On the eve of FC3 test1

[anthony]

Tehehehe, Today's the day. I know it's not that big of a release but hell, it's always cool to be on the cutting edge. That's one thing I don't like about many distros/windows. With Fedora, you can always connect to a download mirror, get into development and download the newest versions of software, even if they aren't that big of a change. I also love the speed of the new versions, FC2 released and a month later FC3 begins. Well it's 12:34 and I wanted to start the ISO downloads before I went to bed, lets see how long I'm gonna be staying up for :P.

[Bana]

Argh, when are the torrents going to open up :p Well I guess it is still 2 minutes till July 12th for me...

Actually I don't know if I am going to even go through the test releases, I got kinda burned out during the FC2 tests.

[ghaefb]

I'm definitely going through the test releases
I'm a cutting-edge/up2date junkie :D

[rkl]

Past history of FC test releases show that they tend to often get pushed back 1 or 2 weeks, so although this week may see FC3T1, I'm not holding my breath for it.

Now if only we had a DVD burner at work so I wouldn't have to do a 21-hour broadband download of the FC3T1 DVD ISO at home...sigh...

I actually wrote my own binary file splitter in C (yes, I know there are programs out there that do that already, but I didn't like the file naming conventions they used for the split files), so that I can split the 4GB ISO into decent (e.g. 20MB) chunks and easily resume my downloads if anything fails.

Oh, if you are going to download the FC3T1 DVD ISO, watch out for many of the mirror sites not correctly listing its size (files over 2GB often upset FTP/Web directory listings) and, even more importantly, you should probably use a decent FTP client rather than Mozilla/Firefox to download (because I believe there's 2GB+ file issues with many Web browsers too). I think I used "wget" to get it down to my work machine, split it into hundreds of smaller binary parts and then "sftp"'ed it down to my home machine overnight.

[anthony]

Yea, I had that problem when I tried to download the "FC2 DVD" last time. Kept showing up as like 40mb or something, so I just opened up FlashFXP and let the download go there.

[Jman]

Moved to Test 3 forum.

[cyborg]

Can I upgrade from Fc2 to Fc3 Test?

[Ug]

cyborg: DO NOT INSTALL FEDORA CORE 3 TEST

I don't think I can emphasise it enough in your case (Joeborg). Newbies should not experiment with test releases.

[foolish]

Installing test releases requires you to do a fresh install when you install the test release, and to do a fresh install when the stable core is released. Don't upgrade to or from test releases. If you didn't know this, you shouldn't be using test releases anyway. Test releases used to be called beta releases. Maybe we should go back to that name as so many somehow believe that test releases will work. Test releases doesn't work, that's why we have them, so we can figure out what causes all the trouble.

[cyborg]

Ok, i'll leave it untill im a bit better :)

[Ug]

Cyborg: not just a "bit better", but good enough to answer most problems in the forum with 100% certainty. ;)

[ilja]

Ok, it's just a thing between you two Suffolk-guys :D , but I think a test version is not only for a little group of specialists only. It is a next step on Linux. First step is to install it and to use it as a normal user. Whor reached this step can go to the next and try to give something back. I do e.g. lot of translation work and this forum here. Everyone has his own way. One way, if you have plenty of time is to be a tester. If you think you can handle a normal, stable system without problems, then you could install paralel to it a test-version and explore it, how it works with your hardware and whether there are errors. And then to report it to the mailing-lists and bugzillas. But if you can't handle linux sure enough or don't have the time or temper to do this (imho borring) job, then don't even start it, because you won't help with your little problems, but only waste time of the developers.

[Ug]

(I'm only being so certain with him - because i actually know him. ;))

[rkl]

It is indeed unwise to install FC3T1 on top of (or upgrade from) your FC2 partition. Get yourself a test partition set up (remember you can share the swap partition between FC2 and FC3T1) of a few GB (I have 6GB cos I don't usually select "Everything", but you'll need about 8GB if you do install "Everything").

That way, you can keep your default FC2 desktop for everyday use and boot into FC3T1 when you want to play around. Does mean some /etc/grub.conf merging though (because grub will use FC3T1's /etc/grub.conf - I edit back in my FC2 /etc/grub.conf's sections into the FC3T1 version and then copy back the merge to FC2 again as a "backup").

When FC3 final comes out, I will still install that initially in my test partition to make sure nothing breaks. It's then a question of how comfortable I feel about FC3 and whether it represents a big enough jump for me to actually overwrite FC2. I always prefer a cold install (overwrite from scratch) of Linux distros than an upgrade, because the latter tends to leave crud from the previous distro lying around (and hence is difficult to "reconstruct" should you need to do a cold install later).

[shagenhoes]

Download the test and see what you can learn! Using a release that has been tested and released as a final is no fun. You learn nothing from running anaconda and saying "yes I installed linux"

If you want to learn alot install Gentoo and Evolution OOo from source and then you can say "I installed Linux!"

[Zotter]

I got it! I got it!! Here it is only 9:00am and I've got all 4 isos and even the MD5 sums are right. Sheesh, what god of bandwidth did I please this week?

Now, where'm I gonna install this puppy for some self imposed aggrivation......