We managed to get the card installed in the PC chassis and connected the power cables with the card and DVI-D cables with the monitor. When system started as normal, the whole monitor was in pink. By using Ctrl+Alt+F2 I switched to command line. The following command:

cd /boot
mkinitrd initramfs-`uname -r`.img

Didn’t work as expected but was necessary. I found that my old /etc/X11/xorg.conf was still there. When I backed it up, removed the file and reboot, the default nouveau driver kicked in and the X window was working.

Nouveau is good for most of users, but it’s not enough for a heavy graphical card user, such as gamers. Based on this article: http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia, we need to install the proprietary nVidia driver.

yum install vdpauinfo libva-vdpau-driver libva-utils akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686

If you use 64 bit of Fedora and want to play 32 bit games, you need to install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686. Reboot.

When system is up,

glxgears -info

will show you which driver you are using.

Previously I installed bumblebee to my system and it was really ugly, so don’t install bumblebee on a desktop! It is designed for laptops.

For Steam users, you may need to issue a command when finishing the steps above to allow games to work with networking.

steam --reset

(6 of 8) A start job is running for Wait for Plymouth Boot Screen to Quit...

I noticed that it’s about the plymouth booting module which hangs at boot and maybe it’s that which causes kernel loops and gdm fails. Here is my solution of workaround.

sudo yum remove plymouth

Edit /etc/defaults/grub, remove “quiet” from “GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX”, re-configure grub.cfg at /boot/efi/EFI/fedora by

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

Reboot.

Now you don’t see a plymouth booting screen, instead you see a lot of logs are generated it makes you look geeky. Booting doesn’t hang any more.

Firstly, boot into Win 8, using disk utility to shrink volumns [to as small as you want if you can], because my version of Y510p has an optical drive, I took the advantage and burned a Fedora 19 DVD disc, I did not use LiveCD, don’t ask me why.

If you intend to use USB to install, use liveusb-creator rather than unetbootin.

In BIOS, I turned on Legacy support with UEFI first. <-- This is important. Left the burnt DVD inside the tray, reboot and kept pressing F12 until a boot selection screen came up. Choose the DVD drive. By default, the kernel in the DVD doesn't provide a working graphics driver, so I'd have to install under command line. The Anaconda command-line was simple enough to use, the problems came next. I could successful boot using UEFI Win8 mode into Fedora, but I couldn't reach a desktop environment. Switched to tty2 using root. I tried startx but it didn't work, and the Ethernet card provided by Athores did not work either! Wifi could work, but I was at school and they used WPA2 Enterprise encryption so I couldn't do anything from this laptop! If you experience black screen on booting, add nomodeset to your grub2 kernel booting options behind linux. You can manually add this parameter to /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg.

I knew this was gonna happen, so I brought my sweet old HP 6531s alongside with me. I figured that if I update some of the packages, it might work, epsecially kernel and graphics related packages. On the Internet some people say using alx driver could install the driver for my Qualcomm Atheros QCA8171 Gigabit Ethernet, it was a no-go for me.

I downloaded the required latest packages from http://pkgs.org, listed below:

binutils-2.23.52.0.1-8.fc19.x86_64.rpm
cpp-4.8.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm
elfutils-0.156-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm
elfutils-libelf-0.156-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm
elfutils-libs-0.156-5.fc19.x86_64.rpm
gcc-4.8.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm
gdb-7.6-30.fc19.x86_64.rpm
glibc-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm
glibc-common-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm
glibc-devel-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm
glibc-headers-2.17-18.fc19.x86_64.rpm
kernel-3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64.rpm
kernel-devel-3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64.rpm
kernel-headers-3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64.rpm
libmpc-1.0.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm
linux-firmware-20130724-29.git31f6b30.fc19.noarch.rpm
mpfr-3.1.1-2.fc19.x86_64.rpm
patch-2.7.1-6.fc19.x86_64.rpm
pkgconfig-0.27.1-1.fc19.x86_64.rpm

Using USB sticks to copy from old computer to Y510p, trying to resolve the dependency list was a great pain.

I recon the most important package is kernel-3.11* then reboot. And voila! Y510p successfully booted into my MATE Desktop Environment! Atheros ethernet was also working fantastically.

The 5400rpm hdd is noticeably slow, the booting process nearly made me think that I failed again. The brightness cannot be adjusted under MATE and I don’t know why (see the follow-up)

Proprietary GPU drive from nVidia doesn’t compile on my machine at all.

Overall, this is a success attempt installation, and it made my day!

It so happens that Linus Torvalds on Oct 17, 2013 made a comment to Fedora Project complaining on their installing DVD/CD that never gets updated after their first current-version release. I agree with him. Otherwise Fedora is great!

Update:

1. You don’t need a xorg-x11-drv-nouveau to be able to display.

2. The nVidia proprietary driver from rpmfusion won’t work yet.

The problem is not big nor severe, but it did took me some time to figure how.

grub2 in Fedora is a little bit different with grub in CentOS. In CentOS you could upgrade your kernel and boot into this new kernel automatically after reboot, whereas in Fedora you need to adjust the grub.cfg file manually.

The step was simple enough but it took me some time to look for the documents.

All I needed was to change the default TIMEOUT to 5 and another line of command: Using root’s privilege and modify /etc/defaults/grub, set the timeout to 5 and do a grub2 reconfiguration:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

And that’s it! Enjoy your new kernel!

You may need the same steps when you compile, upgrade and/or install your custom/new kernel.