EXTREME noob here having some issues with installation/fallback mode

[rtennant]

Taking a Linux college class so this is my first foray in to the world, using Fedora 15. The installation process seemed to go just fine (though I may need to delete and reinstall because I gave over far more storage to the OS than I intended or wanted) but after finishing the install and rebooting, I'm stuck in Fallback Mode and don't have the option to change it to the standard experience. I'm running a custom-built PC with an Intel G620 processor, AsRock H67M motherboard, 2 TB's of storage and 4 GB of RAM, so from a technical standpoint I can't see any reason why this would present a problem. It's a dual-boot system running Win7 Pro 32 bit.

The book we're using is based off running fallback mode so this would not, at first, glance, seem to be the end of the world, however, I don't like things not working correctly and so would like to fix it.

My second question is, is there a way to reduce the size of the lv_extra partition other than removing and reinstalling the OS and granting it less room to work with during that process? I'm not short on storage by any means but I really don't need Linux taking up a terrabyte of memory and figured something closer to 200 GB would be more than sufficient for its needs, but it appears I screwed that up doing the installation process.

Please and thank you for all help in advance, I'm looking forward to getting familiar with Linux and starting to use it but I feel pretty lost at the current moment and so would be very appreciative of any help rendered.

[nonamedotc]

Originally Posted by rtennant

My second question is, is there a way to reduce the size of the lv_extra partition other than removing and reinstalling the OS and granting it less room to work with during that process? I'm not short on storage by any means but I really don't need Linux taking up a terrabyte of memory and figured something closer to 200 GB would be more than sufficient for its needs, but it appears I screwed that up doing the installation process.

Please and thank you for all help in advance, I'm looking forward to getting familiar with Linux and starting to use it but I feel pretty lost at the current moment and so would be very appreciative of any help rendered.

Yes. There is a tool called lvreduce.

man lvreduce

gives this ..

NAME
       lvreduce - reduce the size of a logical volume

SYNOPSIS
       lvreduce  [-A|--autobackup  y|n]  [-d|--debug]  [-f|--force]  [-h|-?|--help]  [--noudevsync]  {-l|--extents  [-]LogicalExtentsNumber[%{VG|LV|FREE|ORIGIN}]  | -L|--size [-]LogicalVolume‐
       Size[bBsSkKmMgGtTpPeE]} [-n|--nofsck] [-r|--resizefs] [-t|--test] [-v|--verbose] LogicalVolume[Path]

DESCRIPTION
       lvreduce allows you to reduce the size of a logical volume.  Be careful when reducing a logical volume's size, because data in the reduced part is lost!!!
       You should therefore ensure that any filesystem on the volume is resized before running lvreduce so that the extents that are to be removed are not in use.
       Shrinking snapshot logical volumes (see lvcreate(8) for information to create snapshots) is supported as well.  But to change the number of copies  in  a  mirrored  logical  volume  use
       lvconvert (8).
.........

hope this helps you a bit ! Cheers.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by rtennant

I'm running a custom-built PC with an Intel G620 processor, AsRock H67M motherboard, 2 TB's of storage and 4 GB of RAM, so from a technical standpoint I can't see any reason why this would present a problem. It's a dual-boot system running Win7 Pro 32 bit.

Fall-back mode is used when the video hardware (or more likely, the video driver) is inadequate for proper OpenGL acceleration. 3-D graphics is one of the few major areas where there is still a lack of high-quality free open-source drivers. If you have an nVidia or ATI graphics card, you should be able to improve things by installing one of the proprietary drivers (that aren't included with Fedora for legal reasons).

For nVidia instructions, see "Fedora Set-Up Guides" in yellow at the top of this page, and http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia.

The book we're using is based off running fallback mode so this would not, at first, glance, seem to be the end of the world, however, I don't like things not working correctly and so would like to fix it.

Full GNOME Shell is quite different to fall-back mode, so if you get this working but would like to switch back to fall-back temporarily (or permanently) for following the book, go to (in normal mode) the status menu (your name at the right of the top-bar)->System Settings->System Info->Graphics->Forced Fallback Mode.

My second question is, is there a way to reduce the size of the lv_extra partition other than removing and reinstalling the OS and granting it less room to work with during that process?

You can shrink a logical volume by first reducing the size of its file system (resize2fs), then resizing the volume to something slightly larger than the file system on it (for safety) (lvreduce), then resize2fs again to fill up any unused space in the shrunk volume. You should unmount the file system and run fsck before and after resizing to avoid any corruption, so if it's a system volume you may need to use a live CD.

Note that this won't free up space that you can use in Windows, it'll only free up space within the volume group. You can remove physical volumes from a volume group with vgreduce, and that space can be used elsewhere. This does not resize actual physical volumes though.

See the manual pages of these commands for details, ("man command" in a terminal), but it'll be easier just to reinstall.

Gareth