Sunday, April 02, 2006

Fedora Core: Maybe Later

I've abandoned trying to install Fedora Core 5 for now. The last straw was when I tried to do a complete reinstall of the system:

  • If I tried doing a "Custom Install" the system hung while searching for the package list.
  • If I tried doing a "Workstation Install" the system hung.
  • If I tried doing the default install, I got a little further. I got a message that Fedora couldn't unmount my CD, and I should go to tty2 (the second terminal screen) to see if it was mounted.
    • First of all, I was working from the DVD, not the CDs
    • Second, when I went to tty2, I saw a "#", the system prompt, with no error messages. This is a Good Thing. But when I entered the "df" command the system hung again.

Now this last problem has been mentioned (you'll have to search for it) and has been reported to bugzilla. Now maybe I should have stayed and debugged the problem, but I had a hosed system with no way to get a new version of Fedora Core 5 installed on it. If I had another box to play with ... maybe in a week or two, I'm working on it.

I could have gone back to FC4, but that didn't seem particularly worthwhile, especially since I would have had to do about 500 software updates to bring my system back up to where it was last week. So for now I'm abandoning Fedora Core. I may (and honestly, most likely) come back to Fedora/Red Hat, where I've been almost since I started using Linux, but I'm going to do a Monty Python and try something completely different — well, as completely different as one can be in Linux: I'm going to install Ubuntu.

Thus, this post marks the end of the Working With Fedora Core series, at least for now. Starting soon, at a website near you, will be Working With Ubuntu Linux. Stay tuned, boys and girls.

1 comments:

rcjhawk said...

The only reason I tried Ubuntu was that I knew it would be an easy install -- OK, it wasn't,b but at least it worked, unlike FC5. So far I'm happy with it. We'll see if I can get the Fortran thing going. That's my real power use, though fiddling with the OS is fun. If I can compile and run an LAPW code then I'll be basically happy with the thing, at least for the time being.

However, if someone shows me how to get FC5 up and running on this computer in the next week or two, I might be willing to switch back.

P.S. Someday (soon?) I'll update the pointer to your blog.