9:58 a.m.
Hi there. First post from someone returning to the RH family fold for
the first time since about 1996-1999, when I was a RHL user (v4 - v6
full time on my servers, v7/8/9 reviewed for various magazines - then
I switched to Caldera, then to SUSE and then to Ubuntu when it came
out.)
I'm trying to take a look at Fedora on real hardware as opposed to in
a VM. This is on a machine that multi-boots Windows 7, Ubuntu 13.10,
Crunchbang 11 and (used to) ElementaryOS.
I am trying to install on /dev/sda. It's a 1TB HD - there's also a
120GB SSD as /dev/sdb with Ubuntu's root filesystem and Win7 on it.
I have a pre-configured set of folders:
/dev/sda10 /home 150GB
/dev/sda11 (NTFS shared data) ~750GB
/dev/sda5 / 16GB <- this is where I want to put Fedora; it used to be
elementary's /
/dev/sda6 (Crunchbang /) 16GB
/dev/sda7 (FAT32, Windows pagefile) 8GB
/dev/sda8 (Linux swap) 8GB
So I need to tell Fedora to put root on sda5 and /home on sda10 and
use sda8 for swap. I want the bootloader on sda5 as well. I'm
currently using Ubuntu's GRUB, as it's my primary OS, but I plan to
replace this with a standalone boot manager.
I managed to get the Fedora installer to format sda5 but then, having
16GB of / + 150GB of /home and 8GB of swap, it said that it didn't
have enough space for the 6.7GB of stuff it needed to install and
crashed out with a series of Python errors.
Now it can't "see" a distro on sda5, it won't let me choose it as an
option. I can't remove and recreate it, either - or at least, I can't
see how. I also can't see how to tell it to put the bootloader in the
root partition.
Is it me, or is the installer just not flexible enough to cope with
this sort of scenario?
--
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven(a)cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven(a)hotmail.com * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884
11:37 a.m.
On Mar 5, 2014, at 8:58 AM, Liam Proven <lproven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
/dev/sda5 / 16GB <- this is where I want to put Fedora; it used to be
elementary's /
Is this a plain partition, or is it an LVM physical volume?
I managed to get the Fedora installer to format sda5 but then,
having
16GB of / + 150GB of /home and 8GB of swap, it said that it didn't
have enough space for the 6.7GB of stuff it needed to install and
crashed out with a series of Python errors.
The installer doesn't change anything on disk, including formatting, until after you
click Begin Installation. When did the crash occur? While you were in Manual Partitioning
or once you clicked on Begin Installation?
Even when the installer crashes, the automatic bug reporter rarely hangs also. Even if
that happens, you can use control-alt-F2 to get to a shell, and copy the contents of /tmp
to a USB stick. Or you can use the fpaste <filename> command to cause them to be
posted to the Fedora pastebin and then you can cite the URLs here.
If you can't get to a shell, that's a significant other problem that sounds like
it could be kernel related, in addition to the installer crashing.
It's a whole lot easier to get access to the installer logs if you have wired ethernet
at the time of the install since most wired ethernet connections are supported and enabled
when booted from install media. Wireless is a different story because a fair chunk of
wireless cards require proprietary firmware to function, and Fedora policy means
they're excluded.
Now it can't "see" a distro on sda5, it won't let
me choose it as an
option. I can't remove and recreate it, either - or at least, I can't
see how.
That suggests to me that possibly sda5 was an LVM physical volume, and maybe only the LV
was deleted, while the VG/PV is still intact so the sda5 partition itself isn't
considered free space yet. But this is speculation, the installer still shouldn't have
crashed.
In any case, I need to see logs, and actually it would be helpful to see the the text file
produced by Boot Info Script. You can be booted from any linux distro to run this.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/
I also can't see how to tell it to put the bootloader in the
root partition.
It's not possible since Fedora 18. On Fedora 18+ it can either be embedded to the MBR
and MBR gap, or not embedded at all.
Is it me, or is the installer just not flexible enough to cope with
this sort of scenario?
Uncertain, there isn't enough information so far. At least I'd like to see the
result from bootinfoscript, and the installer logs found in /tmp named anaconda.log,
program.log, and storage.log.
Chris Murphy
5:17 a.m.
"Frode, maillister" <fr-peter(a)online.no> writes:
The designers/developers have apparently decided to prioritize ease
of
use at the expense of some of the "advanced" features, thinking that
those who do things differently know how to do it.
They have managed to create an installer for Fedora that cannot be used
to install Fedora. That´s still an euphemism, yet it is what it comes
down to.
As for the original question: With the F19 installer, I had to create
the partitions otherwise and then mess around with the installer for
quite a while to tell it which partition to use for what. It was pretty
awful, though at least possible.
Perhaps you can use the F19 installer and install F19, then upgrade to
F20.
--
Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)
4:02 p.m.
On 05. march 2014 16:58, Liam Proven wrote:
So I need to tell Fedora to put root on sda5 and /home on sda10 and
use sda8 for swap. I want the bootloader on sda5 as well. I'm
currently using Ubuntu's GRUB, as it's my primary OS, but I plan to
replace this with a standalone boot manager.
The new Anaconda will not let you install grub2 on a partition, but you
can choose to not install a boot manager at all if you don't want the
mbr to be overwritten. You can manually install grub2 on a partition
before you reboot the machine, using another virtual terminal. Fedora
and the grub developers do not recommend doing this on ext* and zfs file
systems, because they don't have enough space allocated for that use,
though btrfs does.
I have used the procedure outlined in this bugzilla comment, using grub
legacy as the main boot loader in mbr (f19):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=872826#c36
Be careful if you want to try it though...
The only problem is that e.g. /etc/default/grub is not generated.
Another alternative would be to install extlinux instead of grub on the
partition, using the netinstall iso. I haven't tried it, so I couldn't
comment on how that works.
I managed to get the Fedora installer to format sda5 but then,
having
16GB of / + 150GB of /home and 8GB of swap, it said that it didn't
have enough space for the 6.7GB of stuff it needed to install and
crashed out with a series of Python errors.
Now it can't "see" a distro on sda5, it won't let me choose it as an
option. I can't remove and recreate it, either - or at least, I can't
see how. I also can't see how to tell it to put the bootloader in the
root partition.
You have probably tried gparted or fdisk from your Ubuntu installation?
Is it me, or is the installer just not flexible enough to cope with
this sort of scenario?
The designers/developers have apparently decided to prioritize ease of
use at the expense of some of the "advanced" features, thinking that
those who do things differently know how to do it.
Frode Petersen
6:06 p.m.
On 5 March 2014 23:55, Tom Horsley <horsley1953(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I install in a virtual machine where nothing can hurt my real
system, then I use the guestfs tools to copy the new installation
to the exact partitions I want it in, edit the fstab and grub
configs to point to the new partitions, and boot with the
configfile option from a separate stand alone grub2 partition
I have installed.
Heh!
Something like that had occurred to me. I had thought of installing
onto an external USB drive, then copying the result onto the hard
disk... But this should not be necessary!
--
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven(a)cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven(a)hotmail.com * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884
5:59 p.m.
On 5 March 2014 23:42, Fred Smith <fredex(a)fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> wrote:
Well, in my opinion, if ease of use was their goal, then they missed
it by a mile. Particularly in the disk partitioning section, they leave
you to stumble around trying to figure out how to step thru it with
no guidance. for example (from memory), you go to the disk partitioning
page and make your selectioins, then what do you do? there are choices,
and not all of them are the correct next step. At least some of the time,
the proper thing to do seems to be to click "done", as non-intuitive as
that seems, since you're obviously NOT done yet..., especially if you
want to reclaim previously used space.
Well, I have to say, I can only agree...
At least the old Anaconda guided you thru it step by step.
I've not tried it in a few versions and only in VMs for /years/ now.
--
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven(a)cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven(a)hotmail.com * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884
5:55 p.m.
Is it me, or is the installer just not flexible enough to cope with
this sort of scenario?
I've worked out a wonderful way to install fedora these days
so that I no longer have to worry about what in the Sam Hill
anaconda is likely to do to my computer:
I install in a virtual machine where nothing can hurt my real
system, then I use the guestfs tools to copy the new installation
to the exact partitions I want it in, edit the fstab and grub
configs to point to the new partitions, and boot with the
configfile option from a separate stand alone grub2 partition
I have installed.
Aside from protecting my system from the combination of
anaconda and humans who can't tell what anaconda is
likely to do, this also allows me to install a new fedora
with my system up the entire time, rather than being
dedicated to running the installer the whole time.
5:42 p.m.
On Wed, Mar 05, 2014 at 11:02:42PM +0100, Frode, maillister wrote:
On 05. march 2014 16:58, Liam Proven wrote:
<snippage>
>Is it me, or is the installer just not flexible enough to cope
with
>this sort of scenario?
The designers/developers have apparently decided to prioritize ease
of use at the expense of some of the "advanced" features, thinking
that those who do things differently know how to do it.
Well, in my opinion, if ease of use was their goal, then they missed
it by a mile. Particularly in the disk partitioning section, they leave
you to stumble around trying to figure out how to step thru it with
no guidance. for example (from memory), you go to the disk partitioning
page and make your selectioins, then what do you do? there are choices,
and not all of them are the correct next step. At least some of the time,
the proper thing to do seems to be to click "done", as non-intuitive as
that seems, since you're obviously NOT done yet..., especially if you
want to reclaim previously used space.
At least the old Anaconda guided you thru it step by step.
--
---- Fred Smith -- fredex(a)fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
"And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government there will be no end. He
will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding
it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever."
------------------------------- Isaiah 9:7 (niv) ------------------------------
5:27 p.m.
On 5 March 2014 22:02, Frode, maillister <fr-peter(a)online.no> wrote:
The new Anaconda will not let you install grub2 on a partition
Aha!
but you can
choose to not install a boot manager at all if you don't want the mbr to be
overwritten.
Yes, I tried that. That's when it collapsed in a pile of Python errors.
You can manually install grub2 on a partition before you reboot
the machine, using another virtual terminal.
This had been my fallback plan, but I did not get that far.
Fedora and the grub developers
do not recommend doing this on ext* and zfs file systems, because they don't
have enough space allocated for that use, though btrfs does.
I have seen errors doing it on ext2/ext3/ext4 but it always seems to
work anyway.
I have used the procedure outlined in this bugzilla comment, using
grub
legacy as the main boot loader in mbr (f19):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=872826#c36
Be careful if you want to try it though...
The only problem is that e.g. /etc/default/grub is not generated.
Thanks for the info!
Another alternative would be to install extlinux instead of grub on
the
partition, using the netinstall iso. I haven't tried it, so I couldn't
comment on how that works.
:¬o
That sounds a little more exciting than I had wanted...!
You have probably tried gparted or fdisk from your Ubuntu
installation?
Oh, the partition is still there. It used to have Elementary OS in it,
but now it is empty.
The Anaconda installer reaches into the other distros it finds,
inspects their /etc/fstab files (I am guessing from the behaviour
here) and shows them:
_Unknown Linux 1_
sda5 /
sda10 /home
_Unknown Linux 2_
sda6 /
sda10 /home
(And if I let it "see" my SSD, then...)
_Unknown Linux 3_
sdb5 /
sda10 /home
... or something like that.
(If it can read /etc/fstab then I don't know why it can't read
/etc/issue and *name* them, but hey.)
But now that sda5 is not associated with any other partitions, it
doesn't appear in the list of installs and I can't choose it.
It is very annoying.
The designers/developers have apparently decided to prioritize ease
of use
at the expense of some of the "advanced" features, thinking that those who
do things differently know how to do it.
Yes, I think that you're right. >_<
--
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven(a)cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven(a)hotmail.com * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884
3:41 p.m.
On 5 March 2014 18:21, Fred Smith <fredex(a)fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> wrote:
I don't think the "new" Anaconda is as flexibled as the
old one,
I wouldn't know, TBH!
so
it may well not allow you to do what you wanbt,
Ah, good, so it is not just me being dumb then? :¬)
But what I DO know
is that everything in the new installer is obscure as heck, 'specially
in the area of defining partitions and their usage. sometimes I
stumble around in there trying to make it do what I want for quite
a while.
I am really glad to hear you say that!
--
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven(a)cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven(a)hotmail.com * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884
5:45 p.m.
On 24 March 2014 16:37, Chris Murphy <lists(a)colorremedies.com> wrote:
On Mar 5, 2014, at 8:58 AM, Liam Proven <lproven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> /dev/sda5 / 16GB <- this is where I want to put Fedora; it used to be
> elementary's /
Is this a plain partition, or is it an LVM physical volume?
Plain MBR partition. I never ever use LVM on anything.
> I managed to get the Fedora installer to format sda5 but then,
having
> 16GB of / + 150GB of /home and 8GB of swap, it said that it didn't
> have enough space for the 6.7GB of stuff it needed to install and
> crashed out with a series of Python errors.
The installer doesn't change anything on disk, including formatting, until after you
click Begin Installation. When did the crash occur? While you were in Manual Partitioning
or once you clicked on Begin Installation?
The sequence went:
[1] try to install to pre-existing partitions made in Gparted
[2] fail; try to remove and recreate partitions
[3] fail; plug in an external USB2 250GB drive, try to install to that
On this 3rd go, I used the installer to remove the whole empty FAT32
partition on the USB drive. Then I told it to use all the space for
the root FS, nothing else. Picked the other options I needed - UK
keyboard, etc. - and clicked the button to begin installation.
The screen went blank - grey background, mouse pointer, nothing else
at all - and stayed that way. I could flip to vconsoles but nothing
else appeared on the graphical screen. There was disk activity - it
was doing /something/ at least at first - but no screen activity.
I left it several hours before power-cycling the machine.
I'll try again, leave it all on defaults and see if that gets further.
Even when the installer crashes, the automatic bug reporter rarely
hangs also. Even if that happens, you can use control-alt-F2 to get to a shell, and copy
the contents of /tmp to a USB stick. Or you can use the fpaste <filename> command to
cause them to be posted to the Fedora pastebin and then you can cite the URLs here.
If you can't get to a shell, that's a significant other problem that sounds like
it could be kernel related, in addition to the installer crashing.
It's a whole lot easier to get access to the installer logs if you have wired
ethernet at the time of the install since most wired ethernet connections are supported
and enabled when booted from install media. Wireless is a different story because a fair
chunk of wireless cards require proprietary firmware to function, and Fedora policy means
they're excluded.
Fair enough. Thanks for the info. I'll try this.
> Now it can't "see" a distro on sda5, it won't
let me choose it as an
> option. I can't remove and recreate it, either - or at least, I can't
> see how.
That suggests to me that possibly sda5 was an LVM physical volume, and maybe only the LV
was deleted, while the VG/PV is still intact so the sda5 partition itself isn't
considered free space yet. But this is speculation, the installer still shouldn't have
crashed.
Nope. Plain old logical partitions in an extended partition, which was
the only volume on a 1TB MBR drive. The laptop is from 2007 or so, has
a plain BIOS, so a GPT disk isn't really an option.
In any case, I need to see logs, and actually it would be helpful to
see the the text file produced by Boot Info Script. You can be booted from any linux
distro to run this.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/
> I also can't see how to tell it to put the bootloader in the
> root partition.
It's not possible since Fedora 18. On Fedora 18+ it can either be embedded to the MBR
and MBR gap, or not embedded at all.
O_o
That is... very surprising.
> Is it me, or is the installer just not flexible enough to cope
with
> this sort of scenario?
Uncertain, there isn't enough information so far. At least I'd like to see the
result from bootinfoscript, and the installer logs found in /tmp named anaconda.log,
program.log, and storage.log.
I'll see what I can do, but other projects are taking priority over
this one at the moment.
--
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven(a)cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven(a)hotmail.com * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884
12:21 p.m.
On Wed, Mar 05, 2014 at 03:58:48PM +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
Hi there. First post from someone returning to the RH family fold
for
the first time since about 1996-1999, when I was a RHL user (v4 - v6
full time on my servers, v7/8/9 reviewed for various magazines - then
I switched to Caldera, then to SUSE and then to Ubuntu when it came
out.)
I'm trying to take a look at Fedora on real hardware as opposed to in
a VM. This is on a machine that multi-boots Windows 7, Ubuntu 13.10,
Crunchbang 11 and (used to) ElementaryOS.
I am trying to install on /dev/sda. It's a 1TB HD - there's also a
120GB SSD as /dev/sdb with Ubuntu's root filesystem and Win7 on it.
I have a pre-configured set of folders:
/dev/sda10 /home 150GB
/dev/sda11 (NTFS shared data) ~750GB
/dev/sda5 / 16GB <- this is where I want to put Fedora; it used to be
elementary's /
/dev/sda6 (Crunchbang /) 16GB
/dev/sda7 (FAT32, Windows pagefile) 8GB
/dev/sda8 (Linux swap) 8GB
So I need to tell Fedora to put root on sda5 and /home on sda10 and
use sda8 for swap. I want the bootloader on sda5 as well. I'm
currently using Ubuntu's GRUB, as it's my primary OS, but I plan to
replace this with a standalone boot manager.
I managed to get the Fedora installer to format sda5 but then, having
16GB of / + 150GB of /home and 8GB of swap, it said that it didn't
have enough space for the 6.7GB of stuff it needed to install and
crashed out with a series of Python errors.
Now it can't "see" a distro on sda5, it won't let me choose it as an
option. I can't remove and recreate it, either - or at least, I can't
see how. I also can't see how to tell it to put the bootloader in the
root partition.
Is it me, or is the installer just not flexible enough to cope with
this sort of scenario?
I don't think the "new" Anaconda is as flexibled as the old one, so
it may well not allow you to do what you wanbt, But what I DO know
is that everything in the new installer is obscure as heck, 'specially
in the area of defining partitions and their usage. sometimes I
stumble around in there trying to make it do what I want for quite
a while.
--
---- Fred Smith -- fredex(a)fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
I can do all things through Christ
who strengthens me.
------------------------------ Philippians 4:13 -------------------------------
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