Updating X on Fedora Core1

[John Collier]

I have been looking at the possibility of installing Wine on my little Fedora sandbox (all in preparation of kicking M$ out of the house for ever) so that I can see how it works for those programs that I just can't find an equivilant to in Linux, but I have come up against a little bit of an issue.

While putting all of this together and checking out what I have on my little box, it tells me that I need to install some of the X development files in order to continue. This is nothing that I thought would be a big deal since it was easy enough to find them on the net with Goole.

The problem seems to come in when I try to do some of the installs (and probably more will come when I get past this first hurdle, but I have to get by this one first).

When I start the install program that I got from xfree.org, it notices that I have $DISPLAY set and it recommends that this upgrade not be done while X is running. I didn't think this was a big deal until I started trying to find out how to kill X!

I can find many docs on how to start X, but nothing about killing it for situations like this.

Am I trying to do this the hard way? Can someone give the quick and dirty way to get this done?

It should be an easy 10 points for one of the Guru's out there...


Thanks,
John

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello John,

check

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/ref-guide/s1-grub-runlevels.html


You do want runlevel 3.

HTH,

Martin

[Bruce Copeland]

There are a couple of different answers to your question. If you start X with xinit accompanied by an xterm, then giving the exit coommand in the xterm stops X. In your situation, I imagine you have something like gnome or kde running by default. The best way to get out of X is usually to open a terminal window, then

su root

and then give the command

telinit 3

This will switch you from runlevel 5 (multiuser X) to runlevel 3 (multiuser console). After you login in console mode, you can then do whatever you need to do with X. When you are done, restart X by giving
the command

telinit 5

As an aside, I have never had to go through anything this involved to install wine. (Admittedly I've only installed wine on Red Hat 8 or 9--not Fedora.) Have you searched for rpm versions of wine that are built for Fedora?

Bruce

[John Collier]

Martin,

Interesting link. I will hang onto it for future reference, but it seems a bit extreme for what I want to do right now (especially in light of the answer provided by Bruce). I thank you none the less for the input.


Bruce,

I knew there had to be a way to get to it through a term window, but I have to admit that I am still a bit green on the init levels in Linux. I was much more comfortable with the HP-UX run levels at one time.

In reference to your aside, I was searching for an rpm version of the Xfree86-devel files that I needed and actually found those. What I didn't find in rpm format of XFree86 4.3.0. I think that would probably solve my immediate problem but after several hours of searching all I could find were the ftp files available on Xfree.org, none of which were of the rpm format.

Considering the late hour, I may not even try what you have suggested until I get in from work tomorrow. Maybe by then someone can show me the further error of my ways.


Thanks to both of you for the quick replies,
John

[Stuart Browne]

I agree with Bruce here about Wine.

That being said, if you've installed the X development stuff that came with Fedora, you should be able to do pretty much anything you need.

At worst, grab the RH9 wine source RPM, and issue an 'rpmbuild --rebuild wine-*.src.rpm', this will create RPMS for you to install.

As Bruce said, 'telinit 3' should drop you back to an X-less multi-user mode.

To change the default run level, it's a modifying of /etc/inittab's default level.

If you're signed in to X when you issue 'telinit 3', you still may need to sign the current sesion off. If 'logout' in the menus isn't enough, there's always the two nasty ways:

killall -TERM X

or from within the X session:

ctrl-alt-backspace

Have fun and good luck!

[Bruce Copeland]

John,

I checked the winehq site, and they have binary rpms for Fedora. The link for the download page is

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6241&package_id=77396

If you use a wine rpm built for the Fedora distribution, then at most all you should need to do in addition is download and install a few extra required packages (maybe XFree86-devel) from Fedora or Fedora update.

Bruce

[John Collier]

Stuart,

You have discovered the main source of my immediate problem. When I was installing the OS, I didn't realize that I would need the development parts of X, so I didn't specify them in the initial load. Now it seems as if I have to find a way to remedy that oversight on my part.

I don't suppose that Fedora (or any Linux for that matter) will let you simply throw the install disks back in and install additional packages from the disk without having to reload the entire thing, will it?


Bruce,

Even with the avenue that I have taken so far, that is essentially where I am at right now. The main focus of this thread is how to put the development packages in that I failed to include in the original install.

It seems as if I am now paying for my ignorance of the subtleties of Linux and installing/compiling packagesâ ¦


Regards,
J

[Bruce Copeland · Accepted solution]

John,

Actually it's very easy to add what you need. And no, you don't need to rebuild X (or reinstall all of X) in this instance. Simply find the XFree86-devel package with a version that matches the rest of your XFree86 packages. It may be on your original Fedora CD, or you may need to download it from the update site if you have updated XFree86 packages.

You can use the Add Remove Applications graphical application on the System Settings menu to add packages. Alternatively, I usually do small to medium rpm updates/installs from the command line. For example, to find out your current XFree86 rpm version, you can enter

rpm -q XFree86

Once you have located the package(s) you need, select it (them) in the graphical rpm program, or from the command line (as root),
use

rpm -ivh XFree86-devel*

or

rpm -Uvh XFree86-devel*

Either will work in this case. (The first says to install the package(s). The second says to update if the package(s) already exist or install if they don't. There is also an rpm -Fvh command that you use if you only want to update something that already exists.)

If for some reason, there are other packages that you need in order to be able to install/update a package(s), you'll get a message about that. You'll then need to locate the necessary extra package or packages, but otherwise the procedure is fairly straightforward. You can see that the rpm command accepts various standard unix wildcards. So if you have several rpm packages with different names that you need to install, you can put them all in an otherwise empty temporary directory, and then use something like

rpm -Uvh .../temp/*

Hope this helps.

Bruce

[Stuart Browne]

What Bruce has said is exactally right, and it is very simple to do.

If you want to do one of the install-procedure's class of packages (i.e. the "Development" package tree), then you can run 'redhat-config-package'. This will prompt you with the same package-groups as you were shown during the install procedure.

It should also prompt you to insert the appropraite media when needed.