F16: Fresh install of Fedora 16, 64 bit, on home-built Linux Desktop 1, new SSD drive

In late December 2011 I bought a Crucial m4 256 GB SSD drive for about $400 from Amazon. I burned a Fedora 16 x86_64 DVD and installed a standard ``software developer'' package set onto the new SSD drive, manually configured for 2 MB BIOS boot partition,254 MB ext4 /boot partition, and ext4 / for the rest of the disk. The installation went smoothly. The main snag was finding out how to mount my old partitions:

  # modprobe dm-mod
  # vgchange -ay
  # lvscan
  # mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/sda
  # mount /dev/VolGroup01/LogVol00 /mnt/sdb
  # mount /dev/VolGroup02/LogVol00 /mnt/sdc

(The new SSD drive is /dev/sdd.)

Having previously separated my system drive from everything else, to get back almost to normal, I only needed the following steps:

1. Copy my symlinks from my old F15 home directory:

     # find /mnt/sdc2/home/me -maxdepth 0 -type l -exec /bin/cp -pud {} /home/me \;
   

2. Re-add any changes I had made under /etc/ (hosts, fstab, cron.daily).

3. Retweak the UI for my tastes, as described for F15 in §6.4.8 below.

However, a difficulty occurred because user IDs now start at 1000 instead of 500. I first tried changing my uid and gid to 500, but that was a mistake because such numbers are presumed to be ``system'' accounts and not users. As a result, my account no longer appeared in the login window. So, I changed back to 500

  # /usr/sbin/usermod -u 500 me
  # /usr/sbin/groupmod -g 500 me

and did

  # chown -R me.me <dir>

for my old personal directories on all disks, or

  # find <dir> -uid 500 -exec chown 1000.1000 {} \;

for directories having mixed ownership, such as backups including root-owned stuff. Now, of course, I will need to change my uid and gid to 1000 if/when I ever boot up one of those old Fedora partitions.

Next, I copied any nonstandard repos in /etc/yum.repos.d/ from the F15 to the F16 disk. To make a script for installing all my packages, I ran yum list installed on F15 (on Linux machine 2, because it is generally cleaner), piped it through sort and uniq, deleted garbage lines, and changed each desired line (using an emacs macro) to the form yum install pkg (deleting each line from the first '.' to remove version and architecture specification). The final result was then executed as a shell script, and the installs went smoothly.

For general sanity, I also made the following UI changes (when using the Mac Pro keyboard on Linux):

System Settings / Keyboard / Layouts / Options / 
       Caps Lock / CL=ctl
       Alt/Win / Left Alt [Command] is swapped with Left Win [Option]

In ``Advanced Settings'' (from, I think, yum install gnome-tweak-tool), I enabled ``Theme / Keybinding theme/ Emacs'' as an experiment. (Where is this documented?) From a quick Web search, it appears one then needs to use '/' in place of 'F' for searching within a page.