Brief diary of an F-7 installation

[Timothy Murphy]

I had upgraded FC-6 to F-7 on this Athlon64 machine,
but the machine had hung 3 time during the upgrade,
and the resulting system was seriously sick.
It seemed completely confused as to whether the disk
was hda or sda.

I had plenty of space; so I created a new partition, sda8,
and installed Fedora-7 (by NFS) on this.
I kept my old /boot and /home, unformatted.

The installation went remarkably well (and quickly).

Unfortunately, I had clicked a box saying something
about Virtualisation during the "Custom install",
and the resulting xen kernel crashed immediately it started.
I don't know, or want to know, why.

Fortunately I had a working kernel in /boot ,
and when I ran this everything was fine.
There was a rather annoying flurry of messages from selinux
at the beginning of the boot -
these flashed by so fast that even if I wanted to
I could not have read them.

But from then the system worked perfectly -
better in fact that FC-6, which had always had minor problems
on this machine.

I copied /etc/hosts from the previous installation
(after mounting sda5 which held the previous / partition),
and everything ran perfectly.

Two thoughts on Anaconda (not my favourite program):

1. I think the default should be to use the current partitions -
the alternative should be for Fedora to partition for you.

In principle, if there are two (or more) choices,
the one that makes the minimum changes should be the default.

In this case, it is all too easy to miss the choice
of keeping the current partitions,
since the choice only appears on a pull-down menu.

2. There should be an honest choice given between Gnome and KDE.
There is something sneaky about the way Fedora tries to get Gnome in.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of users would choose KDE
if they were given a clear choice.


-- 
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