Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, "Why?")

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Sun Mar 23 18:03:42 UTC 2014


On 22 March 2014 16:55, Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 16:40:36 +0000
> Liam Proven wrote:
>
>> Meantime, for further Fedora eval, it's going in a VirtualBox. Sad,
>> but that's all it seems able to handle.
>
> Actually, that's the key to installing on disk in a sensibly
> created partition layout: Install in a virtual machine 1st,
> then copy the VM disk image to a real disk and fiddle with
> the grub config and fstab. I install that way all the time
> now since the new installer appeared, and find it actually
> make things lots more convenient since I don't have to have
> the machine down while I'm doing the install.


[Nod] I might try that. Assuming that I actually like the OS enough to
want to commit it to the bare metal, of course. ;-)

But if this is SOP, then that to me says that the installer is broken
to a laughable degree.

For instance, many OSes can't handle the PC primary+secondary
partitioning scheme. This means that they need their own primary
partition, which is a *major* limiting factor if you have a multiboot
PC - you only get 4 primaries per drive, and if you need logical
partitions, then one of those primaries must be an extended partition,
so you only get 3. Primaries are a precious, scarce resource, and that
means that OSes that demand primaries - *BSD, Solaris, BeOS/Haiku,
etc. - are not good citizens when it comes to multiboot machines.

But Linux has always been the opposite. It's the eternal secondary OS,
running on machines designed for other OSes - primarily Windows, of
course, but also on hardware designed to run Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX,
HP-UX, etc. etc. If there's any OS that runs on more platforms than
Linux it can only be NetBSD and it is a real minority OS for a handful
of users.

Linux copes with /everyone's/ partitioning systems. Apple, Sun, PC,
GUID, it doesn't care, it just works with it.

Fedora, it seems, does not. It wants things done its way, or perhaps
as a secondary OS on a Windows machine. Otherwise, you're quite
possibly out of luck.

For one of the big, famous, heavily-promoted "outreach" distros, one
that is famous, I submit that this is not a good approach.

Just my 2ยข's worth!

-- 
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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