September 30, 2019

Fedora 30 -- install XFCE spin from USB stick

This machine is an ASUS motherboard (PRIME H270M-PLUS) with an Intel i3-7100 running at 3.9 Ghz an 8G of ram. An LGA-1151 motherboard with two M.2 slots The processor has 2 cores, 4 threads, and runs at 3.9 Ghz, 3M of cache.

I download the XFCE spin ISO image (about 1.5G) and use dd to copy it onto a USB stick. First I have do unmount the stick (which automounts whatever VFAT system it ships with on /dev/sdg1). Then I do: 

su
dd if=Fedora-Xfce-Live-x86_64-30-1.2.iso of=/dev/sdg
I plug this thing into one of the motherboard USB ports and hit the reset button. Then F2 takes me to the BIOS, F8 takes me to the boot menu, and I can select the second entry (the flash stick) and it boots the live image.

There is a prominent icon on the screen to "install to hard drive". I double click on this, and it is running the familiar installer. It sees my 80G hard drive, I have to delete all partitions (there is a handy single button to do just this). I select automatic partitioning, and leave the network alone (it ends up setting up DHCP).

The install is quite straightforward and very fast. It asks me to set up a root password and allows me to set up a user account. It finishes without any fiddling around and tells me to reboot the system to run what I installed. This boots right nto linux without any install dialogs. Very fast, clean, and easy.

Customization and updates

su
systemctl start sshd.service
systemctl enable sshd.service
dnf update
The update process upgrades 630 packages and installs 20 new ones. This took a while (tranferred 1G over my home network). I reboot to the new kernel.

Fedora now includes the "ASUS" splash screen graphics as part of the rhgb screen, which confused me for a while, just hit escape to get the scrolling boot sequence that I like to see.

After the reboot I am running the 5.2.17-200.fc30.x86_64 kernel.

I want to set the hostname (even though this machine does DHCP) and edits to /etc/hostname just get overwritten. The "new way" to do this is: 

hostnamectl set-hostname randy
I would also like to automatically install updates. 
dnf install dnf-automatic
vi /etc/dnf/automatic.conf
systemctl enable dnf-automatic.timer
systemctl start dnf-automatic.timer
The only change I make to the conf file is to automatically apply the updates, not just download them.

Get rid of the d**** Xfce screensaver

Not only do I hate this, I hate the struggle of finding where I go to turn it off.

Go to "Settings" --- "Screensaver" and uncheck the box that says "lock screen after ...". Not as bad as fiddling focus follows mouse.

Set focus follows mouse

Go to Settings -- Window Manager -- Focus

Change the setting via the radio button.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]