F18 beta experience under VM

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-12-03 at 01:10 -0600, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Getting to the first anaconda UI screen took a good 1-2 minutes. I 
> wasn't sure if the VM had locked up as I had no indication of work being 
> done. I can see people being frustrated with the wait and rebooting a 
> few times and then posting on @test or @users that F18 won't install.

That's not normal, it should only take a few seconds after dracut
concludes (during which you can see that Stuff is Happening). Did you
file a bug?

> The custom partitioning manager, as mentioned on other threads, is 
> confusing and buggy. The VM I tested with was already F18 alpha. 
> Anaconda saw F18 already installed, and when I offered to reformat the 
> existing partitions they disappeared from the F18 alpha list (not 
> expecting that) and I found them under the F18 beta partitioning without 
> a mount point. When I added a mount point the partition was duplicated 
> so for example I had a 500MB ext4 partition and gave it a /boot mount 
> point, which created a 500MB "Boot" ext4 partition leaving the original 
> partition still on my screen.

That's an equally confusing bug report. :) Could you please state
precisely what steps you took and what results you saw? This is more
useful and reliable than just saying what you think happened, because
part of the agreed-upon problem here is that not everyone is clear on
exactly what is actually happening in custom part.

> May I suggest that the "Date/Time" setting be moved to the "User 
> Settings" page, which is during package installation? The root password 
> setting looks lonely.

This kind of change is very disruptive and won't happen post-Beta. Also,
we can't do that anyway: the reason there's a date/time spoke during
anaconda at all is because on some systems the clock is completely wrong
- like 30 years wrong - and that can affect some package scripts. So the
spoke exists to make sure you have an opportunity to set the correct
date/time prior to package install beginning. Moving the spoke to during
package installation would defeat its purpose. If we didn't need to be
sure date/time could be set prior to package install on some systems,
there would be no such spoke in anaconda at all, and it'd be done at
firstboot instead.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net