Fedora 12 Alpha fresh install - comments

[mamoulian]

Did a clean install on a newly-partitioned system. A few things I ran into are listed below. I'm happy to raise bugzillas or retest with Beta 1 over the next few days if these are fixed.


1) Is the install disc boot menu setup still the same as described here:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f11/en-US/html/ap-admin-options.html
The only boot-menu I saw was a grub one, there was no 'boot:' prompt to enter anything.

I wanted to install via vnc so I chose rescue mode and started anaconda manually.

2) Anaconda not setting partition type. It found my Intel Fakeraid just fine, listing the partitions I'd already allocated but not formatted. I made one ext4 for '/' and one swap. It formatted OK but didn't set the partition types - I had to manually use fdisk to set them.

3) Grub not being installed on fakeraid. After install it had created the grub.conf and device.map files correctly - referring to my WindowsOS and /dev/mapper/blahblah device OK - but didn't seem to have installed grub onto the MBR. All I had to do was run grub, use the device.map and install.
This may have been caused by point 2 above as the / partition was marked as Win95 type instead of Linux.
If so, I'd have expected Anaconda to have reported an error from the grub install.

4) Anaconda did not ask me to create a user.

5) My keyboard preference (UK) was used by Anaconda but was not set in the installed system.

6) init level was set to 3, should it have been 5? It does the graphical boot thing with the Fedora logo filling up then drops to a text-mode login.

7) X appears to be configured mostly OK, it started up fine on my nVidia card, in a very high resolution but low refresh rate. My user was able to change this in the KDE control panel.
a) the mouse pointer kept disappearing and then coming back as I opened windows
b) the login screen (not sure if it was gdm or kdm, Anaconda didn't ask) had no text on it (by the login/password fields)
c) the KDE desktop by default had a file-browsing plasmoid on it, but contained an error message. Does FC12a contain a full/stable version of KDE or are we on an unstable?

Working on getting the nVidia (beta) driver running, following another thread in this forum.
A kernel boot parameter for the nouveau driver seems to be required.

Kernel oops reporter seems to be working!


Cheers
Neil

[droidhacker]

1) Is the install disc boot menu setup still the same as described here:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f11/en-US/html/ap-admin-options.html
The only boot-menu I saw was a grub one, there was no 'boot:' prompt to enter anything.
That would be the F11 install guide. There are lots of changes, so don't expect everything to be the same.

2) Anaconda not setting partition type. It found my Intel Fakeraid just fine, listing the partitions I'd already allocated but not formatted. I made one ext4 for '/' and one swap. It formatted OK but didn't set the partition types - I had to manually use fdisk to set them.
mkfs, which is what actually formats the partitions, doesn't actually affect the partition table at all. If you simply used the existing partition table, then this is actually *expected* behavior. If you created the partition table in anaconda, THEN it would have set the partition types accordingly.

3) Grub not being installed on fakeraid. After install it had created the grub.conf and device.map files correctly - referring to my WindowsOS and /dev/mapper/blahblah device OK - but didn't seem to have installed grub onto the MBR. All I had to do was run grub, use the device.map and install.
This may have been caused by point 2 above as the / partition was marked as Win95 type instead of Linux.
If so, I'd have expected Anaconda to have reported an error from the grub install.
Sounds like its a bug, probably relates to (2). Or maybe related to dmraid, which you shouldn't be using anyway.

4) Anaconda did not ask me to create a user.
Probably because you decided to do a custom install (started anaconda manually) rather than following the default script. This procedure assumes that you are an advanced user and that you want to do some things on your own rather than having it give you all the defaults.

5) My keyboard preference (UK) was used by Anaconda but was not set in the installed system.
Bug. How does a UK keyboard compare with a US?

6) init level was set to 3, should it have been 5? It does the graphical boot thing with the Fedora logo filling up then drops to a text-mode login.
Expected. It uses the same runlevel as you are in when doing the install. You started anaconda manually, right? runlevel=3.

7) X appears to be configured mostly OK, it started up fine on my nVidia card, in a very high resolution but low refresh rate. My user was able to change this in the KDE control panel.
a) the mouse pointer kept disappearing and then coming back as I opened windows
b) the login screen (not sure if it was gdm or kdm, Anaconda didn't ask) had no text on it (by the login/password fields)
That's because you're using the scary and mostly broken nouveau driver.
c) the KDE desktop by default had a file-browsing plasmoid on it, but contained an error message. Does FC12a contain a full/stable version of KDE or are we on an unstable?
Can't answer that... hate KDE. KDE DIE DIE DIE.

Working on getting the nVidia (beta) driver running, following another thread in this forum.
A kernel boot parameter for the nouveau driver seems to be required.
nomodeset=1?

Might be time to upgrade to an AMD GPU.... OSS driver support up to and including R7xx. The new R8xx's aren't supported yet, but they should be coming real soon due to similarities to R6xx architecture.


Have you performed a "yum update" yet? Some of the weirdness is bound to be fixed by installing all the latest updates.

[mamoulian]

Thanks for the reply!

RE FC11 install guide, not prompting to add a user and starting in runlevel 3 - fairly 'nuff!

Although, if running Anaconda from the rescue commandline is the only/recommended way to pass certain options (e.g. vncserver) then there ought to be an obvious way for the user to get Anaconda in 'standard graphical install' mode.



If you created the partition table in anaconda, THEN it would have set the partition types accordingly.


hmm, maybe Anaconda could warn and offer to fix partition types? It will know that the system won't boot. This sort of setup would crop up - anyone who uses another OS's install procedure to define the partitions knowing they will be installing Linux later.


Sounds like its a bug, probably relates to (2).


Grub does check the partition type and fails if it isn't right, so it probably is. Will raise (or search for) a bug RE Anaconda checking grub's returncode.


Or maybe related to dmraid, which you shouldn't be using anyway.


Shouldn't be using dmraid? Has it been replaced? I didn't tell it to use dmraid... I set up the RAID using BIOS, partitioned using Windows, then booted from the Fedora DVD?

I originally suspected dmraid might have been the problem here, but Anaconda created the grub config files perfectly, taking dmraid stuff into account.



Bug. How does a UK keyboard compare with a US?

Some of the symbol keys are switched round - double-quote and hash, pipe (left of 'Z' on UK) goes somewhere else... Not the end of the world but I needed to use pipe whilst trying to fix things in the shell and had to hunt around for it.
Will bugzilla.



nomodeset=1?


Yup that's the one. Yes I hate the whole nVidia binary business too... nevermind... :-)



Have you performed a "yum update" yet? Some of the weirdness is bound to be fixed by installing all the latest updates.

Yup, it downloaded 700mb+ of stuff then failed to actually do the upgrade saying it couldn't find some things due to repo problems (?).
Not sure if the delta rpm stuff is switched on, I'll check that.
Files shouldn't have been deleted so I'll have another go at running yum thisevening...


Yeah RPM updates will stabilise things, but I'm really keen on trying to help Fedora get to the point where the first install goes smoothly first time, without having to drop to shell - which I can do but Joe cannot. Hence I'm happy to trash and reinstall future builds if the problems I've run in to are fixed.

[RahulSundaram]

Hi,

RAID details has changed atleast in some cases

Read through https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList

In particular

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Features/MDRaid

If you find bugs, please file them at http://bugzilla.redhat.com with more details.

[AdamW]

Thanks for testing! F12 Beta is landing tomorrow, it'd be great if you could try that and see which of your issues are still 'live'.

[PeTzZz]

5) My keyboard preference (UK) was used by Anaconda but was not set in the installed system.
I had the same problem and since I didn't find any recent bug report about that, I reported it. Link (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=530452).

Feel free to add additional information there.

[PeTzZz]

I had the same problem and since I didn't find any recent bug report about that, I reported it. Link (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=530452).

Feel free to add additional information there.

It is fixed in the gdm version ...-6 and newer.

[mamoulian]

Thanks, but I don't think that covers it... I don't use gdm, I had the wrong keyboard layout in the login shell in init3. Anaconda had left grub.conf and /etc/sysconfig/i18n at en_US.

There may be a separate bug to raise here for Anaconda, but noone else seems to have had this problem. It also may have been because I started Anaconda from the rescue-mode shell .


I've created another thread about there being no way to set /etc/sysconfig/i18n from KDE. Not sure about how /etc/sysconfig/keyboard is set now!
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=232596