F11: LiveCD problems [SOLVED]

[Daniel B. Thurman]

On 08/10/2009 01:53 PM, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
>
> For the first time, I have booted off the LiveCD
> and I notice several problems:
>
> (1) The GUI screen starts up with the "teardrop", completes
>     filling it up, and then it drops into a shell
> (2) It says something about creating a symlink (/dev/root)
>     and so I issued:
>    (a) rm -fr root
>    (b) ln -s /dev/root /root
>    (c) exit
>    And the result is the keyboard has Caps-Lock & Scroll-Lock
>    LEDs flashing.  Nothing happens, so I pressed the hardware
>    reset button and the system reboots.  After rebooting again,
>    filling the "teardrop" again, this times it falls into a shell
>    again.
>
> (3) It says something of a "non-standard" filesystem or volume
>     and says that it fails to create a ramdiskfs.
>
> Looks to me that I am unable to get F11's LiveCD to work
> on my system.
>
> I will download the DVD version and see if this works.
>

It is clear to me, that the problem with installing F11
on my system, was due to the fact, that using gparted
to delete, resize, move partitions around re-arranged
the partitions out of order and also left behind "ghost"
partition tables that were supposedly removed (they
weren't), and Fedora's use of "new" install code to search
for partitions (as opposed to some older partition program)
during installs was confused due to these "ghosts"
partitions and believed the drive's partition tables
was "corrupted" and stopped right there (panicked),
even though there were other drives in the system at
the time none, which was available for F11's use, because
there was no swap partition to be found anywhere.

I have since obtained my RMA'ed drive several days
ago, manually created 15 partitions (on a SATA drive),
copied over the contents of the partitions over from
the "corrupted" drive to the RMA'ed drive (using both
cp -a and rsync (as a test)), re-edited the boot/fstab files,
and successfully booted off the RMA'ed drive, wiped clean
my "corrupted" drive, and only then I was able to install F11
on the RMA'ed drive.  I have used the "old" drive as a backup
copy of the RMA'ed drive and both drives can be used for
multi-boot purposes... for now.

I note that this was not a problem with the other install
distros - as they found nothing wrong with the "corrupted"
drive via their installation CDs (probably because they are
using a different partition program, I presume), and it was
only Fedora that failed to find a valid drive.

Only now, I am chasing F11 problems, but for the most part,
F11 is pretty good so far.  The problems I now have is:

1) Xorg incorrectly does not provide 1600x1200 resolutions
     for a Intel 945 Video chip, -xrandr says it allows for 4095x4095
     but limits to 1280x1024.  My hardware is not the problem as
     xorg works on F8/9 but not on F10/11.  Oh, and my monitor is
     a CM715, if that helps.

2) Samba fails to find other windoes domains/shares and only
     sees itself in "Network" places.

3) Amarok 2.x sucks big time, awful layout, severely "parred down"
     with almost no features anymore, IMO.  Downgraded to Amarok 1.4
     and I hope Amarok re-mediate with later releases, we'll see.

I will certainly be fully testing F11 and we'll see if more "goblins"
will crawl out of hiding. ;)