Install 12 Alpha Using USB Stick

[Robert L Cochran]

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, 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.

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, and the Xorg 
graphics seem rather unsophisticated compared to Fedora. And I miss yum. 
Archlinux's `pacman` is okay, but the ability to use delta packages 
(downloading only the differences between the old and new packages) is a 
desirable feature, and I'm not sure if pacman checks for signed packages.

Bob



On 08/30/2009 10:20 AM, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> I'm going to try installing Fedora 12 x86_64 using the install.img 
> image taken from the DVD iso. I put it on a USB stick. I'll install 
> this to a brand new hard 160 Gb drive. I need to upload a few more 
> files to my other machine which will be needed on the new installation 
> if it is successful. We will see what happens.
>
> Bob
>