Installing Fedora 16 on a System that can not boot GPT Labelled Disks

Some Systems Particularly Fujitsu Siemens Life books, Apple Macs and some others,
Cannot Boot If the Hard drive is Formatted using this Newer GPT  format.

Fedora 16 uses the new GPT format since it does have some benefits.
However if you want to install Fedora 16 on a Lifebook or an Apple mac, you need to do the following.

You need to pass parameter nogpt to the Fedora installer.

To do this, at the initial bootloader menu for the Fedora installation, where you can select to install, install in basic graphics mode, boot to the rescue mode and so on, hit the Tab key, then edit the command line for the Fedora installer and add the word nogpt.  you can do this when using the Live CD or the Complete distribution DVD.

Then install as normal and your Machine should now boot and work as expected.

Do not choose custom partitioning layout, You must let the system create it's own layout first and then if you want , You can edit what it creates to suite your requirements. If you choose custom layout, the 1MB problematic BootBios partition is created and this will give you the following error "
"you have not created a bootloader stage1 target device"

mount.nfs: access denied by server while mounting

If your nfs mounts stop working
and mount-a gives you the following error.
mount.nfs: access denied by server while mounting /blah_blah_blah/blah_blah


Chances are, your machine has been upgraded and now uses the NFS version 4 as default nfs version
 instead of 3

To fix this issue you need to explicitly tell nfs to mount your share using the older nfs version 3

simply add nfsvers=3  to your nfs mount stanza in your /etc/fstab file


eg
vi /etc/fstab


192.168.1.10:/shared/files  /mnt/files nfs soft,intr,nfsvers=3 0 0

save the file and type
mount -a  

Your nfs mounts will now work.

Resolve transparency issues with Guake

If you set Guake to start automatically when your computer starts, depending on how quickly your Gnome session loads, there  may be an issue with it starting before Gnome has completed it's full initialization. 

when this happens, the transparency in quake does not work as it should, You cannot see the windows behind the Guake terminal, It lets you see your Background wallpaper only.

A solution for this is to delay the start up of Guake, so that Gnome is allowed to initialize fully before Guake starts.

To do this , run 

gnome-session-properties

under startup-programs edit your entry for Guake.

and add  sleep 8 && infront of guake, 
like so

 sleep 8 && guake 

This gives guake an 8 second delay before starting, and should be enough to let Gnome fully initialize, and your transparency will work as it should.

Problem mounting a LVM

To  manually mount a drive that contains a LVM (Logical Volume)
do the following.

lvdisplay

will output info about your logical volume
the important thing to note here is
the line which says VG Name
VG Name               vg_lvm

sometimes you will get a lv status as not available
to make it available type

vgchange -a y

this will activate any LVMS that werent active and make them available.

then to mount the LVM simply type

mount /dev/vg_lvm   /mnt