Fedora 17 Beta PPC Announcement

Gather around the BBQ! We are pleased to announce the availability of the beta release of Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle) for Power. Want to get a taste of the future? Download it now:

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/17-Beta/ppc64/

What is the Beta Release?

The Beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 17 for Power. Our continued focus leading up to the general release of Fedora 17 for Power will be on critical boot & install time bugs.

However, this is still a beta release so some problems may still lurk. The Common F17 Bugs list does apply to Fedora 17 for Power, in addition to the Known Issues below.

Features

In addition to the general Fedora 17 features, Fedora 17 for Power also includes the following delightful new condiments:

• Initial support has been added to RPM for building Power7 optimized packages (use 'rpmbuild --target=ppc64p7'). YUM is also capable of correctly detecting Power7 systems and installing the appropriate RPM when both are present. Note however that no Power7 packages are currently included in Fedora 17 for Power.

• Fedora 17 for Power beta is also capable of upgrading a Fedora 16 for Power system, including the switch from yaboot to grub2 as the bootloader. This has only been extensively tested on IBM POWER systems.

• IBM hardware no longer needs to pass the 'serial' paramater.

Known Issues

• When installing via the cdrom and using kickstart, you will run into the following error "Unable to read package metadata. This may be due to a missing repodata directory. Please ensure that your install tree has been correctly generated."

To work around this, add sshd=1 to the boot command line and then execute the following command, via ssh, after you hit that error:

ln -sf /run/initramfs/live /mnt/install/source

Then select retry to allow the installation to continue. We expect to have this issue resolved in the GA release of Fedora 17 for Power. (Bugzilla #817084)

• The 32-bit PPC tree continues to be built and have installation images created for it, available here, however additional testing and code contributions from the community are still required to ensure that Fedora 17 for Power installs and works well on Apple Mac PPC hardware.

• On certain hardware and under certain conditions, the up/down arrows do not work in grub2. Instead, use ctrl-n and ctrl-p.

Additional Notes

Many boot and install time options have changed, so please note the following:

• Kickstart files generated by anaconda on F16 ppc64 cannot be used unchanged for F17 installs due to the change in the boot loader. Look for the bootloader line in the kickstart file and change the --location=partition to --location=mbr.

• Anaconda options have changed significantly between F16 and F17. Please ensure you are passing valid options according to this [1]

• If you are using static IP addresses, please note that the syntax for ip= has changed. The full documentation for dracut IP configuration is located at [2]. However, an example would be:

ip=<client-IP>:[ <server-id> ]:<gateway-IP>:<netmask>:<client_hostname>:<interface>:{none|off}

Server id is usually left blank (but the colon is still necessary). Also, keep in mind that you need to specify a DNS server with a separate nameserver=IP entry.

• Do not pass the root= and repo= options at the same time while netbooting. If you pass repo= , then please ensure the LiveOS/squashfs.img is within that repo. Also make sure the .treeinfo file is within that repo.

Contributing to Fedora

More information on Fedora for Power can be found on at Architectures/PowerPC. The team is generally active and discussing issues in #fedora-ppc on Freenode.

For more information on common and known bugs, tips on how to report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the release notes:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!