Folks,
We distribute a distribution medium called „Everything“ at
https://alt.fedoraproject.org/
and various subpages. This provides several (mutually exclusive) installation options, in
addition to all desktop spins and labs also a "Fedora Server Edition". There are
several problems with this:
1.
The installation falsely claims to install "Fedora Server Edition" and reports
accordingly when booting. However, the default values install a desktop environment, so
that our Fedora Server Edition comes with btrfs and a large /home subvolume, among other
things. This violates pretty much all of the lower technical specifications for the
Fedora Server Edition.
2.
There are always users who download the "Everything" medium instead of the
various edition-specific media. They rely on the "Fedora Server Edition" label
and then complain that nothing works as it should and as it is described in our
documentation.
3.
Funnily enough, a "wild collection" of groups is offered as sub-options for the
server installation, ranging from various graphical user interfaces to special
configurations such as video editing. All of this certainly has no place on a "Fedora
Server Edition".
4.
The compilation of options and sub-options does not give the impression that anyone has
seriously considered their meaningfulness recently.
(See image in
https://pagure.io/fedora-server/issue/136)
5.
And even worse, a major provider of rentable ROOT servers (Hetzner), which has just
managed to bring Fedora back into its supported OS options, uses "Everything"
because it's the best for customers. And thus produces user disappointment at a
critical point. This thwarts our efforts to make Fedora Server Edition available on other
platforms.
The minimum solution is to remove the option „Fedora Server Edition“ from the installation
options and to rename the medium to „Fedora Selection“ or something similar.
In addition, it would certainly be beneficial to thoroughly revise the options. For
example, if I select the "Fedora Cloud Server“ installation option and perform an
installation, I get the following after booting the installation:
----------
Unexpected return from initial read: Device Error, buffer size 0
Failed to load image : Device Error
Start_image() returned Device Error
StartImage failed: Device Error
----------
I don't think that's the intention of Cloud Working Group.
Best
Peter
--
Peter Boy
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pboy
PBoy(a)fedoraproject.org
Timezone: CET (UTC+1) / CEST (UTC+2)
Fedora Server Edition Working Group member
Fedora Docs team contributor and board member
Java developer and enthusiast