You might remember I had a bit of a nightmare getting vmware to work on a dual core Intel. In the end it turned out that Fedora had chosen the wrong kernel arch (i586 rather than i686). This morning I was having a poke around the FC6 Common bug list (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC6Common) and found the problem. Apparently it’s bug in Anaconda, the Fedora installer. Here’s what they say:

Anaconda installing the wrong architecture kernel in some systems. cpuspeed is not working for the same reason. This does not affect out of box functionality much but if you are compiling third party kernel drivers you might run into this on x86 architecture. x86_64 and PPC systems are not affected. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=211941. You can bypass this bug in a new installation by specifying “linux i686″ in the installation boot prompt.

An updates.img is available for this issue http://people.redhat.com/pnasrat/211941-updates.img. Please follow the instructions here: Anaconda/Updates.

To check which kernel package architectures are currently installed:

rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}\n"|grep kernel|sortIf the installed kernel architecture is i586, but your machine is i686 capable (Pentium II or K6II or higher), use the following simple workaround:

  1. Install yumdownloader. yumdownloader is part of yum-utils in Fedora Extras. You can also manually download the kernel.su -c "yum install yum-utils"
  2. Get the current i686 kernel:yumdownloader kernel.i686
  3. If the version of the kernel downloaded is larger than currently installed:su -c "rpm -ivh kernel-2*.i686.rpm"
    • Alternatively, if the version of the kernel downloaded is the same as that currently installed:su -c "rpm -ivh --replacefiles --replacepkgs kernel-2*.i686.rpm"
  4. Restart the machine.reboot