On Sun, 2009-08-30 at 20:37 -0400, Robert L Cochran wrote:
Well, to answer my own question: you cannot use the version of
install.img which is on the Fedora 12 x86_64 DVD. You can certainly dd
the image to the USB stick, but after that the stick can't be
automagically mounted (it generates SELinux errors in enforcing mode and
one gets false error messages that the device is write-protected.) Nor
can you boot to it.
Just to make sure of this, I used dd to put an archlinux netinstall
image on the same USB stick, and it booted just fine.
So I reluctantly burned the DVD and used that to install the Alpha.
Obviously, the installer isn't working right: X failed to start,
Well, that doesn't mean the installer's broken. It could mean X is
broken. :) What's your hardware?
and it
booted into a text-mode installation. I had no opportunity to do hard
drive partitioning and there was likewise no chance to select packages
or package groups, either. The text mode installer is blindingly fast:
it installed 184 packages (count 'em, 184!) which is almost nothing, and
left me with a glorious non-X, non-graphical, runlevel 3 installation
that doesn't even do firstboot.
I ran `yum update` and updated most of these packages -- all except
dhclient and one of it's dependencies.
Then I tried to `yum groupinstall` X but many of the packages needed
couldn't be found by yum. I even installed yum-presto to see if the
needed packages were available as drpm's.
Rawhide is rather broken at the moment due to OpenSSL excitement, that
could be related.
At that point, I gave up on the Alpha. I know it will improve in time
so
I'm not at all whining.
Seeing the opportunity, I had a ball installing Arch Linux on that hard
drive. I don't know why others might think Arch is ahead of Fedora...I
only got a 2.6.30 kernel from their 2009.08 release,
Well, kernel 2.6.31 hasn't actually been released yet, in all fairness.
We're shipping pre-release versions of it in Rawhide. I wouldn't expect
any 'stable' distro to ship a pre-release kernel (though hey, we did it
in Mandriva more than once...)
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net