My install of Fedora 18 Alpha

[Erinn Looney-Triggs]

Let me first say I am not here to gripe, well at least not too much,
just passing along my impressions.

System:
http://www.smolts.org/client/show/pub_ab5febc0-0f09-4d9b-b21e-063d268e3067

My first run through the installer failed because of disk partitioning.
I know this is a known issue area so no big surprise there. I have a
dual boot system with Windows and the partitioning configuration either
wasn't up to par or just kept crashing on me. So I turned to using a
kickstart.

My first run through with the kickstart failed pretty miserably too.
Turns out this is due to the "base" group being renamed "standard", this
too is a documented problem, but it was a little tough to track down.
Adding --nobase to %packages solved that issue. This bug has been
reported and is fixed so nothing new there.

Partitioning too via the kickstart gave me a fair amount of trouble. My
partitioning in kickstart looked as follows:

part  --onpart=sda7 swap
part / --fstype=ext4 --onpart=sda6
part /home --fstype=ext4 --onpart=sda5
part /boot --fstype=ext4 --onpart=sda3
part --onpart=sda2 --noformat
part None --fstype=ntfs --label="System_Reserved" --onpart=sda1 --noformat

This was simply taking the one generated by anaconda in Fedora 17. Turns
out this doesn't work because the sda2 partition has no name. I am
unsure of whether that is a bug in the generation in Fedora 17 or not.
In fact looking at the anaconda-ks.cfg generated by the F18 installer,
there are no partition names for either sda1 or 2. A corrected and
working partition setup was as follows:

part  --onpart=sda7 swap
part / --fstype=ext4 --onpart=sda6
part /home --fstype=ext4 --onpart=sda5
part /boot --fstype=ext4 --onpart=sda3
part None  --onpart=sda2 --noformat
part None --fstype=ntfs --label="System_Reserved" --onpart=sda1 --noformat

I had noticed while using the graphical installer that you could leave
the root account disabled, which I thought was neat, so I commented out
the rootpw section in the kickstart file and let it rip. Everything
worked out ok, even installing grub2 to a partition, which has been a
problem in the past.

My first reboot failed, it appeared it may have been an SELinux issue,
adding enforcing=0 to the boot line solved this on my next run through.

On first (working) boot the little wizard came up, and I decided to see
if I could really shoot myself in the foot, by skipping configuring a
user, and having a disabled root account. Indeed I could, this may or
may not be something that is worth fixing/checking up on. Also NTP
configuration wouldn't work, claiming it couldn't write to the
appropriate file.

So a reboot into rescue mode was necessary to actually add a user
account and set the password for root just in case. Which is essentially
my way of saying rescue mode is very important, I noticed discussion at
one point of not having it included in the alpha, I reckon that would
have been a bad thing.

Finally, for what it is worth, here are my thoughts on the new GUI
installer.

It shows a lot of promise and I think the basic idea is great. It looks
to me like there will need to be some polish added to navigation, back
is a little odd, it feels like there should be something better I just
can't figure out what. Perhaps, something along the line of a tree which
you can click back to base on, or perhaps a pane at left showing you the
remaining "required" tasks, so you can click on those and move around.
Or perhaps a bit of both, back just seems as I said a bit odd.

So all told, keep up the great work, I imagine it will get there in
time. This was one of the more difficult alpha installs I have ever had
to do, a fair number of hoops to jump through to get to the end.

-Erinn

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 551 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/attachments/20120916/6dd9c850/attachment.sig>