Can't install ƒ20

[Frode, maillister]

On 05. march 2014 16:58, Liam Proven wrote:
> So I need to tell Fedora to put root on sda5 and /home on sda10 and
> use sda8 for swap. I want the bootloader on sda5 as well. I'm
> currently using Ubuntu's GRUB, as it's my primary OS, but I plan to
> replace this with a standalone boot manager.

The new Anaconda will not let you install grub2 on a partition, but you 
can choose to not install a boot manager at all if you don't want the 
mbr to be overwritten. You can manually install grub2 on a partition 
before you reboot the machine, using another virtual terminal. Fedora 
and the grub developers do not recommend doing this on ext* and zfs file 
systems, because they don't have enough space allocated for that use, 
though btrfs does.

I have used the procedure outlined in this bugzilla comment, using grub 
legacy as the main boot loader in mbr (f19):

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=872826#c36

Be careful if you want to try it though...
The only problem is that e.g. /etc/default/grub is not generated.

Another alternative would be to install extlinux instead of grub on the 
partition, using the netinstall iso. I haven't tried it, so I couldn't 
comment on how that works.

> I managed to get the Fedora installer to format sda5 but then, having
> 16GB of / + 150GB of /home and 8GB of swap, it said that it didn't
> have enough space for the 6.7GB of stuff it needed to install and
> crashed out with a series of Python errors.
>
> Now it can't "see"  a distro on sda5, it won't let me choose it as an
> option. I can't remove and recreate it, either - or at least, I can't
> see how. I also can't see how to tell it to put the bootloader in the
> root partition.

You have probably tried gparted or fdisk from your Ubuntu installation?

> Is it me, or is the installer just not flexible enough to cope with
> this sort of scenario?

The designers/developers have apparently decided to prioritize ease of 
use at the expense of some of the "advanced" features, thinking that 
those who do things differently know how to do it.


Frode Petersen