Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> Personally, I am willing to put up with problems installing a
> distribution if I really want to install it,
> and I have put up with enormous problems in the past to install Fedora -
> the worst being, as I mentioned, on Sony PictureBooks.
In my experience, Sony has notoriously suck-tastic support for
recordable media in their drives due to their love for DRM.
I really don't think DRM has anything to do with the problems I had
with the Sony PictureBook - problems I might say that everybody had
with these machines.
The essential point was that the PictureBook
was very picky about boot devices - for example,
you could only boot (Windows or Linux) from their own PCMCIA-CD reader.
But Fedora was particularly difficult to boot,
and in fact I never succeeded in booting Fedora 2 to 5 from a CD
on these machines; I always installed Fedora in a different way.
Since
Ubuntu disks from ShipIt are pressed and not burned on recordable
media, could it be that you are having issues with a particular
brand/type of recordable media that you are using to burn Fedora
images on?
I'm not sure what you mean by "Ubuntu disks from ShipIt".
The particular Ubuntu Live CD I used was downloaded and burnt
in exactly the same way as my Fedora CDs.
Just a thought since, by my recollection, I have yet to
have any issue, *ever*, with a Fedora CD not booting and I have been
tracking various stable/unstable versions on a wide variety of
machines since before Fedora.
So, you are very lucky.
If you read this newsgroup/mailing list you must have seen
many people complaining of exactly the same issues as me.
I have had some problems with a few
other distros but mainly in the kernel loading stage due to missing
hardware support in the initrd.
Actually, Fedora in the past has been pretty bad on my SCSI only machine,
for the reason you give.
I always upgrade on that machine, so I have an old compiled kernel
to fall back on.
To be fair, with Fedora 6 I had more disk space,
so I installed (rather than upgraded) it,
leaving Fedora 5 on another partition in case FC-6 didn't work.
The Fedora-6 kernel did in fact work OK.
[I'm not a great fan of Fedora - or any other distribution - kernels;
basically, I have more confidence in Linus and his team
and prefer to keep kernel and distribution distinct.]
> I wish Fedora would undertake some modest investigation
> to see what problems people have with installation.
> I have suggested this, but been told that it would be a mammoth task,
> which I find difficult to believe.
The proper course of action would be for you to first troubleshoot
your own kit to see if the issue is local to faulty (broken or by
design) hardware.
Sorry, that is a silly remark.
As far as I am concerned, if Windows runs OK on a computer,
and Knoppix and Slax boot OK,
but Fedora does not boot,
then the fault lies with Fedora not with the machine.
Then, once you determine that you are not at fault,
point your finger at the Fedora Project by filling out a bug report
recording your hardware details and what you have done to verify that
you have working hardware (booted several other burned CDs, did a
media check on the Fedora CD, etc.). That is how this truly mammoth
task of getting 100% hardware support is accomplished ... not by
writing inflammatory emails to public mailing lists accusing the
Fedora devs of ignoring some huge shortcoming in their distro.
I'm afraid I have come to the conclusion that the Anaconda developers
are not at present open to suggestion;
they share your view that if their program does not run on your machine
then there is something wrong with your machine.
... and in the end, Fedora (or at least used to) provides an
old-school floppy disk image for those systems that can't boot from CD
for some reason. I doubt they do for the LiveCD though. You could
always try a syslinux boot to CD boot floppy.
Do any machines have floppy drives nowadays?
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland