install git [cohen@localhost ~]$ sudo yum install ruby [cohen@localhost ~]$ sudo yum install rubygems [cohen@localhost ~]$ sudo gem install -y rails
Now I’m back to a reasonable baseline and can continue development.
Topics: General |
