I have tried to do a network install of Fedora 16 multiple times, but it has failed every time! More to the point I also discovered that the anaconda install ignores changes I requested for the partition layout. Excuse me for suggesting this, but Fedora 15 and 16 releases seem to be the most troublesome releases ever, even exceeding the problems of the transition to KDE 4. In fact I'm beginning to lose patience with Fedora and will probably look at switching to another distro, so all suggestions of an alternative stable KDE distribution are welcome.
cpp4ever
On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 03:05:44PM +0000, n2xssvv.g02gfr12930 wrote:
I have tried to do a network install of Fedora 16 multiple times, but it has failed every time! More to the point I also discovered that the anaconda install ignores changes I requested for the partition layout. Excuse me for suggesting this, but Fedora 15 and 16 releases seem to be the most troublesome releases ever, even exceeding the problems of the transition to KDE 4. In fact I'm beginning to lose patience with Fedora and will probably look at switching to another distro, so all suggestions of an alternative stable KDE distribution are welcome.
If you can describe exactly what you did, it would be easier to offer advice or help. For instance, a blow-by-blow of what you did at the partitioning screen would be useful.
On 01/03/12 18:44, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 03:05:44PM +0000, n2xssvv.g02gfr12930 wrote:
I have tried to do a network install of Fedora 16 multiple times, but it has failed every time! More to the point I also discovered that the anaconda install ignores changes I requested for the partition layout. Excuse me for suggesting this, but Fedora 15 and 16 releases seem to be the most troublesome releases ever, even exceeding the problems of the transition to KDE 4. In fact I'm beginning to lose patience with Fedora and will probably look at switching to another distro, so all suggestions of an alternative stable KDE distribution are welcome.
If you can describe exactly what you did, it would be easier to offer advice or help. For instance, a blow-by-blow of what you did at the partitioning screen would be useful.
Using the network install CD, (verified from hash)
Setting it to automatically partition and use a 1 Tb drive, changing the GUI to be KDE rather than Gnome, it hangs after between 130 and 500 packages have been installed. It failed the same way when no changes to the default packages were made. Numerous variations, including simplifying the hardware to just motherboard, graphics card, memory, HDD, and DVD RW made no difference! Even connecting directly to the ISP modem made no difference. I doubt you can suggest something new.
Using the KDE spin CD, (verified by hash and does boot in vesa mode)
Installation completes, but then fails to finish configuring the HDD causing the subsequent boot from grub to fail!.
Finally I have failed to burn an install DVD either on the PC or a laptop, it also failing multiple times! Hence my attempts to update from Fedora 14 appear to have been thwarted and I'm somewhat annoyed!!
After this much trouble I am becoming seriously disillusioned with Fedora!!!
Breaking news!!! I have a flaky Fedora 16 running on my PC, here's roughly how:
Installed from KDE spin CD Ran update from network install CD, (multiple times due to failures)
still cannot boot the latest kernel though, and it appears to crash far more frequently than I'd expect. Bottom line is I'm still not going to try updating my laptop from Fedora 14 until I see Fedora 16/17 become a lot more stable!
cpp4ever
On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 08:36:34PM +0000, n2xssvv.g02gfr12930 wrote:
On 01/03/12 18:44, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 03:05:44PM +0000, n2xssvv.g02gfr12930 wrote:
I have tried to do a network install of Fedora 16 multiple times, but it has failed every time! More to the point I also discovered that the anaconda install ignores changes I requested for the partition layout. Excuse me for suggesting this, but Fedora 15 and 16 releases seem to be the most troublesome releases ever, even exceeding the problems of the transition to KDE 4. In fact I'm beginning to lose patience with Fedora and will probably look at switching to another distro, so all suggestions of an alternative stable KDE distribution are welcome.
If you can describe exactly what you did, it would be easier to offer advice or help. For instance, a blow-by-blow of what you did at the partitioning screen would be useful.
Using the network install CD, (verified from hash)
Setting it to automatically partition and use a 1 Tb drive, changing the GUI to be KDE rather than Gnome, it hangs after between 130 and 500 packages have been installed. It failed the same way when no changes to the default packages were made. Numerous variations, including simplifying the hardware to just motherboard, graphics card, memory, HDD, and DVD RW made no difference! Even connecting directly to the ISP modem made no difference. I doubt you can suggest something new.
You can often see error messages by switching to an alternate tty: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Logging
Whether you can switch (using Ctrl+Alt+F2, F3, F4, etc.) may depend on whether you're getting a really awful problem like a kernel panic -- which may indicate a hardware error particular to your setup -- or just a network timeout of some sort.
Ctrl+Alt+F2 will give you tty2, a shell where you can look at the current logs in /tmp. Similarly Ctrl+Alt+F3 (tty3) and Ctrl+Alt+F4 (tty4) will give you higher level messages which might indicate the problem.
The fact that you're having difficulty with a number of different methods makes me think it's more likely a hardware difficulty. Can you verify your memory, storage, etc. are all fine using other OS utilities?
Using the KDE spin CD, (verified by hash and does boot in vesa mode)
Installation completes, but then fails to finish configuring the HDD causing the subsequent boot from grub to fail!.
Finally I have failed to burn an install DVD either on the PC or a laptop, it also failing multiple times! Hence my attempts to update from Fedora 14 appear to have been thwarted and I'm somewhat annoyed!!
After this much trouble I am becoming seriously disillusioned with Fedora!!!
Breaking news!!! I have a flaky Fedora 16 running on my PC, here's roughly how:
Installed from KDE spin CD Ran update from network install CD, (multiple times due to failures)
still cannot boot the latest kernel though, and it appears to crash far more frequently than I'd expect. Bottom line is I'm still not going to try updating my laptop from Fedora 14 until I see Fedora 16/17 become a lot more stable!
Well, this is a step forward, but let's not rush to conclude this is a general or widespread F16 stability problem. I've run both on my hardware here with zero problems, as have many other people I know. My whole family uses it daily on several computers and it's been solid as a rock since the public release. A lot of dedicated, wonderful folks put a ton of time into making sure that Fedora is as good as possible before that happens.
Nevertheless, do think about reporting a complete bug if you can make the same problem happen repeatedly. Start here for beginner information, but if you're going to file a kernel bug, I *highly* recommend you press on to read the more detailed information linked at the end.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_file_a_bug_report
On 01/03/12 21:49, Paul W. Frields wrote:
<snip>
Nevertheless, do think about reporting a complete bug if you can make the same problem happen repeatedly. Start here for beginner information, but if you're going to file a kernel bug, I *highly* recommend you press on to read the more detailed information linked at the end.
Just for the record, the latest kernel for Fedora 16 causes a kernel panic. From this I've deduced that installing Fedora 16 without updates first resulted in my having a bootable kernel and hence a workable Fedora 16. As for the reporting of bugs, when I can reliably reproduce an error with some useful feedback I will do so, but as I well know it is very difficult to fix bugs with limited information or ability to reliably reproduce them. Unfortunately I'm still finding Fedora 16 somewhat unstable, yum/yumex being particularly prone to becoming unstable. So no updating my laptop just yet.
Anyway, more information to come regarding failures during startup, as these appear it bit more consistent, and easy to narrow down.
Here's hoping people new to Linux don't come up against the problems I have, it may not put them off Linux, but just the Fedora distribution.
cpp4ever
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n2xssvv.g02gfr12930 -
Paul W. Frields