Fedora Core 6 Common Issues

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 10:27:41PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 
> Based on the reviews and user feedback this is our best our release of 
> Fedora Core 6 yet.

I am not so sure if you should be in so self-congratulory mode.  The
release by itself is fine but anaconda, or something below it, looks
mighty sick.  So far I had that experience on three different
machines - one i386, two x86_64 but different mobos/chipsets and two
updates (i386 and x86_64) and one a fresh install on a "virgin"
hardware.

The issue is that at some moment during an installation anaconda
dies.  Most likely at the last moment when all post-installation
tasks should be performed.  No access to anything, a keyboard is
dead, a mouse is dead too or no reaction to it, no traces in logs on
post-mortem.  The only thing one can do is to hit a power switch.
Not repeatable, as the next try can as well finish although results
will be far from clean, and not much to report beyond "it's dead,
Jim!".

With a new installation this left a machine unbootable as there was
nothing in /boot/grub/.  A subsequent reinstallation of FC5 on the
same hardware - everything was silky smooth.

For updates most of work was done but I was left with a nasty
cleanup job of tons of duplicate packages, where was not always
obvious which should be gone, and even more "interesting" task if
multilib was involved. (Those with distro indentifier in version
helped as one can do 'yum remove "*fc4*" "*FC4*"', or similar, and
this catches some dependent ones too; 'package-cleanup --orphans' is
also a good idea).  Due to known rpm issues this steps removed
assorted files common to old and new packages and now it was
necessary fish out and fix that.  All of that doable but a lot of
completely unnecesary work which left bad taste in mouth.  Sigh!
After all of this was acomplished then we were indeed in an
excellent shape.

An internet search seems to indicate that FC6 installation problems
are much more common that one would like to see.

   Michal