Installing with F20 installer report (and failure)

[Chris Murphy]

On May 29, 2014, at 12:29 PM, lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
> I`m not saying that I have no idea what LVM is, only that I don`t have
> use for it.  

I still think it shouldn't be default for workstation or cloud, only for server. It's got very cool features, but it causes way more problems and complications than it solves, therefore I think it's better if people who want it have to choose to use it, rather than people who don't know what it is or won't benefit from it having to know to disable something they don't know to disable. The explanation is that "eventually we're going to move to Btrfs by default so why make a change from LVM to plain partitions and then to btrfs; why not just do the change once when we're ready?" And that logic won the argument. I still think it's better to do the simplest thing at the moment, even if it means back to back changes.

But whatever, if you know what it is, and you know that you don't need it, you don't really have much reason to just advertise that you don't need it. It's not really going to do much good in this forum (just like the above paragraph of mine), there are other forums for that.

> And the installer doesn`t say what it means by "standard
> partitions".  

It means "don't use LVM" it just uses plain partitions for each chosen mount point in the installer.

> I want to use raid because I don`t store data on a single
> disk only.

RAID1/Mirroring in the Fedora installer translates to md raid. It will support existing IMSM (Intel firmware initiated RAID), also via md. The md driver is part of the kernel, and the user space tool is mdadm.

> 
>> And same goes for employing full-disk encryption. If you don't know
>> what to do with passphrase, you will inevitably use your data
>> permanently and blame Fedora.
> 
> I`m not saying that I don`t know what to do with it.  Why do I have to
> enter the passphrase like 10 times?  Why does the installer want to save
> it, and where?

If it asks for a passphrase on more than one page (two times on the same page, the 2nd one is a confirmation) then you've probably run into a bug or confusing design. With Fedora 19 for example it was possible to inadvertently create encrypted partitions, which became LVM PVs, and then you could also separately encrypt each LV. So you were getting double encryption. This logic was fixed in Fedora 20 but you might still be running into some confusing UI, but it shouldn't let you actually create a layout with double encryption.

In any case, almost no one is going to understand what you're talking about unless you either write out discrete steps, maybe annotated with screen shots. Or better (and easier) if you can make a video of it.

> Anyway, I want to use the system.  Since Fedora fails and there aren`t
> any ideas about getting it to work, it seems I have to install something
> else.

I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts no one even understands exactly how it's failing. That is it failing isn't specific enough, like I said earlier there are thousands of ways an OS can fail to boot or startup. A good starting point for troubleshooting is to edit the boot menu entry in grub (use e to edit) and find the linux line, and remove rhgb quiet. That's a one time thing, the next time you boot those options will be back in there so if you need to keep troubleshooting you have to remove them each time. Another idea if this might be video card related is to try adding the option nomodeset. And then take a photo with a cell phone where the text scrolling stops and put it up somewhere.

Even better if you can ssh into the computer remotely and post the result from:

journalctl -b -l -o short-monotonic > journal.txt
scp journal.txt <remotehost>  

It's probably too big for fpaste but you could try it: fpaste journal.txt


Chris Murphy