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Fedora Core 8
Notes


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Summary

We upgraded computer systems in the Mathematics Department to Fedora Core 8 over the Christmas 2007 holidays. This web page will attempt to collect notes, tips, and other information to ease your migration to the new opertating system.
  • Screensaver locking issues: The KDE default was changed to automatically lock your screen after 60 seconds of running the screensaver.  To change this, look in the Control Center under the K Menu and then look in Appearance & Themes and finally in Screensaver. At the bottom of this window you can configure it to wait longer or never ask for a password.
  • KDE Panel Issues : The first time you login to the new version of Fedora, some changes are made to your taskbar configuration that might be undesirable.  If you have more than one clock visible, right click just to the left of one of the clocks (there is probably a small black triangle there) and select Remove Clock to remove any duplicate clocks.  Your clock might also have been reconfigured and look different.  To return to the normal default, right click on the clock itself and select Configure Clock and change the type to Digital Clock and checkbox only Date, Frame, and LCD Look.  Then click apply.   Finally, your panel may be much smaller than usual, right click on an empty portion of your panel and select Configure Panel.  Change the panel size from Small to Normal.
  • Audio issues: Fedora 8 uses a new sound mechanism called Pulseaudio. For now contact us if you are having audio issues as we are still working through the difficulties on this one.
  • Mounting USB/CD/Floppy drives : The mount command is no longer used by users. Currently, the recommended way to mount/unmount these devices is by the icons placed on your desktop in Gnome and KDE. An alternative is to use the script 'lsdev' to see the devices that are available (for example /dev/sdc1) and then select from the list to mount or unmount appropriately. In addition, if you know any of the device name, device type, or device description (which can be found if you just run lsdev) you can skip the menu by passing that as an argument to lsdev. It will take the last one that matches your argument. For example :
    
    roma{schrett}1282: lsdev
    
    ID Device Name  Mounted Type     Description
    -------------------------------------------------
    1  /dev/sdc1    No      disk     Generic STORAGE DEVICE
    2  /dev/hda     No      cdrom     HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H10A
    
    Select an ID to mount/unmount (1 - 2) : 1
    Mounted /dev/sdc1 at "/media/disk"
    
    roma{schrett}1283: lsdev Generic
    
    ID Device Name  Mounted Type     Description
    -------------------------------------------------
    1  /dev/sdc1    Yes     disk     Generic STORAGE DEVICE
    2  /dev/hda     No      cdrom     HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H10A
    
    Found match with ID 1 (/dev/sdc1 disk Generic STORAGE DEVICE)
    Unmounted /dev/sdc1
    
    roma{schrett}1284: 
    

Maintained by: System Support Staff req@math.duke.edu