Sad experience with Fedora on Sony Picturebook

[Timothy Murphy]

There has been a steady decline in the ease with which
I have been able to upgrade or install Redhat/Fedora
on my Sony C1VFK Picturebook,
using the stanard CD51 CD reader.

Redhat-8.0 was the last distribution that installed without problem.
With Redhat-9 I had to respond to the boot prompt with
"linux ide2=0x180,0x386".

With Fedora-1 I had to expand this to
"linux ide2=0x180,0x386 pci=off".

I could not install Fedora-2 from CD;
I had to install it from hard disk.

I just tried Fedora-3 test2
and I could not install this from CD or hard disk.
With CD (and the mantra above) it reached the point
where I opted to install from local CD,
but at that point my screen filled with garbage.

The hard disk installation got past the dependency check,
but then bombed out with the error message in upgrade.log
"Upgrading 658 packages
error: db4 error(2) from dbenv->close: No such file or directory".

It's pretty depressing when it gets harder to install a distribution
rather than easier ...



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland