->fc6: Pkg Installation - "may take several minutes" - 36 hours later!!

[Jim Cornette]

sean wrote:
> Alan Cox wrote:
>> On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:40:52 -0400
>> sean <seandarcy2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Upgrading to FC6, off a hard disk partition. Text install goes 
>>> without error, until the Package Installation screen appears. There's 
>>> a popup:
>>>
>>> "starting install process. This may take several minutes..."
>>>
>>> That was 36 hours ago!
>>>
>>> No disk access lights flashing.
>>>
>>> This is a slow old machine 400mz, 128meg ram, but it runs fc5.
>>
>> 128MB is pushing it for an update but it will find and use your swap so
>> it ought to be ok. 36 hours on I'd have expected the system to have
>> finished (and if not to be thrashing the disk like a lunatic trying to
>> fit stuff in swap)
>>
>> How much swap does the box have ?
>>
> 
> There's a 1 gig swap partition. It's an old Gateway the I use without X, 
> just cli, as an internal firewall, dhcp server, etc. I'd like to upgrade 
> to keep all the little housekeeping settings I've made over the years.
> 
> I'm also surprised it's not disk trashing - that's what I expected. 36 
> hours might not be too long to actually install  the packages.
> 
> But it never even started - no disk access light once the Package 
> Installation screen came up.
> 
> It there any way to check if anaconda actually finds the swap partition 
> ( Which shouldn't be hard - only one disk, swap is hda2 )?
> 
> Would installing the fedora-release rpms, and then yum upgrade be a 
> better strategy?
> 
> sean
> 

I had a problem in the past that was similar to what you described. The 
installer exited and left the system with a working shell. I was able to 
go into /mnt/sysimage/root and view the logs and do other activities in 
the environment. I was text installing with 256 MB of memory. I ended up 
getting additional memory which allowed me to get a decent installation. 
(added 512 MB more of memory).
The bug was filed and I believe fixed for 256 MB, 128 MB might still 
show a similar failure.

Is it possible to add more memory to the computer?

If not, I think your proposal to install the fedora-release (and company 
for docs) package and doing a yum upgrade might work out for you. Just 
take into consideration that you'd want to get core system packages 
installed first which will probably pull in up the line packages that 
depend upon these important libraries and system utilities.
Hotplug might be an issue since it was removed and packages depending 
upon hotplug might need to be upgraded to remove the dependency on 
hotplug of past package versions. It should be less time consuming vs. 
the 36 hour wait with no activity.

Jim

-- 
It would be nice if the Food and Drug Administration stopped issuing 
warnings about toxic substances and just gave me the names of one or two 
things still safe to eat.
		-- Robert Fuoss