I tried loading up FC5 test 2 on Virtual PC on my Mac, and the install went well, but the smoke test (rebooting into my new Linux install) failed miserably with some weird errors:
bad: scheduling from the idle thread! Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer derefence
This was followed by a dialog telling me “An unrecoverable processor error has been encountered. The PC will restart now.”
Per this post on macosx.com, I found a suggestion to use Pentium-MMX as the target architecture instead of Pentium Pro, but the instructions didn’t work perfectly for me. There is a 586 architecture RPM available, but the Fedora installer fails to choose this, and uses the 686 RPM instead.
To actually get the kernel on the target system, I used the Virtual Disk Assistant to create an empty FAT32 disk image, mounted it on my Mac, copied the kernel to it (look for kernel-version.i586.rpm in this directory), and unmounted it.
Then I configured the still-broken Fedora install to use that image as the second disk, put the install DVD into my machine, and booted into rescue mode. I figured I could just chroot to /mnt/sysimage, and rpm -ivh the file I needed. Unfortunately, I got a bunch of errors about the scriptlets, so I had to install it by hand.
First, I mounted /dev/hdb1 (the FAT32 image), copied the kernel over to the root of the boot partition, and then installed it with cpio.
sh-3.1# mkdir /mnt2 sh-3.1# mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt2 sh-3.1# cp /mnt2/kernel-2.6.15-1.1907_FC5.i586.rpm /mnt/sysimage/ sh-3.1# umount /mnt2 sh-3.1# chroot /mnt/sysimage/ sh-3.1# rpm2cpio kernel-2.6.15-1.1907_FC5.i586.rpm | cpio -u --extract
Don’t reboot just yet, because when I tried booting, I got lots of errors from ksign about unsigned modules. It turns out there was one more thing to do: run the post-install scriptlet (which you can find with the command rpm -qp –scripts kernel-2.6.15-1.1907_FC5.i586.rpm):
sh-3.1# /sbin/new-kernel-pkg --package kernel --mkinitrd --depmod --install 2.6.15-1.1907_FC5
Now you’re ready to exit the chroot environment, halt the Fedora virtual machine, eject the DVD, and reboot.