Install 12 Alpha Using USB Stick

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2009-08-30 at 20:37 -0400, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> 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, 

Well, that doesn't mean the installer's broken. It could mean X is
broken. :) What's your hardware?

> 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.

Rawhide is rather broken at the moment due to OpenSSL excitement, that
could be related.

> 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,

Well, kernel 2.6.31 hasn't actually been released yet, in all fairness.
We're shipping pre-release versions of it in Rawhide. I wouldn't expect
any 'stable' distro to ship a pre-release kernel (though hey, we did it
in Mandriva more than once...)

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net