Johns thoughts on F13

Tue Nov 24 05:42:31 UTC 2009

I hadn't planned on using F13, but I decided it would be handy to have a 
(virtual) server with recent PHP etc, and being somewhat familiar with 
RHL and its successors, I chose Fedora 12.

I'm installing into a VM running in Virtual PC under Windows XP.

It's not a happy experience. Here are some thoughts put together while 
my third attempt runs.
1. Applying updates at install time is good. Randomly choosing a mirror 
isn't, even if it gets lucky.
1a. Threatening to give up if the mirror is a bit flaky is seriously bad 
form. Several times it failed to fetch a package and proposed to reboot. 
However, on retrying, the package was downloaded successfully. The one 
package I investigated was an update, installing a local copy would have 
been better even if out of date - a "yum update" at some time would fix 
it. An option of "skip" would be good too, not every package is 
critically important, and I could well do without gnome themese.

Which brings me to
2 Installing stuff I don't want. How hard must it be to do something 
equivalent to a ubuntu "server" install, with absolutely no GUI stuff, 
especially xorg GUI stuff with Gnome, KDE, XFCE and all the rest?

If that's possible with an interactive install (and I did review the 
package selections), why is it not easily seen?

2a More stuff I don't want. I did not choose any language support. I 
have no use for Tamil, Hundi, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, 
Russian (is there anyone left to offend?) Ah, Thai support. I didn't 
choose support for any of those, but I see lots of fonts for all sorts 
of languages I don't know.

It's my third effort and I've excluded all the X stuff I could see, 
including window manages, and I see it's installing metacity.

this is <your choice of impoliteness>

3. I don't know who's at fault, but Fedora kernels a pretty much alone 
in not running in Virtual PC. Booting with "noapic" often enables it to 
run. It would be really nice if F13 would recognise whatever the problem 
is an work around it.

The third install has completed, and it's defied my selections. Amongst 
other things, I specifically excluded base-x but again it's installed as 
  shown by the kickstart file anaconda has produces. I specifically 
excluded all the *Support packages, individually by name, and again I 
have heaps of useless fonts.

This is too much, far too much.
Here is the %packages section of the ks file I created:
%packages --ignoremissing
links
elinks
lynx
alpine
@admin-tools
@base
@books
@core
@development-libs
@development-tools
@editors
@fonts
@hardware-support
@input-methods
@java
@online-docs
@sql-server
@printing
@server-cfg
@text-internet
@web-server
@smb-server
@base-x
- at X Window System
-sendmail
postfix
gpgme
gpm
gnupg2
lua
gypsy
hdparm
php-pgsql
php-odbc
-system-config-lvm
-system-config-language
-system-config-boot
-hplip
-hpijs
-gutenprint-cups
-gutenprint
-bluez-cups
-webalizer
-squid
- at Arabic Support
- at Armenian Support
- at Assamese Support
- at Bengali Support
- at Bhutanese Support
- at Dial-up Networking Support
- at Ethiopic Support
- at Georgian Support
- at Gujarati Support
- at Hardware Support
- at Hebrew Support
- at Hindi Support
- at Inuktitut Support
- at Japanese Support
- at Kannada Support
- at Khmer Support
- at Korean Support
- at Lao Support
- at Maithili Support
- at Malayalam Support
- at Marathi Support
- at Oriya Support
- at Printing Support
- at Punjabi Support
- at Sinhala Support
- at Tajik Support
- at Tamil Support
- at Telugu Support
- at Thai Support
- at Urdu Support
- at Venda Support
- at Afrikaans Support
- at Albanian Support
- at Amazigh Support
- at Azerbaijani Support
- at Basque Support
- at Belarusian Support
- at Bosnian Support
- at Brazilian Portuguese Support
- at Breton Support
- at Bulgarian Support
- at Catalan Support
- at Chichewa Support
- at Chinese Support
- at Coptic Support
- at Croatian Support
- at Czech Support
- at Danish Support
- at Dutch Support
- at English (UK) Support
- at Esperanto Support
- at Estonian Support
- at Faeroese Support
- at Fijian Support
- at Filipino Support
- at Finnish Support
- at French Support
- at Frisian Support
- at Friulian Support
- at Gaelic Support
- at Galician Support
- at German Support
- at Greek Support
- at Hiligaynon Support
- at Hungarian Support
- at Icelandic Support
- at Indonesian Support
- at Interlingua Support
- at Irish Support
- at Italian Support
- at Kashmiri Support
- at Kashubian Support
- at Kazakh Support
- at Kinyarwanda Support
- at Konkani Support
- at Kurdish Support
- at Latin Support
- at Latvian Support
- at Lithuanian Support
- at Low Saxon Support
- at Luxembourgish Support
- at Macedonian Support
- at Malagasy Support
- at Malay Support
- at Maltese Support
- at Manx Support
- at Maori Support
- at Mongolian Support
- at Myanmar (Burmese) Support
- at Nepali Support
- at Northern Sotho Support
- at Norwegian Support
- at Occitan Support
- at Persian Support
- at Polish Support
- at Portuguese Support
- at Romanian Support
- at Russian Support
- at Samoan Support
- at Sanskrit Support
- at Sardinian Support
- at Serbian Support
- at Sindhi Support
- at Slovak Support
- at Slovenian Support
- at Somali Support
- at Southern Ndebele Support
- at Southern Sotho Support
- at Spanish Support
- at Swahili Support
- at Swati Support
- at Swedish Support
- at Tagalog Support
- at Tetum Support
- at Tibetan Support
- at Tonga Support
- at Tsonga Support
- at Tswana Support
- at Turkish Support
- at Turkmen Support
- at Ukrainian Support
- at Upper Sorbian Support
- at Uzbek Support
- at Vietnamese Support
- at Walloon Support
- at Welsh Support
- at Xhosa Support
- at Zulu Support
- at Clustering
- at Font design and packaging
- at Fonts
- at FTP Server
- at Games and Entertainment
- at GNOME Desktop Environment
- at GNOME Software Development
- at Graphical Internet
- at Graphics
- at Input Methods
- at KDE (K Desktop Environment)
- at KDE Software Development
- at MinGW cross-compiler
- at Moblin Desktop Environment
- at Office/Productivity
- at Sugar Desktop Environment
- at Virtualization
- at Window Managers
- at XFCE
- at XFCE Software Development
- at X Software Development
- at X Window System
%end

Here is the packages section from the ks file anaconda created:
%packages --ignoremissing
@admin-tools
@base
@base-x
@books
@core
@development-libs
@development-tools
@editors
@fonts
@hardware-support
@input-methods
@java
@online-docs
@printing
@server-cfg
@smb-server
@sql-server
@text-internet
@web-server
alpine
elinks
gnupg2
gpgme
gpm
gypsy
hdparm
links
lua
lynx
php-odbc
php-pgsql
postfix
-bluez-cups
-gutenprint
-gutenprint-cups
-hpijs
-hplip
-sendmail
-squid
-system-config-boot
-system-config-language
-system-config-lvm
-webalizer

%end

If, as I suspect, this nonsense arises because of deps resolution, how 
about giving the user the choice as to how it's done? If some package is 
pulling in all this nonsense, I _do not want it._ I thought 
"--ignoremissing" might, maybe, do it.

Clearly, F12 isn't useful to me. Maybe, if people listen, these problems 
can be dealt with in time for F13.

-- 

Cheers
John

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