About that installer...

[Dan Irwin]

So I'm trying to get F18 onto my new Dell laptop (e6530). Not
surprisingly, it's not working.

The installer won't let me install. It won't find free space. It won't
shrink partitions.

I even dropped to a shell, and used fdisk to blow away my windows 7
partition, and the installer still doesn't work properly!

I have now tried to manually partition, and the installer tells me
"Error checking storage configuration".

I have not had issues like this installing Linux since the mid 1990s.
And even then, I was able to complete and install. Today, in 2013,
with all the knowledge and experience I have, I cannot seem to get F18
onto my laptop.

In frustration, I went and installed a F18 VM on my old laptop. When
the VM has an empty, unpartitioned disk, the install worked perfectly.

Why has this been broken so bad? What was so bad about the old
installer? The ability to manually create LVMs and partitions would is
a panacea compared to this mess in F18. Seriously. This is pathetic.

So, right now, I have a laptop without any OS. Useful!

Notes:

Yeah, I should have beta tested. But that was hard considering I only
received my new laptop on Friday.
I'm not blaming anyone for my deletion of my own OS.
Fedora should not outright remove and replace features, and expect to
have such features restorred within the usual 6 month release
schedule. Who the hell signed off on this?
Linux distros need to learn to not cater for novices. If you can't
partition, you shouldn't be running Linux.

As this has descended into rant material, I am going to choose to stop now.

Come on Fedora, shape up. You can do better than this.

Time to find a Fedora 17 ISO somewhere on my net...

Cheers,

Dan