F13 DVD installer weirdness (virtualized)

[forkbomb]

DL'd the x86 torrent to install in a VM (Oracle VBox 3.2.x). Booted the DVD. Came up as the text installer. That's not necessarily the end of the world, except that I wasn't given any choices at install time other than to choose a root password, and the "use whole disk" etc screen. It just picked a partitioning scheme and filesystem and ran with it. No choices for partitioning, no firstboot config, no package selection screens. No GUI was installed, GNOME or otherwise.

Noticed the boot was hanging at the end of the Plymouth bar. Switching to runlevel 3 (which of course required booting the VM to edit grub.conf to get rid of the moronic "hiddenmenu" and 0 timeout and switch from quiet rhgb to verbose) shows it hanging after bringing up crond IIRC. At this point I assumed it was hanging at Xorg. Installed GDM, GNOME, etc from runlevel 3 using yum.

Then it hit me... I realized it appeared that the "X Window System" group wasn't installed, which is odd considering I ran a groupinstall of GNOME (you'd think GNOME would pull in the X server as a dep, right!? :rolleyes: )

So in other words the install DVD crapped out, came up without the rudimentary anaconda GUI, didn't give any installation options, and left me with a text install. Not a huge deal (other than the apparent near-total lack of installation options).

If I'm recalling correctly older versions of Fedora would leave you with a text install if the installer booted into text mode and you picked defaults. I just found it odd that 1) groupinstall of "GNOME Desktop Environment" group appeared to not bring in Xorg; and 2) even though it installed with no GNOME and no Xorg, the grub lines were set to "rhgb" and "quiet" and it appeared it was (oddly) attempting to boot into runlevel 5.

Anyway, upon yumming in Xorg, upon reboot I finally got the firstboot screen and got to GDM. Other than that, no huge issues except for the fonts being absolutely atrocious. :rolleyes:

---------- Post added at 07:37 PM CDT ---------- Previous post was at 07:36 PM CDT ----------

At least the icons are pretty snazzy...

[stoat]

I realized it appeared that the "X Window System" group wasn't installed, which is odd considering I ran a groupinstall of GNOME (you'd think GNOME would pull in the X server as a dep, right!?I've been starting with minimal installs since Fedora 9. And after establishing an Internet connection, I have always started out with yum groupinstall XFCE "X Window System". The other day I saw someone suggest what you did, and I thought the same thing (that I don't need to include X in that command). But yum groupinstall XFCE did what yours did. No X. I've been right all along but didn't know it.



Other than that, no huge issues except for the fonts being absolutely atrocious.I thought that, too. I tried installing all xorg fonts. No help. Ugly font still and no change in the font collection in the XFCE "Appearance" applet (don't know the Gnome equivalent at the moment). I could only change to ulgier fonts. Then I pushed on with my usual routine which included creating ~/.fonts in my user directory and copying my stash of MS TTF font files there (for OpenOffice). Then I opened the "Appearance" applet in XFCE again. All those TTFs were sitting there for the choosing. I picked my favorite one, logged out, logged back in, and now beautiful font in the XFCE DE. Maybe that simple thing will work in Gnome. Or mabye somebody knows a more correct way to add fonts to a desktop environment. Anyway, I'm happy with it.

[forkbomb]

Yeah, I don't necessarily mind minimalistic installs. In fact, I find them preferable. I was more miffed about the lack of partitioning and encryption options. Again it's not a huge deal for VMs because I can do configuration after the fact. But until I see reason to think that this is a fluke that means F13 is potentially worthless for me on bare metal - lack of custom partitioning and full root encryption is a distro deal-breaker for me.

Maybe the reason for the ugly fonts was the fact that so little was installed by default.

As far as fonts I use, I eventually end up bringing in some TTF fonts but generally I just use DejaVu Sans for GNOME fonts (via System -> Preferences -> Appearance, font tab). The default "Sans" fonts were there in my install once I brought in GNOME and the X server but even the generic fonts from F12 were better.

[stoat]

I think the partitioning thing in the new text mode installation is a "feature". Part of the "true minimal" install as the docs say, I guess. I accomplish minimal starts in the GUI installer by unchecking all packages. So I can partition in the disk druid. But the text mode installation is either chosen or forced often enough that the partitioning and package thing should be loosened up it (judging by other people voicing the same complaint about it).