Anaconda woes

[marriedto51]

Does anyone else find installing/upgrading fedora so hard?

Don't get me wrong: I love using fedora, and have been a fan since RedHat 7.1. It is just that anaconda doesn't like me.

For fedora 9, the installer wouldn't boot until I trawled online and found an option to pass to the kernel. (Can't remember now what that was about.)

For 10, I couldn't get anaconda to start a graphical install until I added "xdriver=vesa" to the kernel options -- and that was with an Nvidia 8000 series card, so hardly something obscure.

With 11, anaconda crashed with "unhandled exception". Seems that it didn't like my partition table (but everyone else did: sfdisk, gparted, Windows, ...). Some hair-pulling and a re-partition later and I have now got it to go.

As I say, using fedora is great, but the installation and upgrades drive me nuts!

Now it's time for a cool drink and a lie-down in a darkened room...

[CSchwangler]

In my experience, a lot has changed with F12. I also had problems with the partitioning in previous releases, but since F12, I haven't seen this happening again (and I did quite a few installations).

[marriedto51]

That is encouraging. F12 is the next step for me...

[arcas]

I wouldn't get your hopes up about Anaconda behaving any better in F12...

I've tried to install F12 on a machine for the last 2 days. Anaconda seems to have no problems letting me set up my filesystems and lets me select packages to install. After package selection, Anaconda seems to barf when performing the dependency resolution step right before it begins installing packages. I guess this is the Fedora team's way of actively discouraging people from installing F12. I only wish Anaconda would crash sooner so I don't waste time selecting packages...

I don't know if Redhat Enterprise Edition also uses Anaconda but I'd be absolutely livid had I paid for RHEL only to discover that their installer wasn't stable enough to successfully complete an install.

[CSchwangler]

I mostly use the Fedora liveCD's (Gnome) and never had major problems with it. F11 had some problems with custom partitioning, but I never had problems with F12 installation. However, I guess much depends on what hardware you have. In my experience, there are many distros out there with much worse installation programs than that of Fedora.

[smr54]

For me, I choose minimal installation, unchecking everything---I'm not sure if F12 has the "minimal" option, it will be in F13.

I find this lessens the possibility of some dependency issue, and gives me a very quick install.

As, after a default install, there are so many updates anyway, it's probably just as quick to simply add things like X, Gnome, and other desired things, after the minimal installation.

[arcas]

That's what I wound up doing. Minimal install and then used yumex to install packages by group. Yumex is a little rough around the edges but it seems to work be quite a bit more stable than Anaconda.

[marriedto51]

I did see a dependency resolution problem at one stage when attempting to install fedora 12 over the top of a pre-existing installation of 11 -- I just started again and asked anaconda to format what had been root (/), then things went swimmingly.

Other than that, I'm happy to say installing 12 was the easiest yet.

[kurtdriver]

I've never had the problems with it that some of you describe. I used to really enjoy the control that Anaconda gave me. The last few versions have not permitted me that control. With Fedora 13, which I recently installed from a livecd, the custom layout option, which would have let me retain the partitions I had created five minutes earlier, didn't work. It also doesn't give you the minimal installation option. I'm with the O.P. on this, my only real complaint is the difficulty of installation, other than that, Fedora works like a charm.
Nothing installs as easily as Slax, and wouldn't it be nice if yum could do a dist upgrade similar to Debian's?

[ozzor]

I think RH is working on a whole new installer. http://boot.fedoraproject.org/index

Anaconda has been on the back burner, I guess.

Don't tell anybody, but I've been using Ubuntu Live to partition before installing the Hat

[alien_life_form]

What to say....

Installing FC13 here, and anconda has been giving me the fits on a Bios stripeset raid with two separate types of crash (see here for the gory details : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=578553#c13). Funny thing is, I was able to install x86-64 painlessly (but then Flash wouldn't work, and sound would not work etc.). Funnier still, FC12 works (so I installed that & am now upgrading).

All, in all, I'd agree that installation has always been a weak RH spot.

Cheers,
alf