Installation of Fedora Core 4

akonstam at trinity.edu akonstam at trinity.edu
Fri Nov 18 21:48:47 UTC 2005


On Sat, Nov 19, 2005 at 03:07:38AM +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 09:20 -0600, akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> > There is a lesson in all this. FC4 installs well on many
> > architectures.
> > We have it installed on at least 5 different architectures going form
> > state of the art to obsolete. A custom install sill allow you do do
> > much of what you want to do in most cases.
> > 
> > That yours bombs out is frustrating but needs to investigated as to
> > why it is bombing out not just to go to another installation scheme at
> > random.
> > 
> > That is my opinion and I am sticking to it.
> 
> I have had it go fine on some PCs, and others it drove me around the
> twist.  Now I can understand that some obscure hardware might be hard to
> support, but I view that as an after-the-installation problem.  Not the
> installer script dying before installation really begins.  The installer
> script ought to run on all systems with enough RAM.
> 
> The systems were given a gruelling memtest86 trial.  They've worked for
> months, sometimes years, with prior Linux installs, and the current
> installs.  It just seems to be some issue with the installing.
> 
> I've custom picked things to install, it's died.  I've gone back and
> picked the same things, and it's worked.  It's extremely frustrating.
> 
> The thing is, though, where to debug this.  An uninstalled system
> doesn't give you any easy way to save a log file, particularly if you
> only have a CD-ROM and hard drive in the box.  And there's a plethora of
> options for what you install, giving a large number of possible failure
> points (and variables for what's really at fault).
First, if you don't accept mail at your return address I would ask you not
to send me private mail which I can't resond to.

That being said, there is a way to debug the install and it is not true that
the install should work on every architecture. Rather it should but does
not. We had some some completely SCSI ssytems that fought installation with
all their might.

Now for debugging. When you install ctl-alt-F2 or ctl-alt-F3 (I forget
which)  allow you to see the isntallation messages and errors as they occur.
The messages will tell you what the installer as doing and where it fails.
Have you tried that? There is also an install.log created it seems to me
which might tell you something.
-- 

-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
telephone: (210)-999-7484




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