Fedora 18 TC1 images are out!

[hadrons123]

http://download-ib01.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Alpha-TC1/Fedora/

The TC1 images were released few hours ago!

[nonamedotc]

Does not boot in virtual machine. based on http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2012-August/109367.html, it looks like does not work on bare metal either ... :(

[jpollard]

So just as buggy as 17.

[nonamedotc]

At this stage, that's how it looks to be!

[jpollard]

At least I was able to install F17 in a VM.

Couldn't do a preupgrade though. And based on other comments, still can't.

[Dutchy]

Do these images already contain the redesigned Anaconda?

[hadrons123]

I tried the 18 RATS 1 image last week (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=283050). Both have similar result.

Boot image enters into a recovery shell.

[nonamedotc]

Do these images already contain the redesigned Anaconda?

They are supposed to, yes. I guess we will see it if we get that far.

I remember trying the new anaconda sometime ago. I don't remember what image I downloaded. It was following a link in devel mailing lists ...

[hadrons123]

Do these images already contain the redesigned Anaconda?
That's what we were anxiously trying to take a look, but TC1 is too bugy to enter into xserver or even a fully working shell.

---------- Post added at 08:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:19 PM ----------

@nonamedotc (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/member.php?u=180340)
I was following anaconda list with devel list. But didnt get a chance to see a screenshot of the new anaconda.
How did you manage to try the new anaconda?
just curious!

[nonamedotc]

@nonamedotc (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/member.php?u=180340)
I was following anaconda list with devel list. But didnt get a chance to see a screenshot of the new anaconda.
How did you manage to try the new anaconda?
just curious!

Let me see if I can locate the email today or the link to the download. It *might* also have been test. But I am sure it was one of these two mailing lists ...

I remember that the download was from a link in the fedoraproject wiki page and thinking - why here! :)

[smr54]

Judging from the testing list, very buggy right now--might be better by tonight though. (Anyone interested can just browse testing list archives which are updated almost immediately.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2012-August/thread.html

Go to that link, and at the top of the page are other sorting options--the link itself is sorted by thread.

[nonamedotc]

I think this is where I got the images (for the new anaconda UI) from - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_18_newUI_Install - at least a month old ...

[Demz3]

TC2 Released http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Alpha-TC2/Fedora/ still no LiveCD's

[hadrons123]

Does TC2 work?

Anyways I 'm already downloading it.

[Demz3]

Does TC2 work?

Anyways I 'm already downloading it.

no idea an hope they do LiveCD's soon

[hadrons123]

I don't think liveCD will be out before alpha at least.

[Demz3]

not long till Alpha anyway so i might wait an install the Alpha

[hadrons123]

Well TC2 doesn't go beyond the emergency shell for me. Fail.

dracut-initque errors...

[Demz3]

if you wanna install it that bad, prolly best to yum it up

[Dan]

Couldn't stay away, eh? <..;)..>

Welcome back, Greg.

[hadrons123]

isn't he Detox, Tox ?

Welcome back dude!

[nonamedotc]

Welcome back, greg! Hope all is well!

TC2 not working either! :doh:

[Dan]

isn't he Detox, Tox ?

Welcome back dude! Aka, "Retox". <..:p..>

Formerly( Pre-tox) : Demz

<..:D..>

[marco765]

TC2, in a nutshell

1. needs pre-formatted drive, you can use your old f17 disc for this
2. anaconda gui doesn't work, [TAB] at boot menu, add "3" to arguments, login as root, run "anaconda --text"
3. it says it sets root password, it's lying, proceed with install, but before rebooting...
4. switch to another vt, login as root again, chroot to /mnt/sysimage, run passwd to really set root password
5. reboot and login

f18 yay!

[Demz3]

Couldn't stay away, eh? <..;)..>

Welcome back, Greg.

ty, im only back for F18 release dunno bout beyond that

---------- Post added at 12:09 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:34 AM ----------

TC3 http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Alpha-TC3/Fedora/ No LiveCD's Available

[hadrons123]

TC3 Doesn' work for me.

[Demz3]

expect an Alpha slip ( not unusual for fedora for that to happen )

how come TC3 wont work for you?

[hadrons123]

This (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=849002) is the issue. I filed for a bug.

[nonamedotc]

hu! hu! TC3 works for me. :) :dance:

Installing as a virtual machine.

---------- Post added at 09:34 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:19 AM ----------

I don't think the partitioner works very well.


Once a partition is created, I am unable to change the partition size. I am having to delete the partition and recreate it.
Also, regardless of what capacity I enter, the partitioner creates only 500 MB space. Automatic partitioning creates bigger partitions without problems.


Should I file a bug? Anyone else seeing this?

By the way, the software selection screen is rather limited. Is it that we can only select what groups to install and not what specific items to install? Does anyone know if this is a bug or a "feature"?

For example, if you choose "Graphical Internet", it was previously possible to select specific items. Now, there seems to be no such option ...

[stevea]

hu! hu! TC3 works for me. :) :dance:

Installing as a virtual machine. ...

Which visualization ? I tried TC1 & TC2 under KVM w/o success.

[nonamedotc]

Steve, this is Virtualbox at the moment. I will try KVM when I get home (in my other computer). I could not get TC1 & TC2 to work either.

By the way, are these one of the issues you are facing?

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=844463
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=848930

---------- Post added at 10:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:52 AM ----------

I don't think the partitioner works very well.


Once a partition is created, I am unable to change the partition size. I am having to delete the partition and recreate it.
Also, regardless of what capacity I enter, the partitioner creates only 500 MB space. Automatic partitioning creates bigger partitions without problems.



Chris Lumens replied on the mailing list to these questions - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2012-August/109491.html

[hadrons123]

@nonamedotc
Did you try a USB boot on a bare metal?
I couldnt get past beyond the recovery shell on all the TCs.

[stevea]

Steve, this is Virtualbox at the moment. I will try KVM when I get home (in my other computer). I could not get TC1 & TC2 to work either.

By the way, are these one of the issues you are facing?

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=844463
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=848930


The first matches my TC2 experience, but I don't have the details nor time to investigate.

[nonamedotc]

@nonamedotc
Did you try a USB boot on a bare metal?
I couldnt get past beyond the recovery shell on all the TCs.

Nope. I have not got past Virtualbox in any of the TCs so far. As of now, only TC3 shows any hints of working. Screenshot of the fist screen -

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/album.php?albumid=305&pictureid=1363

Link to the image - http://forums.fedoraforum.org/album.php?albumid=305&pictureid=1363

[smr54]

Well, using VirtualBox, I got it installed, though the base install seems far more bloated than the previous minimal.
However, it wouldn't boot because it couldn't find a png file and apparently grub needs some sort of pretty background.

(Which is being unfair of course, it's TC 1 and still quite buggy, still, grub requiring a png file is the type of thing that makes me start ranting about those durn kids.....)

[DBelton]

Grub don't neeeeeeeed noooooo steeeeeeenkin png file! :D

Crap! If they started putting that crap in by default, it appears I am going to have to spend time to strip it out. :( I wish they would at least make it a choice before sticking all the bloat crap in.

A bootloader should be just that.. a bootloader. nothing pretty.. nothing fancy.. just boot the darned OS as quickly and efficiently as possible. The more crap that is put in, the more chance that something will break and you have an unbootable system.

[hadrons123]

@nonamedotc
Your link is broken.

[nonamedotc]

Well, using VirtualBox, I got it installed, though the base install seems far more bloated than the previous minimal.

Well, that kind of explains why package customization is missing too! I have long felt that ease of package customization during install is one of the best points of anaconda! Looks like that's going away ... :dis:

[Demz3]

im sure someone said on one of the lists that the old Customization during install will not be returning in this new Anaconda.

[Dan]

The Fedora Project: Almost ten years of solid innovation and progress ... uninterrupted by common sense. <..:p..>

[Demz3]

i'll miss it but once installed its just as easy enough to yum the stuff up once the DE is installed

[nonamedotc]

The Fedora Project: Almost ten years of solid innovation and progress ... uninterrupted by common sense. <..:p..>

Brilliant! :)

It is really quite insane. Guess, I would have to install base system and install everything on top. It is definitely easy as Greg says - just a little inconvenient ... :mad: :eek:

[hadrons123]

I always had to remove a bunch of stuff after installing from a LiveCD. so it doesnt make any difference to me!

[Demz3]

one problem i have with the New Anaconda is you can only install the 1 DE :( but once installed you have to do a groupinstall of another DE to have more than 1 DE/WM to log into i think scott pointed that out in one of the lists ages ago?

[smr54]

The thing is, I try not to rant anymore. Two reasons--one, the fact that I don't like something, doesn't mean it's not good. More importantly, at some point, I realized that Fedora and Ubuntu, to pick the two most obvious, are far more popular than say, ArchLinux, which is probably the most popular of the Let's not include the kitchen sink distros.

And, it's like complaining about politics, very little is going to be done. When RH 6.x came out with the crippled text install, there was some disbelief from those who use RH and its clones at this next step towards making it nice for the masses, but then people adjusted--no one is going to suddenly change 100 servers from RH (or CentOS or whatever) to Debian or Ubuntu server.

RH is sort of in the same position as MS--they can, within limits, do whatever they want, and though folks may complain they'll keep using it because it's too much trouble to switch--and more importantly, it seems the vast majority of desktop users prefer things this way (or else they'd be using Arch, let alone Gentoo, or leaving Linux for BSDs)

It's all stuff that can be dealt with, but it makes more work.

[Dutchy]

im sure someone said on one of the lists that the old Customization during install will not be returning in this new Anaconda.
:eek::blink:;):mad::fp::bang:

It better looks very, very, extremely nice then!

[AdamW]

so, it's important to understand one of the driving forces behind the anaconda UI re-design: the existing UI is over-complex. not from the point of view that it contains features that are entirely useless, but rather, it has more functionality than the anaconda team can maintain properly. Of course it sucks to lose a feature you like, but the people who have to maintain the code feel like it's so complex they can't actually do that properly. so as well as modernizing the design of the installer, it's a conscious goal to simplify it - not because the developers think users are idiots who don't 'understand', no-one thinks anyone's cutting their finger on the package customization screen, purely because it's just too much stuff to take care of. Every release, lately, we've wound up running across bits of code in the installer that literally no-one actually understands. That's not a very sustainable situation. Whenever we've had to make significant changes to anaconda in recent releases - for the grub2 migration, for the GPT experiment, for UEFI support, for noloader - the devs have basically had to resort to an approach of 'write the new code, throw it in there, then see what breaks and firefight as required'. the oldUI codebase is so complex that they couldn't really properly _plan_ the major changes - they were never entirely sure, ahead of time, which of the zillion other bits of functionality in anaconda were going to break when they poked the bootloader code or the init stuff or whatever. so yeah: it sucks to lose some functions, but there's a sensible reason for it, and it's not 'we think you're too dumb to handle it'. There will be genuine benefits from simplification of the UI - at least we hope so: once newUI gets stabilized, anaconda should be generally more reliable in future releases, and it should be possible to do major changes with less unexpected and unpredictable breakage and crazy firefighting.

edit - the 'crippled text install' that smr54 mentions is a good example here, actually. It wasn't 'this next step towards making it nice for the masses' as you suggested - there's not much point in dumbing down a *text* mode for the masses, after all. Nope, it was just what I wrote above: maintenance headache. The full-fat text installer was neat, but for the maintainers, it meant they had two implementations of every damn screen in the installer to maintain - one in GTK+, one in curses (or something, I forget what text UI library it used). It's a lot of work. Doing that work swallows resources that could otherwise be used to improve anaconda in other ways. The team got to the point where they just didn't think it was a good idea to devote substantial resources to maintaining a mode that was only used by a few people, and usually either for kickstart deployments or for very minimal installs (a system that can't run the graphical installer is usually a system that's going to have a very minimal install on it). So it kinda made sense to simplify the text installer, not because they actually thought the simplified interface was a *better* interface exactly, but because it was sufficient to the needs of most of the few people who use the text interface while requiring far less work to maintain. It _is_ a tradeoff, we recognize that, but the tradeoffs have to be made _somewhere_.

One thing to keep in mind is the kickstart function of anaconda - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart . To an extent I think it's a bit underused. Where there are things newUI doesn't allow interactively which oldUI did, it's often the case that you can still do it via a kickstart: again, package customization is a good example. You can't customize individual package selection interactively in the UI any more, but you *can* still do it with a kickstart. Just think of it as an anaconda config file. :)

[AdamW]

some notes on various specific issues:

TC1 is utterly DOA. Won't work, can't work. Fuhgeddaboutit.

TC2 cannot start graphical anaconda at all, only the text mode. Use TC3.

TC3 can get into graphical anaconda and do an install of KDE, LXDE or Xfce. GNOME won't work because of dependency issues, at least at present, this will change when we push updates that fix the dep issues through the freeze.

Live images are missing because the idea was to use a new tool called livemedia-creator to build them for F18, instead of the old livecd-creator, but honestly it's not entirely ready yet. There's some, er, mild dissent between the dev and releng teams there so I won't say too much in case I misrepresent anyone, but suffice to say the current state of lmc really doesn't fit in too well with the established procedures rel-eng has for spinning live images. Most likely we'll go back to spinning the lives with livecd-creator _at least_ for Alpha. That may happen as soon as TC4. We do know that livecd-creator basically still works, so we aren't entirely screwed.

TC3 will not boot when written to a USB stick (in any way) - it may be possible to work around this, but we haven't bothered to figure out a workaround, the key thing is to fix the bug.

TC3 will have issues booting in most common KVM configurations, because there are showstopper bugs with both the cirrus and qxl drivers for the two most commonly used virtual graphics adapters in KVMs. qxl is utterly screwed; the only way to get into X with the 'qxl' card is to use the vesa mode. a 'cirrus' card will boot if you pass 'nomodeset' as a kernel parameter. Or you can simply use the 'vga' card in KVM. The bugs here are https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=848930 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=844463 . The cirrus one should be fixed in TC4, qxl we don't have a fix right now.

Custom partitioning in general is pretty fragile, the code is very new and probably riddled with bugs. Do report any you find, but don't nominate them as Alpha blockers, custom partitioning doesn't block Alpha. Do check if the bug you're filing has already been reported, I think the one about 500MB sizes is already filed for instance, but I don't have a comprehensive list handy.

Note that the 'review and modify partition layout' checkbox in newUI doesn't do the same as in oldUI. In oldUI, it let you pick one of the automatic partitioning methods but check the results: anaconda would figure out the automatic layout, then put you into 'custom partitioning' mode where you could adjust the result if you wanted. In newUI, it really just puts you straight into custom partitioning mode - it doesn't come up with a working automatic layout for you to review and modify, it just goes _straight_ to custom partitioning, for you to create your own layout. It doesn't give you an expected-to-work layout to modify, if you hit that checkbox, you _will_ have to create the whole layout manually. We recognize this is bad UI as it goes against user expectations, it'll be adjusted somehow.

There's a major issue with user accounts. newUI doesn't currently make the root account accessible, and firstboot is broken. So after install you won't actually be able to login without some manual faffing. Easiest thing to do is probably to boot to single-user mode to set a root password, then boot to runlevel 3 and create a user account with adduser, then finally you can boot as normal login with the regular user account. Obviously this isn't how it's intended to work =) we'll try and get firstboot fixed up for TC4. There's still a problem with non-graphical installs, where there's no firstboot to create a regular user account; this wasn't properly considered when the newUI design was being done. We have a bug open on it now and it'll be addressed somehow before Alpha release.

The DVD doesn't actually use the packages from the DVD, it uses online repositories. AFAIK there's no workaround for this. It should be fixed for TC4.

Entering the network configuration screen is death - anaconda _will_ crash later if you do so. So if your network doesn't work out of the box, you're in trouble. Sorry...we're working on it.

grub doesn't _need_ a png file, exactly - the problem is that we accidentally shipped it with a configuration that mentions a png file, by the wrong name. It looks for fireworks.png, the file is actually called background.png. D'oh. By default you'll get a themed graphical grub (once we fix that bug...) for F18, but you can certainly change it to a boring non-themed config if you like. The error isn't fatal, when you see it just press enter and boot continues, it doesn't stop you booting.

smr54 said something about the default package set - honestly we haven't worried about that at all yet, and comps is being revised quite heavily as part of the https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ReworkPackageGroups feature. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some bug in there somewhere results in a bigger default install, but it's not an Evil Conspiracy, just a cock-up. I'll take a quick look at that if I find time. It may simply be the effect of the DVD install using the remote repos not the packages on the DVD - a 'default' install from online repos has always been bigger than a 'default' install using only the packages on the DVD, because of the stuff that's left off the DVD to make it fit.

demz3: yeah, that (only being able to pick one DE) is a...contentious design decision. It has indeed been debated on the test@ list at least once already. I don't know if there's any plan to change it.

added by edit: upgrade functionality is entirely missing from newUI at present. You cannot do an anaconda-based upgrade from F17. Don't try, it will only result in breakage. If you want to upgrade from F17, for the present, use yum. It more or less works, but you'll need to do 'setenforce Permissive' first, or do 'yum reinstall polkit' after the upgrade is done and you reboot, or else policykit will be broken - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=841451 .

added by edit: live installation is currently also entirely broken. This doesn't matter much as lives haven't been built for the first three TCs, but if you build your own live image or something, be aware you will not be able to install from it, it's just not going to work. This kinda ought to be fixed prior to Alpha release, so I'm hoping the anaconda team get their skates on =)

Hope that covers a few points =) As always, if you're following along with the TC/RC process, it's always a good idea to follow the validation matrices where validation test results are filed - principally https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Current_Installation_Test - and the blocker bug list, which has now moved to http://qa.fedoraproject.org/blockerbugs/current . Most of the above issues are in that blocker bug list. And please remember, TCs and RCs are *test images* for us to do validation on. The whole point of their existence is basically to find the really big problems ahead of the official pre-releases. TCs and RCs are not official releases or even official pre-releases, are not guaranteed to work in any way and may well set your house on fire. The way you do a release of software is to start by just building it and seeing what's busted and what needs fixing: RCs and especially TCs *are* those 'let's see what's busted' builds.

tl;dr summary: TC1 and TC2 are utterly busted, TC3 can be made to work but is very fragile and needs manual intervention. Honestly, if you just want a Fedora 18 system to play with, you're probably going to have more luck yum updating from F17 right now. If you insist on getting TC3 working, refer to the blocker list for help.

[kkshethin]

Downloaded Fedora-18-Alpha-TC2-i386-netinst.iso and tried to install in virtualbox. First try failed.
Then following suggestions by marco765, able to install. Text login, Tried to install group Gnome Desktop Environment & X Window System.
Many dependency problem. --skip-broken, Have to downgrade some, try, retry. Finally text login and then startx sucessfully.
Following not working,
A lock screen which do not reveal login screen, first time it showed then disappeared.
User settings, not unlocking
mounting of guest additions.
user account settings shows username one time and next time does not show username as if user disappeared.
Further i did not like new nautilus at all. No status-bar. Computer bookmark showing file system instead.
I have apprehension (May be premature) that Fedora17 will be my last dear distro.

[DBelton]

So, it appears that I will have to do a "windows" type install now.

For example, I no longer use Gnome 3 shell, but since there is no customization and only one choice of DE, I will be forced into installing it, and then going back later and removing it after installing the DE I wish to use? Or will there be a way for me to just install the DE I wish from the DVD and not install Gnome? Even if I can't install the DE I wish from the DVD, is there a way for me to not install Gnome, but still do a graphical install?

Sorry, but Gnome shell is out on my system here. I gave it over a year to mature enough so that it's usable for me, but it just didn't happen, so it doesn't even get installed on my machines here anymore. I sure hope that anaconda isn't going to try and force it upon me, either. I'll drop it and go elsewhere if it even tries.

[Dan]

some notes on various specific issues:

TC1 is utterly DOA. Won't work, can't work. Fuhgeddaboutit.

TC2 cannot start graphical anaconda at all, only the text mode. Use TC3.

TC3 can get into graphical anaconda and do an install of KDE, LXDE or Xfce. GNOME won't work because of dependency issues, at least at present, this will change when we push updates that fix the dep issues through the freeze.

Live images are missing because the idea was to use a new tool called livemedia-creator to build them for F18, instead of the old livecd-creator, but honestly it's not entirely ready yet. There's some, er, mild dissent between the dev and releng teams there so I won't say too much in case I misrepresent anyone, but suffice to say the current state of lmc really doesn't fit in too well with the established procedures rel-eng has for spinning live images. Most likely we'll go back to spinning the lives with livecd-creator _at least_ for Alpha. That may happen as soon as TC4. We do know that livecd-creator basically still works, so we aren't entirely screwed.

TC3 will not boot when written to a USB stick (in any way) - it may be possible to work around this, but we haven't bothered to figure out a workaround, the key thing is to fix the bug.

TC3 will have issues booting in most common KVM configurations, because there are showstopper bugs with both the cirrus and qxl drivers for the two most commonly used virtual graphics adapters in KVMs. qxl is utterly screwed; the only way to get into X with the 'qxl' card is to use the vesa mode. a 'cirrus' card will boot if you pass 'nomodeset' as a kernel parameter. Or you can simply use the 'vga' card in KVM. The bugs here are https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=848930 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=844463 . The cirrus one should be fixed in TC4, qxl we don't have a fix right now.

Custom partitioning in general is pretty fragile, the code is very new and probably riddled with bugs. Do report any you find, but don't nominate them as Alpha blockers, custom partitioning doesn't block Alpha. Do check if the bug you're filing has already been reported, I think the one about 500MB sizes is already filed for instance, but I don't have a comprehensive list handy.

Note that the 'review and modify partition layout' checkbox in newUI doesn't do the same as in oldUI. In oldUI, it let you pick one of the automatic partitioning methods but check the results: anaconda would figure out the automatic layout, then put you into 'custom partitioning' mode where you could adjust the result if you wanted. In newUI, it really just puts you straight into custom partitioning mode - it doesn't come up with a working automatic layout for you to review and modify, it just goes _straight_ to custom partitioning, for you to create your own layout. It doesn't give you an expected-to-work layout to modify, if you hit that checkbox, you _will_ have to create the whole layout manually. We recognize this is bad UI as it goes against user expectations, it'll be adjusted somehow.

There's a major issue with user accounts. newUI doesn't currently make the root account accessible, and firstboot is broken. So after install you won't actually be able to login without some manual faffing. Easiest thing to do is probably to boot to single-user mode to set a root password, then boot to runlevel 3 and create a user account with adduser, then finally you can boot as normal login with the regular user account. Obviously this isn't how it's intended to work =) we'll try and get firstboot fixed up for TC4. There's still a problem with non-graphical installs, where there's no firstboot to create a regular user account; this wasn't properly considered when the newUI design was being done. We have a bug open on it now and it'll be addressed somehow before Alpha release.

The DVD doesn't actually use the packages from the DVD, it uses online repositories. AFAIK there's no workaround for this. It should be fixed for TC4.

Entering the network configuration screen is death - anaconda _will_ crash later if you do so. So if your network doesn't work out of the box, you're in trouble. Sorry...we're working on it.

grub doesn't _need_ a png file, exactly - the problem is that we accidentally shipped it with a configuration that mentions a png file, by the wrong name. It looks for fireworks.png, the file is actually called background.png. D'oh. By default you'll get a themed graphical grub (once we fix that bug...) for F18, but you can certainly change it to a boring non-themed config if you like. The error isn't fatal, when you see it just press enter and boot continues, it doesn't stop you booting.

smr54 said something about the default package set - honestly we haven't worried about that at all yet, and comps is being revised quite heavily as part of the https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ReworkPackageGroups feature. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some bug in there somewhere results in a bigger default install, but it's not an Evil Conspiracy, just a cock-up. I'll take a quick look at that if I find time. It may simply be the effect of the DVD install using the remote repos not the packages on the DVD - a 'default' install from online repos has always been bigger than a 'default' install using only the packages on the DVD, because of the stuff that's left off the DVD to make it fit.

demz3: yeah, that (only being able to pick one DE) is a...contentious design decision. It has indeed been debated on the test@ list at least once already. I don't know if there's any plan to change it.

added by edit: upgrade functionality is entirely missing from newUI at present. You cannot do an anaconda-based upgrade from F17. Don't try, it will only result in breakage. If you want to upgrade from F17, for the present, use yum. It more or less works, but you'll need to do 'setenforce Permissive' first, or do 'yum reinstall polkit' after the upgrade is done and you reboot, or else policykit will be broken - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=841451 .

added by edit: live installation is currently also entirely broken. This doesn't matter much as lives haven't been built for the first three TCs, but if you build your own live image or something, be aware you will not be able to install from it, it's just not going to work. This kinda ought to be fixed prior to Alpha release, so I'm hoping the anaconda team get their skates on =)

Hope that covers a few points =) As always, if you're following along with the TC/RC process, it's always a good idea to follow the validation matrices where validation test results are filed - principally https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Current_Installation_Test - and the blocker bug list, which has now moved to http://qa.fedoraproject.org/blockerbugs/current . Most of the above issues are in that blocker bug list. And please remember, TCs and RCs are *test images* for us to do validation on. The whole point of their existence is basically to find the really big problems ahead of the official pre-releases. TCs and RCs are not official releases or even official pre-releases, are not guaranteed to work in any way and may well set your house on fire. The way you do a release of software is to start by just building it and seeing what's busted and what needs fixing: RCs and especially TCs *are* those 'let's see what's busted' builds.

tl;dr summary: TC1 and TC2 are utterly busted, TC3 can be made to work but is very fragile and needs manual intervention. Honestly, if you just want a Fedora 18 system to play with, you're probably going to have more luck yum updating from F17 right now. If you insist on getting TC3 working, refer to the blocker list for help.Ahhh! Gotcha. Well awright! Adam ... thank you for a refreshing breath of solid info. Seriously, this kind of scuttlebutt squashing helps a lot more than it hurts IMHO. Although ... it also gives a metric ton of ammunition to the conspiracy theory crowd ... me included thence. <..:D..>

So, with that in mind, my semi-psychotic take away from all that is:



Common (read: any project) growth symptoms = abundance of ambition>mission creep>over-reach, which then eventually leads to changes>breakage>attrition>downsizing>product shrink>re-build/re-stabilize, then the cycle starts all over again. Sometimes in the same project ... sometimes in the next generation of evolution if the original doesn't survive the adaptation process, but usually accompanied with personnel churn.
Due to the above trend, you've got a buggy/dysfunctional code minefield at this point, which means ... simplify to troubleshoot = choice/complication removal. In short, the alphas and probably the betas will be any color you like ... as long as it's black. Even shorter, "We'll fix it first, decorate it later (maybe)."
The Gnome/Adwaita contingent/Borg are still very much alive and well. " ... You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile ... <..http://www.zyloo-enterprises.com/graphics/smileys/borg.gif..> " ( <..:p..> )



Please feel free to skewer any of the above wild-arsed speculation with the clean cold steel of reality. <..:C..>

[jpollard]

too bad the other developers don't have the same thought.

Making things too complicated is exactly what is wrong with gnome and systemd.

They try to do too many things in one application, which means they end up doing none of them well.

[nonamedotc]

So, it appears that I will have to do a "windows" type install now.

For example, I no longer use Gnome 3 shell, but since there is no customization and only one choice of DE, I will be forced into installing it, and then going back later and removing it after installing the DE I wish to use?

Or will there be a way for me to just install the DE I wish from the DVD and not install Gnome? Even if I can't install the DE I wish from the DVD, is there a way for me to not install Gnome, but still do a graphical install?

Sorry, but Gnome shell is out on my system here. I gave it over a year to mature enough so that it's usable for me, but it just didn't happen, so it doesn't even get installed on my machines here anymore. I sure hope that anaconda isn't going to try and force it upon me, either. I'll drop it and go elsewhere if it even tries.


Yes. It is possible to install the DE of your choice without installing GNOME. The key is - you can install ONE DE of your choice. Dbelton, in your case, you would be able to install XFCE during install. Just not anything else along with it. In fact, in my case, I was able to get F18 installed on Virtualbox with XFCE.

[DBelton]

Ahhh.. Thanks for the explanation, nonamedotc :)

Well, it's still a problem, since I pretty much use Xfce for most of my stuff, but have KDE installed for a few things I need to do for work. I also have some Gnome applications that I use, so need just a few parts of Gnome as well.

I usually install them from the installer since it's a pain in the butt to go back and install them later on since a group install later on pulls in a lot more packages than it does from the install DVD.

I use the DVD rather than the LiveCD spins so I can get the customization I want, but if I can't get that any more, may as well go over to Arch where I can at least get the custom system I need.

[nonamedotc]

Ahhh.. Thanks for the explanation, nonamedotc :)

Well, it's still a problem, since I pretty much use Xfce for most of my stuff, but have KDE installed for a few things I need to do for work. I also have some Gnome applications that I use, so need just a few parts of Gnome as well.

I usually install them from the installer since it's a pain in the butt to go back and install them later on since a group install later on pulls in a lot more packages than it does from the install DVD.

I use the DVD rather than the LiveCD spins so I can get the customization I want, but if I can't get that any more, may as well go over to Arch where I can at least get the custom system I need.

That's what I do too. Rhythmbox and evolution come with a Live CD install :Y

But, as you say, that's no longer going to be the case. :) I suspect that a minimal installation would be in order! :)

P.S. By the way, I am sure you are aware that Arch took out that Arch Installation Framework and put, in its place, a set of installation scripts right? I have the iso downloaded but not tried that yet!

[DBelton]

eeew... Rhythmbox and Evolution are 2 packages that I ALWAYS uncheck from the install since they are pure garbage.

I haven't even looked at Arch in quite awhile now, since I have been pretty happy with Fedora. Fedora has in the past given me the flexibility that I needed and has been a good fairly stable distro. If that changes, (as it appears to be doing) then I am not against looking elsewhere, but I hope I don't need to.

I just hope that anaconda will continue to give me the customization I need, which is the entire reason I download the DVD instead of the LiveCD images. If I wanted to be limited to just one DE, then I would be downloading the LiveCD's.

[hadrons123]

Am I the only one who thinks that all the explanation given by Adam is right?

[Dan]

Uhm ... no.

[AdamW]

Dan: that's broadly correct, but we're talking about a longer timespan than 'Alpha vs. Final' here. I don't want to mislead you into thinking that stuff like the package customization screen is going to come back in Final, that's not what I meant. The simplification is for the long term, to give the anaconda team a manageable code base they can make really solid and usable.

The cycle you describe is broadly the pattern anaconda has fit into over time though, yeah, and I've seen it happen to other projects. In a way it's one of the few drawbacks of the 'F/OSS way' - when you're trying to demonstrate your openness to community contributions it's very difficult to say 'no' to someone who offers you a patch that implements some cool new feature, but the people who write and contribute the new feature code aren't always volunteering to stick around and help you maintain it over the long term. So you can wind up with a very small group of core maintainers trying to maintain code that was drive-by-dumped by a much larger group of people: for a few years they're like 'hey, this is awesome, we're getting all these features for free!', then one day they wake up and realize they're sitting on a mountain of code that's just too big for the three of them (or however many it is) to maintain. I don't think it's often a cycle, though, in my experience once a project goes through it one time, they usually get much stricter about keeping the codebase manageable in future.

dbelton: It's different for everyone, I guess, but I stopped using package customization years ago, before I switched to Fedora, even - I just decided it wasn't really giving me much benefit. I find it works out fine for me just to pick 'minimal' and add on what I need with yum for servers, or to pick the desktop I want and add on anything else I need with yum for desktops. I probably have quite a few packages installed that I just never use, but it really doesn't bother me much. If they're really big I'll get around to yum removing them at some point to save on update bandwidth, but eh. It's not like they're getting in my way, or something. They just sit there not being used. To me post-install package set tweaking is just as good as doing it during install, really.

[DBelton]

Well, another bad thing here is that you are pretty much "stuck" with what someone else decides you should install.

For example, When I installed F17, I installed Gnome, BUT I went into the customize option and removed Evolution, Tracker, and telepathy (and others as well) because I did not want that crap on my machine, and you can't easily remove it once it is installed without removing just about all of Gnome. It's not a case here of install it but don't use it. I don't want it installed at all.

The customize option is very important to me, and without it, I am not going to even bother with install Fedora. I want MY system to have installed on it what I want. Not what someone else decides they want to install along with the desktop I choose.

So, in F18, install from the full DVD, how do I install Gnome, but not install Evolution, Tracker, and Telepathy? Can I do that, or will I have to go with another distro to do it?

[hadrons123]

I always use the LiveCD and remove this following without any trouble
yum remove gnome-packagekit transmission-gtk eekboard libpinyin* gnome-contacts abrt liberation* rhythmbox empathy cheese gnome-documents yum-langpacks.noarch seahorse ibus* evolution gnome-games* orca gnome-backgrounds yelp* fedora-release-notes xorg-x11-drv-nouveau sendmail deja-dup -y

[DBelton]

A lot of those are more applications I don't install, especially empathy, gnome-contacts and gnome-documents (one of the most useless pieces of garbage I have seen in a long time), and a lot of them can be removed later. But some, once installed, want to remove just about all of Gnome as well.

[AdamW]

dbelton: I may be missing something, but I can't see how it could be the case that you could de-select Evolution from anaconda without causing other things to also be de-selected, but you couldn't remove it post-install without causing other things to be uninstalled. That just doesn't seem to be possible. The dependencies between packages are specified in the *packages themselves*, and both yum and anaconda simply enforce those dependencies (using the exact same logic). I can't see how anaconda would do this differently from yum post-install. Any package combination you can achieve through anaconda you also ought to be able to achieve through yum. If you think there's an instance where this isn't the case, could you provide more specific details so I can check into it?

In the case of evolution specifically, you may need to distinguish between evolution and evolution-data-server. Nothing much relies on evolution itself, you can yum remove it without difficulty - on my system, if I do 'yum remove evolution', yum is happy to uninstall just evolution. However, lots of things depend on evolution-data-server, because it's really the official GNOME server for storing contacts and calendar stuff, it's not just a part of evolution. Removing e-d-s wants to take out empathy, gnome-panel, gnome-shell and gnome-tweak-tool (and a few others), for me. I'm pretty sure that if you de-selected evolution-data-server during install, anaconda would de-select those packages too. Are you sure this evolution/e-d-s distinction isn't the source of the confusion?

[DBelton]

possibly could be the reason it tried to remove a lot of Gnome after the install, not sure now. It's been quite awhile since I installed F17, and I slept once or twice since then :D

I don't have the exact numbers, but I would guess (just a rough guess) that half of the users grab the DVD image instead of the LiveCD images.

There are 3 main reasons to get the DVD image:

1: Select the filesystem you wish to use instead of using what the LiveCD copies over
2: The ability to install more than one desktop environment
3: The ability to customize what packages get installed.

So, if I am even close on the number of users that get the DVD image, then with you wiping out 2 of the main reasons people get the DVD instead of the LiveCD, you have just potentially made half your user base mad at you.

Not a good decision, in my opinion.

[Dutchy]

The ability to customize the packages during the installation "was" one of the best features of anaconda.
The new way does look better, with its lengthy descriptions but I really would like to look what's actually in those categories and ultimately choose individual packages like before.

Let's hope this is a case of two steps forward one step back.
Overall it takes some getting used to and I'm sure there still are a lot of bugs that need to be squashed, but the way the installation options are presented all together in a overview is nice IMO.

Furthermore, TC3 netinst did install (after a few tries) and all the bugs I saw were all described by AdamW.

[DBelton]

I could deal with one release of not having the customization option, I do realize it takes quite a lot of time to get features into a new application. But If it's a matter of them not even thinking about putting it back in, then I will definitely go elsewhere. Plain and simple. I want My machine to have applications installed that I want, not somebody else's idea of what packages they want. I search out and download the DVD because I want it installed how I want it t be. If I wanted a "cookie cutter" system, I would download the LiveCD image. It's much easier to find, and a lot smaller download.

It is just plain stupid to have anaconda install a package just to turn around and manually remove it. It takes more time on the install, and more time after the install.

[smr54]

I always prefer the minimum installation. I think I mentioned that the basic install seems to have more packages than minimal used to, and I find it annoying--but, in honesty, most of the extra choices are things that I would install once I had the system set up.

One of my pet peeves with Anaconda though, is that it will fail, with no option save a reboot and try again, going through all steps. So, adding more packages gives it more chances to fail. (Unless that's one of the things getting fixed in the new Anaconda)

EDIT

On the other hand, so far, (though I haven't gotten that far with the current TC's yet), I haven't come across any OH NOOOO---they did THAT????
(Meaning some sort of drastic change). I can live with the additional packages in the base install, figuring I'm probably in the minority as far as that goes.


The older I get, the more important that becomes.

[Demz3]

AdamW

any idea when TC4 will be made?

i see there's a newer Anaconda been rolled

[AdamW]

demz3: we usually do a sorta 'TC of the TC' build when there's a new anaconda - tim throws together a boot.iso on his own system with the new anaconda, just to make sure it's not completely DOA. if it boots and smoke tests for tim, we do the TC request. we had trouble doing that build with the TC4 packages - looks like some grub changes need corresponding changes in lorax. so we need to make sure that's all sorted out before TC4 gets done. there's a small chance it'll get done over the next few hours if tim tells me he got the smoke test done: right now it's late evening for me and tim, but mid-afternoon for dennis, who does the actual TC/RC builds, so if we file the request before we go to bed, dennis will do it 'overnight' for us. otherwise, it'll likely get done tomorrow when dennis comes online, mid-afternoon my time.

edit: if you want to follow the sausage factory in all its gory detail, feel free to idle in #fedora-qa, #fedora-releng and #anaconda on freenode irc. it's probably quite amusing watching us all swear at each other. =) all of this stuff actually goes down in public, since me and tim and all the other qa people, the anaconda devs, and dennis and kevin (releng) are all in different places - there's no watercooler stuff. we do it all over the public lists and IRC channels.

[Demz3]

ohh ok thanks

[jvillain]

I'm curious as to why these aren't available under the experimental menu item in BFO? Any thoughts?

[AdamW]

I'm curious as to why these aren't available under the experimental menu item in BFO? Any thoughts?

TC/RC builds are not really meant to be public pre-releases. Strictly speaking they exist purely for the QA team to do release validation on. Since they're frequently badly broken we really don't want to promote them as if they were 'official' builds - even the official Alpha and Beta have some basic expectation of working-ness, TC/RC builds do not.

So we intentionally try to keep them reasonably quiet and small-scale; dealing with half the internet saying 'TC3 doesn't work!' is just more trouble than it's worth.

[Demz3]

Hey, folks - just wanted to make sure anyone who's interested is in the
loop. The anaconda team has been working to try and get live
installation working with the newUI changes, but right now they don't
think it'll be possible to have it ready in time for F18 Alpha, at least
without slipping again. They don't think it can be done by next
Wednesday.

So, if we wanted to release the Alpha on current schedule (just 1 week
slip), it'd have to be with no live images, or with non-installable live
images. If we want installable live images for Alpha, we'd have to slip
at least another week.

That feels like a 'policy' decision to me, so I've filed a ticket with
FESCo to discuss it at their next meeting:

https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/941

so if anyone feels strongly about this issue, please, chip in in the
ticket or at the meeting. If people feel it'd be desirable, we could
also put this on the agenda for the QA meeting on Monday and perhaps
come to an official position on what we would like to see happen, since
our meeting is ahead of FESCo's. Thanks everyone! http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2012-August/109623.html , i'd prefer another slip to get these Live Images done

[smr54]

Hm, Ok, tried TC3. Same issue as mentioned in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=849250, no chance to create password. Glad Adam, when filing the bug, put design feature in quotes. :)

The trick is supposedly to boot into single user mode to set the password. However, in a VM install, I haven't figured out how to do that, when I hit e to edit, rather than the grub menu, I just get an empty text box that won't echo letters, only numbers. I don't know if that's a Fedora problem or VirtualBox one.

Well, hopefully, the fix for that will be along soon.

[DBelton]

I am wondering about something I read someplace and how they were thinking about doing it.

What I read was that somewhere in the install process/first user stuff, they were talking about making the first user created the admin user and not create a root user.

I really don't see how that is going to work correctly, though. But then again, I don't have any specifics on how/what they were talking about.

I need to hunt around and find more about this one, though. I have a lot of things that specifically look for root user or user 0.

[smr54]

If you look at the bug report I linked, it mentions it in passing. I think it's another reason Adam put it in quotes--he does comment that it will probably affect other things.

On the other hand, Fedora has struck me for years as being targeted towards the person fleeing Windows and I think that is why it, along with Ubuntu, also aimed at the less experienced (or the one willing to sacrifice control for convenience--nothing wrong with that in my opinion), is so popular. My problem is when the desktop user stuff gets thrown into the server end, e.g., RH.

If you or I dislike Fedora's accomodating the inexperienced, it's fine--in almost any case I can think of, we are free to use something else. I use it primarily because most work in my field is done on RH servers, and this has helped me be aware of things that will cause my company and myself issues. If it weren't for that, I might use something else, but who knows. It still has a reasonable balance between convenience and configurability for me, though the inability to get a VBox install of a Test Candidate--key word here is Test--to boot into single mode is aggravating.

On the other hand, I'm reading a medieval mystery right now where people are dying of bubonic plague, so I reckon I'm better off than they were. :)

Aha--I got it to a point where I could edit it. I rebooted it a few times, hit ctl+c which takes you to a grub prompt, hit escape to get out of that and there was something I could edit.
Still, 442 packages for the base install? Sheesh. (For those who are just coming in at the end of this, Adam has commented that at present, package selection is one of the things that will be worked on, so it's not necessarily going to be that bad, I'm just enjoying myself.)

[jpollard]

It can work, using SELinux to define what an administrator is and setting that "admin user" to have that label. The "root" user as a login name still exists, but is permanently locked from login. It serves only as an ownership label for the system files. The "admin user" login then uses labeled secured programs to either transition into the equivalent of a root login, or to carry out specific actions under active privilege. It isn't a fun thing to configure yourself, but can work reasonably well.

[smr54]

Hrrm, seems (again, it's only TC stage, so I'm not sure) that it isn't including an /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 biosdevname, system-config-network and system-config-network-tui are missing, so if one doesn't want to use NetworkManager, you'll have to manually create such a file. Haven't tested creating the file yet, only removed NetworkManager, started network, then ran dhclient eth0.


I'm hoping this is just TC stuff, or if not, that RH doesn't see fit to model RH 7 after it.

Ah well, one can work around it, and again--it is a TC release right now, so this doesn't necessarily mean that are dropping it.

EDIT--seems that this is already noted and being worked on--I see a mention in some updates that it should create such files (that is, the ifcfg-eth0, though probably using the biosdev name).

[DBelton]

So what would be accomplished by this?

I would still have to create 2 users. 1 with the admin privileges, and 1 without admin privileges for everyday use.

Currently on my systems here, I have root user and 1 normal user. If they make those changes, then I would have root user, 1 admin user, and 1 regular user.

While I might sign into some desktop environments as root or admin user, I definitely would not sign into Gnome 3 using one. It's pretty much experimental code (and sloppy code at that) and I sure don't want it having rights to go wherever it wished to and completely trash my system.

What worries me is a user being created that has admin privileges that people are going to be using all of the time for normal everyday stuff. At least in until now, users were pretty much restricted to their own stuff, and couldn't modify the system files. Is this going to change now? How can you set up a "part time" admin user?

[AdamW]

smr54: the lack of ifcfg files is just a bug in new anaconda, yeah. I think it's just part of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=849012 .

As far as the 'admin user' thing goes - the design actually all more or less exists already and is very similar to Ubuntu's default config. When you're creating a user account in firstboot, there is an 'admin user' checkbox. If you check the box, a few things happen. The user gets a special status as far as policykit is concerned - policykit has this 'admin user / regular user' distinction - and that has consequences in some policykit-based apps. (For e.g., admin users get asked for their own password, not the root password, when installing a package).

In some ways more significantly, the user gets added to the 'wheel' group, and in recent Fedora releases - though you may not have noticed this, I didn't till I went and looked at it - we have sudo in the default package set, and sudo's default config allows any user in the wheel group to run any command as root by entering their own password - just like how it works in Ubuntu for the first created user. The 'admin user' still needs to provide authentication when actually doing any dangerous action, so it's quite safe to log in and work normally with the 'admin user' account.

So in practice the whole system looks rather like Ubuntu's, the first created user (and any other 'admin user') can do all 'root' tasks with their own password, the root account has no password and is inaccessible. Also like Ubuntu, if you don't like the setup and want to go the 'traditional' route, all you have to do is 'sudo passwd' to create a root password and you're good.

As for a practical workaround at present - sounds like you figured one out, smr54, but in case anyone else struggles, the way I got around it in a VM was simply to boot a Fedora 17 live image, mount the installed Fedora 18 system, and chroot into it in a console to run passwd.

[DBelton]

Thanks for that clarification, Adam :)

If they implement it in that way, then I don't see much problems with it, as long as there is the choice of making the user and admin user or not.

Just as long as they don't take away the root user, or force a user to be admin user, I'll be happy :)

Somehow I read someplace that they were doing completely away with the root user, and that wouldn't have been very good at all.

[jpollard]

Not having a root user is not that bad.

As long as the security model is properly done, that is. I've used a rootless system before, and it works. I've also seen one done not so well...

The purpose is to prevent single account attacks and internal attacks. To administer the system you first login as the admin user. That allows you to then elevate privilege in one or more ways - one is just to be able to su to root. This now requires two passwords - the first is the admin login, the second is the root password. The advantage this has is that any root level activity can be traced back to the admin login - and there is the possibility of multiple admin logins.

Logging in as a regular user does not allow you to su to root. You might be able to go from a regular user to admin user to root...(three passwords). This model has a subset capability via sudo - one password per function or delegation of function to specific logins (which is already available, though usually all subsets are given to one login).

All it does is layer control. It makes it clearer that you "really really really" mean to do the designated action, and causes you to think about it too. If you are doing one thing, but accidentally type a different operation, you get blocked.

A second model removes root as login entirely. In this model you login as an account (one or more, depending on the system) that has some privileges. In this case, the all encompassing root privileges are broken up - one account manages disks, another manages networks, another manages VMs, another handles security functions (an auditing capability), another to install/update systems. This structure is the one most people don't like.

The advantage is for large organizations, it helps prevent internal attacks - you can have three or more people handling the system and that helps prevent collusion. In the situation I was working, there were 4 groups - a security login, operations, user administration, and system maintenance (both software and hardware). No one person could take over the system. Even two could not (though more damage could be done as people from different groups begin colluding). Evidence of collusion could not be hidden until you get 4 people, one from each of the areas because different logs would end up recording the activity (security logs separate from system logs, separate from operations logs...).

I should add, we had 3 security administrators, 20 operations staff, and 7 software+hardware vendor maintenance staff, and we used the first model, though the second was tried (not used due to other problems, and not required by upper management).

It isn't perfect, but some organizations do require this (banking and the DoD to my direct knowledge) capability.

[Demz3]

so whats the outcome with LiveCD's? im a bit confused as to whats going on in this ticket https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/941 .

[AdamW]

There hasn't been a decision made yet. Data and opinions from various folks are still being gathered. usually fesco would have discussed this at its meeting today, but that meeting didn't happen because a lot of fesco members are at LPC and hence not really available.

[Demz3]

seems a bit of a mess hopefully someone comes to a reasonable conclusion soon enough.

[hadrons123]

new Pre-TC4 test images.
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2012-August/109731.html
I will test the USB install method with netinst.iso

Edit:
I 'm happy that Fesco didnt abandon new anaconda for f18. They are going to slip f18 alpha by one more week.
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2012-August/109742.html

[Demz3]

by the looks of it, it still can be slipped again The next Go/No-Go meeting is on Thursday Sep 06, same place
but different time (19:00 UTC, 3 PM EDT, 21:00 CEST
#fedora-meeting).

[smr54]

There's a few new ones since then. Latest is actually at

http://imagebuilder.fedoraproject.org/testimage/18/pretc4-5/

I've just been doing minimal net installs, and seeing gradual improvements. One is that there is a minimal (vs. the basic from the early test candidates) with around 211, vs 440? or so for the basic.

Also, there is a place to set root password during installation, in the same place where one selects disk and so on.

It's still not creating /etc/sysconfig/network and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts ifcfg-<interface>, save for ifcfg-lo, for loopback.



But, as each TC seems to fix one issue or another, it's getting there. I've just been installing on a VM, then a minimal X, and that's all working each time. Haven't tested sound and the like, just getting a very basic system at present.

[nonamedotc]

pretc4-2 DVD does not work for me on Virtualbox - not for me at least. I have to download the pretc-4.5 DVD image and try it again ...

---------- Post added at 10:06 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:03 PM ----------

The installation stalls on "Installing filesystem". This happens in both minimal and GNOME installation ...

[smr54]

Not for me, on VirtualBox. I've been having successful installs--I've only been doing minimals.

For what it's worth, I've been choosing let me review partitioning and just giving an 8 GB virtual disk one big / partition. (The host has 16GB of RAM, so I've been giving the VM 8 GB--therefore, not worrying about swap partition as these machines are doing almost nothing.)

Hrrm, what else might be different? This is 64 bit, host and guest. I've only done minimal install, but you mention it happened to you with minimal installs too.

[nonamedotc]

Not for me, on VirtualBox. I've been having successful installs--I've only been doing minimals.

For what it's worth, I've been choosing let me review partitioning and just giving an 8 GB virtual disk one big / partition. (The host has 16GB of RAM, so I've been giving the VM 8 GB--therefore, not worrying about swap partition as these machines are doing almost nothing.)

Hrrm, what else might be different? This is 64 bit, host and guest. I've only done minimal install, but you mention it happened to you with minimal installs too.

Darn! I have done something stupid! :doh: I downloaded the 64-bit iso and tried to install without enabling hardware virtualization. This is not the usually system I play around in - stupid! :doh:

Will try again!

[Demz3]

blanked out

[AdamW]

we should be able to build lives early next week. dgilmore is patching koji's livecd-creator support to work for f18. there are a couple of entirely unofficial live builds floating around the ether, myself and a couple of others have built a few for testing.

[hadrons123]

TC 4 doesnt boot into GUI , same as all the previous TCs on USB iso install.
Is everyone else doing a CD/DVD or virtualBox install?

[nonamedotc]

I have been trying to install it in the virtualbox - no use. The installation hands at "installing filesystem" ... More than 15 minutes now ... :doh: Does this regardless of what I choose to install ... So far I have tried GNOME, minimal and xfce.

---------- Post added at 02:11 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:50 PM ----------

Oh! here is the bug report already filed ... https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=853405

[Dutchy]

TC4 looks pretty decent to me.
The only thing that still didn't work was the first run thingy where you can create a new user.
after creating a user with the command line all ran well.

I installed: i386 netinstall, Gnome, guided partitioning (btrfs root)
On x64 AMD bulldozer, Virtualbox 4.1.20

[smr54]

Seems Ok, but still not creating /etc/sysconfig/network and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<interface> save for ifcfg-lo.

I believe Adam said that was a bug in Anaconda, and, as it seems to be working fine if one leaves the default NetworkManager to run things, it will probably only inconvenience a few people. (Relatively speaking).

[AdamW]

hadrons: USB boots being broken is known and reported, so yeah, we're using virtual boots mostly.

[AdamW]

Seems Ok, but still not creating /etc/sysconfig/network and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<interface> save for ifcfg-lo.

I believe Adam said that was a bug in Anaconda, and, as it seems to be working fine if one leaves the default NetworkManager to run things, it will probably only inconvenience a few people. (Relatively speaking).

the bug I thought it was part of is supposed to be fixed in tc4 but indeed it still doesn't write ifcfg files to the installed system, so we probably need a new bug report for that. can you file one?

[rtguille]

i am currently downloading tc4, in the meantime i tried pretc4-5 and i am not able to install it in a kvm guest with 768mb.

[...]
21:55:12,295 INFO anaconda: 786432 kB (768 MB) are available
21:55:12,297 INFO anaconda: check_memory(): total:768, needed:512, graphical:512
21:55:13,731 DEBUG anaconda: X server has signalled a successful start.
[...]
21:55:19,327 INFO anaconda: Detected 736M of memory
21:55:19,330 INFO anaconda: Swap attempt of 1472M
[...]
19:03:00,756 ERR anaconda: You have not specified a swap partition. 917 MB of memory is required to continue installation without a swap partition, but you only have 747 MB.
[...]
19:12:01,000 ERR anaconda: Error running modprobe: Cannot allocate memory

does anybody know if current f18 anaconda ram requeriments? is it 1GB now or it might be a bug?
i will try with tc4 first, before reporting.

[DBelton]

aye ya ya! Anaconda requires 917MB of RAM?

I thought they were supposed to be trying to decrease memory requirements of anaconda, not increase them.

[Penguinclaw]

So just as buggy as 17.

Hey, I love F17 and I have not had any major bug issues that can't be solved. Maybe I'm lucky with my hardware choice, though I doubt it as every other distro I've tried struggles with something :D

[smr54]

@Adam, done.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=853584

[Demz3]

blanked out

[hadrons123]

With Alpha 2 weeks away and so many bugs in between, I 'm expecting at least 4-5 more TCs

[Demz3]

my guess they'll do, 2 more TC's then do RC's then to Alpha

---------- Post added at 08:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:17 PM ----------

any1 gotten the LiveCD's to boot into GUI yet? i havent burnt mine yet. will do mine tomorrow

[smr54]

TC5 still has the issue with network scripts. Minimal install boots fine, adding a window manager then starting X works fine.

[Demz3]

TC5 still has the issue with network scripts. Minimal install boots fine, adding a window manager then starting X works fine.

yeah i saw your Bug report on that. im just looking at getting LiveCD to boot an or boot into a DE GUI before i muck around installing it. i dont think its ready to be installed yet IMO. anaconda seems to flaky

[rtguille]

I just tested the livecd-kde:

TC5 LiveCD-KDE on KVM/SPICE:qlx (either with nomodeset / basic graphic mode / failsafe) results in plasma-desktop crashing.

TC5 LiveCD-KDE on KVM/VNC:cirrus reaches desktop, but it is hyper-slow, unusable. I must login with plasma failsafe,
but it is still slow engough for anaconda to never load.

[nonamedotc]

Finally! TC5 works for me in Virtualbox - no issues yet. It's a bit sluggish though ... i-386 GNOME desktop on VESA: virtualbox adapter. Full gnome shell experience is available.

[smr54]

I don't think you can get in the VB tools--that is the graphic driver portion---because the version of X is too new.

[nonamedotc]

No No! I just mentioned what my installation mentioned. Just for information. Did not want to change anything. At this point I am happy that I got GUI :)

[Demz3]

ok im in Gnome but the Shell didnt work, crashed. fell back to fallback Mode but over all im happy with it so far that it worked without a problem unlike F17 had .

you gotta expect running it Via a LiveCD will be slow

[nealzimm]

I am trying to learn a bit more about Fedora and have decided to help with the TC's.

I have been searching up and down the site to find a list of tests, but with no luck.

Is there such a beast?

I was able to get TC3/KDE up with a desktop (gnome failed for dependencies) but
now it looks that the development team has enable password checking.

How do I get past the login prompt? ( no first run configuration screens)

Thanks!!

[lutor]

hello
I downloaded and tried to install the Fedora-18-Alpha-TC5-x86_64-Live-KDE.iso but to my surprise when I tried to install gave error. I tried to send the bug but not send. the error is related to the installation because I realized that something goes wrong when installing.
I hope I have given a little more help for it to be. excuse my english but I'm Portuguese and I have to use the google translator.

[DBelton]

That is a known issue, and the reason that the Alpha release was slipped by another week.

The LiveCD images are just that currently. You can't install to your hard drive from them.

Were you able to bring up the Live OS but just weren't able to install to your hard drive from it? Or did you have issues bringing up the Live OS?

As I said, the install doesn't work currently, but it should bring up a Live OS for you to use.

[lutor]

hello
yes I could see the OS on fedora 16 and tried to install on my hard drive but without result

[DBelton]

Currently, if you wish to install it to your hard drive, then you need to get the DVD images, not the Live images.

[lutor]

but the live has to install. not better then remove the installation?

[DBelton]

Why do you think the live has to install? You are testing out a pre-alpha test candidate. There are things that don't work, period.

Personally, and professionally, I think they are rushing the implementation of the anaconda rewrite. It appears to me that anaconda is being written as as it's being implemented into F18.

It should have been completely written, and tested as good as it could be with the F17 release, and implemented into F18 only after the testing was done and they had it working. Then it could have been "fine tuned" for F18 and that's all it would have needed.

I have a feeling that the F18 release cycle is in for a lot of delays and problems due to the anaconda rewrite that's not ready.

[errorxp]

I hope they make some improvements to custom partitioning in anaconda because right now it feels very clumsy indeed not to mention package selection.

[DBelton]

errrr... What package selection? :(

[lutor]

I downloaded the DVD and tried to install 2 times already. 1st tried the gnome installed but after that did not work and the 2nd time I installed KDE that also does not work on my pc. I'm not sure if it's my own pc if it's the fedora

[nonamedotc]

At this stage, it is more likely that the problem is Fedora. Remember, it is pre-alpha!

Why don't you try minimal installation and then build the system on top of that ...

[lutor]

my computer:
2 gigabytes memory
Motherboard: Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0
graphics card: Ati radeon HD3600
Processor: intel core 2 Duo CPU E7200 "2.53GHz

Something here that does not leave the fedora working properly?

[AdamW]

dbelton: it's worth noting that some of the bigger problems with Alpha have not actually been due to newUI at all, but to changes in dracut. we did in fact do some f17-based newUI test images which worked pretty well - then when we rebased onto F18 we found all the dracut issues that weren't exposed by testing on top of F17...

[AdamW]

I am trying to learn a bit more about Fedora and have decided to help with the TC's.

I have been searching up and down the site to find a list of tests, but with no luck.

Is there such a beast?

I was able to get TC3/KDE up with a desktop (gnome failed for dependencies) but
now it looks that the development team has enable password checking.

How do I get past the login prompt? ( no first run configuration screens)

Thanks!!

The official announcements on test-announce provide all the details on tests:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test-announce/2012-September/000498.html

Getting in if you didn't set a root password during install is a bit tricky - you have to boot a rescue image or live image or something, mount the installed system, chroot into it, and run 'passwd' to create a root password. Then you can boot the system, log in as root, and use 'adduser' to create a new user account. Things should be fixed so firstboot runs in TC6/RC1.

[Demz3]

pre-tc6 available http://imagebuilder.fedoraproject.org/testimage/18/pretc6/

[DBelton]

I'm downloading the pre-tc6 right now. I am going to try installing into a VM and see how it goes.

[DBelton]

dbelton: it's worth noting that some of the bigger problems with Alpha have not actually been due to newUI at all, but to changes in dracut. we did in fact do some f17-based newUI test images which worked pretty well - then when we rebased onto F18 we found all the dracut issues that weren't exposed by testing on top of F17...

From some of the things I have seen, the anaconda team isn't even sure how they are supposed to be doing some things.

For example the firstboot stuff. That should have been planned out and thought about long ago if it was going to be changed in F18. As it is, they are still trying to figure out when it's needed and when it isn't.

Actually, anaconda should set a few things up, like root user and password, and not worry about what gets run later. If that funky gnome first user experience is supposed to run, let it, anaconda's job is finished by that time. If the normal firstboot is supposed to run, let it. anaconda's job is finished by then. Anaconda could possibly set a flag, then whatever initial firstboot setup can test that flag and reset it when it runs. Anaconda shouldn't even be worried about what other apps are going to do on first boot.

Another thing that wasn't very well planned out was the decision to only install one DE and the decision to remove the package customization from the DVD install. Anybody with even half a brain would realize that those are 2 of the major reasons why people are willing to download a much larger DVD image than get the Live images. Whoever made those decisions needs to be keel-hauled, made to walk the plank, then shot and fed to the sharks. :p I actually download more Live images than I do DVD images, but I will only install from the DVD image so I can customize how I want my system to be installed.

Don't get me wrong, Anaconda definitely needs the complete re-write. I totally support a new anaconda, but I see where they are going to be so rushed getting it into F18 that it's not going to be much better than the old anaconda. It will be sloppy hacked together spaghetti code, and they will be back to the same problems trying to support it in the future.

Edit:
Also, I saw someplace where someone had issues running the F18 installer due to not enough RAM and no swap. The message I saw said it needed nearly 1GB of RAM??? That is just to install Fedora? I thought they were supposed to be looking at finding ways for anaconda to install in less memory, not use more :(

[smr54]

Well, FWIW, my particular issue, of it not creating ifcfg-<interface> files and an /etc/sysconfig/netork file still exists. However, on the bug report, it seems like it's going to be fixed

[DBelton]

Well, I can't use the pre-tc6 image, so grabbing the TC5 image and trying it instead.

There aren't any 32 bit pre-tc images, and this box doesn't support Vt, so I'm limited to 32 bit in a VM.

I don't run any VM's on my box that does support Vt, and run them on the box that doesn't. :lol:

[AdamW]

dbelton: anaconda doesn't have anything to do with firstboot. anaconda doesn't have any concept of "when it's needed and when it isn't", anaconda just does anaconda's stuff.

if you mean the idea of not setting the root password, well - it _was_ thought out in advance, just apparently not well enough - no-one considered the text install issue. The design work was heavily focused on the 'typical graphical install' path and I think they could probably have done better at considering other paths, but they did _try_ to think it out ahead of time.

"Another thing that wasn't very well planned out was the decision to only install one DE and the decision to remove the package customization from the DVD install. Anybody with even half a brain would realize that those are 2 of the major reasons why people are willing to download a much larger DVD image than get the Live images."

You haven't actually proved that, you've just asserted it. Right now we have you asserting that the design is dumb, and the people who designed it asserting that it isn't. This is a pretty difficult situation for anyone to referee...

"Also, I saw someplace where someone had issues running the F18 installer due to not enough RAM and no swap. The message I saw said it needed nearly 1GB of RAM??? That is just to install Fedora?"

the RAM usage hasn't really been looked at / optimized at all in f18 cycle yet. I would expect it'll be possible to tighten it down during beta / final phase.

[Demz3]

i just think times are a changin an it doesn't take much to use yum groupinstall from command line to install a second DE/WM, but i will miss the customization thing. i believe they have made a Newer rewritten " PreUpgrade " thingy. i was never a Fan of PreUpgrade. but getting back to the customization, i dont think even Ubuntu installer has it?

---------- Post added at 11:31 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:29 AM ----------

AdamW

any idea when there gonna spin Newer TC iso's ?

[DBelton]

Well, after installing F18 in a VM, it took all day long going back and installing/removing packages that I used to just check (or uncheck) in the installer. So to get close to the same thing done today that used to take about an hour, it took nearly 9 hours of constant updating. Over 100 packages that I usually uncheck got installed, and I had to go back and remove every one of them :(

also, what happened to being able to change the localhost name in anaconda?


"Another thing that wasn't very well planned out was the decision to only install one DE and the decision to remove the package customization from the DVD install. Anybody with even half a brain would realize that those are 2 of the major reasons why people are willing to download a much larger DVD image than get the Live images."

You haven't actually proved that, you've just asserted it. Right now we have you asserting that the design is dumb, and the people who designed it asserting that it isn't. This is a pretty difficult situation for anyone to referee...


Well, there are really only 3 reasons that someone would download the much larger DVD image (that you have to hunt for to download) over the LiveCD images.

1: The ability to install more than one desktop environment
2: The ability to customize the packages installed
3: The ability to customize the filesystem

So.. 3 reasons. 2 have definitely been taken away (anaconda team says they are gone, I see they are gone, so they are gone)

So, point proven. 2 of the 3 major reasons that people download the DVD image are gone.

[Demz3]

blaned out

[Adunaic]

another TC. TC6 Available

---------- Post added at 06:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:32 PM ----------

running the TC6 LiveCD now. runs much better than TC5 did.

Where is the link, I can see the TC6 folder, but it is empty.

[Demz3]

Where is the link, I can see the TC6 folder, but it is empty.

all works fine for me following links i posted above

---------- Post added at 07:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:13 PM ----------

look under Desktop that link

[Adunaic]

all works fine for me following links i posted above

---------- Post added at 07:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:13 PM ----------

look under Desktop that link

I see, I was following the first link in this thread, which , I am guessing is a mirror and has not updated yet.

[DBelton]

Interesting. The live images say TC5 as Demz pointed out above, but the checksum for them say TC6.

Also, the 32 bit have TC5-i686 for the LiveCDs, and TC6-i386 for the checksum.

But, grabbing TC6 now and see if it is any better than TC5. If the install isn't any better, I'm going to trash it before it even finishes the installer. I'm not going through 9 hours of a Fedora install again. :lol:

[nonamedotc]

A word of warning though (if you did not know already) - The live CD is just that - will not install - same as TC5. Although, this one starts anaconda (unlike TC5 in my experience) and once you click "I accept my fate", it lands in Timbuktu as it warns albeit 30 years in the past :D

Having said that, Live CD runs fine without problems ...

[DBelton]

Well, I only install from the DVD, but that may change since they have decided to strip the functionality out of it and basically make it the same as a live install just with a much larger download. (Actually, if they continue, I will switch distros, but I'm going to give them a change to put the functionality back into the DVD)

But are you being serious about that 30 years in the past?

[nonamedotc]

But are you being serious about that 30 years in the past?

I was just kidding - in reference to what it says when it starts anaconda "timbuktu 6 months in future". :)

[Demz3]

only 64bit available http://imagebuilder.fedoraproject.org/testimage/18/pretc7-1/


https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Task_Status

[nonamedotc]

only 64bit available http://imagebuilder.fedoraproject.org/testimage/18/pretc7-1/


https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Task_Status

Tested it out on Virtual box.

Installed XFCE Desktop - no errors during installation

First boot appears!

Error!


"Couldn't write either /etc/ntp.conf or /etc/sysconfig/network. Configuration unchanged.


First time I am seeing the background image - but GDM does not seem to start! Although, I was able to setup user account in first boot.

---------- Post added at 09:18 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:56 AM ----------

Never mind. I installed gnome-shell from VT and now GDM works mighty fine!

Weird? Why was this not installed in the first place if it is needed? Should I file a bug report or did I do something wrong?

[AdamW]

not your fault. the weirdness with TC6 DVD and pre-TC7 is down to changes to comps and spin-kickstarts.

we will build a TC7 or RC1 tomorrow, most likely, which I'd expect to work *significantly* better than any TC so far. I'd hold out for that if I were you.

[nonamedotc]

No problem! I am doing all this on a VM. Time permitting, let me try every image :)

[Demz3]

looks like they'll build these images on Monday?

[Holdolin]

only 64bit available http://imagebuilder.fedoraproject.org/testimage/18/pretc7-1/


https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Task_Status

Finally got in image to install succesfully. Now to go find and report some bugs :dance:

[nonamedotc]

New netinstall images are out. x86_64 only.

http://imagebuilder.fedoraproject.org/testimage/18/pretc7-2/

[smr54]

Says F17 but is F18. My own issue, that of no /etc/sysconfig/network and no /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-<interface>, save for lo, still exists, but is supposed to be fixed.

[nonamedotc]

Installation completed without any errors! One surprise was it had lightdm instead of GDM when I chose XFCE. That's nice! :)

Did the XFCE spins have GDM or lightdm before?

And yes, the network issue mentioned above persists!

[Holdolin]

New netinstall images are out. x86_64 only.

http://imagebuilder.fedoraproject.org/testimage/18/pretc7-2/

Hehe, just as i finished up the last TC install, and came here to say it installed i found this. It indeed installed in my VM without issue. I love this stage in an OS's life.l Watching it come from an utter pile of little more than ideas to a working OS. Hats off to the team :)

[Demz3]

false entertainment

[nonamedotc]

Are you trying CD/DVD boot/install or USB? I had no problems with TC7-2 on VM, but no go with USB. Will try RC on VM and post what I get ...

[Demz3]

iblanked out

[hadrons123]

Did you use the USB install or DVD?

---------- Post added at 08:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:28 PM ----------

finally I am able to do a netinstall with a USB key. But why did gnome-shell become a dependency for gdm. Doesn't make any sense.

GDM doesn't load automatically. I have to start gdm from a shell. why?

[DBelton]

try running


systemctl enable --force gdm.service


That should set GDM up to start automatically for you.

I also ran into the policykit/selinux bug when installing from DVD (I used RC1 haven't tried RC2 yet)

I believe reinstalling policykit and systemd will fix it, though. trying that in just a minute.

[hadrons123]

I installed RC2.
Your force method didnt work nor disabling selinux bring gdm either.
i 'm not sure what bug it is.

[DBelton]

did you get any errors when you tried to enable the gdm.service?

try starting the gdm.service and see if you get errors as well...

systemctl start gdm.service

(The enable would just set it start automatically upon boot, it wouldn't start it in the current session.)

[hadrons123]

no errors.
sidenote:
I cant see NTFS partitions from nautilus either. action always pending..

---------- Post added at 09:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:33 PM ----------

I used to be the guy who liked gnome3. From Gnome 3.6 and starting from the gdm unlock screen, new nautilus , redesigned gnome shell are really crap. To start an application I got to the hot corner and move all the way down to the side bar for applications app and FINALLY select the app on the main screen , man I 'm tired.

[DBelton]

To be completely honest, I don't think F18 is even close to being Alpha stage at the moment. There are still way too many bugs that should have already been worked out by now.

I haven't really seen the new Gnome 3.6 yet, I have been thinking about installing it (once I can manage to get F18 running) and see what it looks like.

[hadrons123]

The installer finally worked. Maybe lot of work is on the way.
The customizing the packages in the installer is crap. I want the old style customization. But I don't think that's going to come in f18.

[DBelton]

I want the package customization as well, but I think the developers don't believe that people want it. I don't think they are planning to put it back in at all unless a lot of people really scream about it being gone.

I ended up having to go back and remove tons of packages once I got F18 installed when I installed the tc5 DVD. Ended up taking me about 9 hours just to get to a state where F17 put me right after the install finished

My suggestion...

Everybody that installs F18 and wants the package customization.. File a NEW bug in bugzilla, don't add to an existing one (just opposite my usual recommendation). Maybe if enough new bugs get opened with people requesting customization, then possibly someone will listen.

Edit:

In RC1 I still don't get the /etc/sysconfig/netowrk or /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/ifcfg-* created here. I manually created them myself, and the network comes up fine, but until I create them, I have no network.

Currently, I am trying to figure out why firstboot refuses to run. It cancels when I try to manually start it, but it didn't run automatically, either.

[nonamedotc]

I used to be the guy who liked gnome3. From Gnome 3.6 and starting from the gdm unlock screen, new nautilus , redesigned gnome shell are really crap. To start an application I got to the hot corner and move all the way down to the side bar for applications app and FINALLY select the app on the main screen , man I 'm tired.

To be completely honest, I don't think F18 is even close to being Alpha stage at the moment. There are still way too many bugs that should have already been worked out by now.

I haven't really seen the new Gnome 3.6 yet, I have been thinking about installing it (once I can manage to get F18 running) and see what it looks like.

Where did you see that shell? The GNOME shell in RC2 says it is 3.5.50 and it has the look of GNOME 3.4 except for that new nautilus. Did you update/install gnome from somewhere?

I am not seeing GNOME 3.5.90 (?) - just like DBelton mentions ..

[hadrons123]

@Dbelton
I am with you 100%. But If we file a new bug for the same thing won't they just merge it as duplicate?
@nonamedotc
Dont' you think 3.5.XX is going have the same features as 3.6 or vice versa?

I assume from here that there is going to be just bug fixes for 3.5.XX. Not feature changes. I hate the new features. That's my point.

[DBelton]

Yes, they probably will close it as a duplicate, but all of the bugs will still be in bugzilla, and they will have to manually close and mark it as a duplicate. Plus, then the bug they keep open will have a big string of bugs shown as duplicates as well.

[nonamedotc]

@nonamedotc
Dont' you think 3.5.XX is going have the same features as 3.6 or vice versa?

I assume from here that there is going to be just bug fixes for 3.5.XX. Not feature changes. I hate the new features. That's my point.

I agree. I thought that would be the case. It is just that I am not seeing what you have described except nautilus. In my GNOME live CD of RC2, GNOME looks exactly like 3.4 complete with "Windows" and "Applications" tab .. That's why I was confused.

I have screen that in some screenshots (of GNOME 3.5.90) though and I think that's insane! :doh:

[hadrons123]

my gnome-shell version is 3.5.91. I did a netinstall with RC2 image.

[DBelton]

Blah.. I'm giving up on RC1. I have RC2 downloading at the moment and I'm going to try it out.

I haven't been able to get anything newer than tc5 installed and working here, I hope RC2 gives me better results.

[hadrons123]

Filed the bug for feature request in package customization.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=856301

[DBelton]

Will be interesting to see what becomes of it.

My guess is it will be closed as WONTFIX or NOTABUG, but I hope I'm wrong on this.

[hadrons123]

I know what happens at bugzilla. Fedora people promptly will choose not to answer. I 'm not demanding for my money back, But a basic courtesy of simple answer, at least one liner, would be sufficient. But lately everyone at fedora is busy.

[DBelton]

Yea, I know what you mean.

I filed a few bugs back during the F15 pre-release that are still open, and none of them have gotten even a single response. They recently just suddenly got closed when F15 went EOL, no usual warning like they normally get, so I cloned them and opened them back up since the problems still exist.

Should I even have to say.. They are Gnome bugs. The only bug I have ever filed against Gnome that got a response was one that AdamW was talking about putting on the blocker list for F17.

[smr54]

Would one of you who has downloaded RC2 comment on whether /etc/sysconfig/network exists, and whether there are /etc/sysconfig/networks-scripts/ ifcfg files for other interfaces besides lo?

[hadrons123]

I think Adam is the only guy in fedora, who really listens to people and cares. Others are simply just busy!

[DBelton]

I agree. Adam does seem to really care about the users, and cares about how Fedora is heading. He does an impossible job, in my opinion.

smr54, I have about 2 minutes left on my RC2 download, then I'm going to try it out, so I can't answer your question at the moment. They weren't created with RC1, though, but I believe you already knew that. :D

Sighz.. For the first time since the Fedora project started, and even before that, since RHL 4.1, I have been looking at other distros. I kinda like the look of mageia, and if F18 doesn't pan out, I may look at it closer.

[hadrons123]

@smr
1. /etc/sysconfig/network doesn't exist.
2. /etc/sysconfig/networks-scripts/ has all the other interfaces. But I didn't check if everyone of them is working yet.

---------- Post added at 11:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:25 PM ----------

@Dbelton
i am usually put back and forth between arch and Fedora. Its easier for me to move to Arch. I know Arch has its own problems, but today it looks lot better.

One thing I forgot to ask, do we still have text based fedora installer for f18 or that's gone already?

[GoinEasy9]

RC2 boots to a dracut prompt. /dev/root does not exist. Sigh.

[hadrons123]

I think you got it wrong. You should have downloaded RC2 alpha not TC2.

[GoinEasy9]

Fixed it. Thanks.

[csillva]

I cannot for the life of me figure out the new partitioning tool. I've got a disk setup like so:

/dev/sda

/dev/sda1 - 20GB with Fedora 17
/dev/sda2 - 20 GB empty
/dev/sda3 - 250 GB home
/dev/sda4 - swap

All I want to do is say put root on /dev/sda2 and mount /dev/sda3 as home, use swap as swap. Instead, I'm clicking all over the screen, selecting disks, choosing continue, selecting something else, checking boxes that say let me do this myself, and when I actually get to a screen that I think is going to let me assign it a mount point, I can't tell what partition I'm assigning root to. And when I figured 'ah screw it, I'll just choose this and see what happens', what happens is it crashes.

It might be easier to just install a netinst of F17 and then dist-upgrade to 18. Is that possible?

[hadrons123]

Not sure if dist-upgrade tool is working. But the best option is try playing with a virtualbox or a spare hard disk, before you wipe your hard disk.
I did install on a spare hard disk. The anaconda was twitchy all along.

[nonamedotc]

Installation in VM works without issues if you do not try to change anything. I am yet to try any sort of customization on Anaconda ....

I saw something else too ...

In the first boot screen, after entering "Full Name", username is generated. If you use tab to navigate, the username disappears. If you click on the field, it shows up when you start typing! Weird! ;)

[Holdolin]

Installation in VM works without issues if you do not try to change anything. I am yet to try any sort of customization on Anaconda ....

I saw something else too ...

In the first boot screen, after entering "Full Name", username is generated. If you use tab to navigate, the username disappears. If you click on the field, it shows up when you start typing! Weird! ;)

I noticed that too. If you click on the pswd box below it, the name will stay put. After having at leat gotten that far in abotu 4 installs, i noticed that little trick :P

[smr54]

@hadrons, thank you. But, (if you have time) please check which ones are in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripsts. There are several things in there, but I don't think they have the standard ifcfg-pp1p1 or whatever they choose to call it now--I think the only ifcfg one that you see will be for loopback.

[nonamedotc]

@hadrons, thank you. But, (if you have time) please check which ones are in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripsts. There are several things in there, but I don't think they have the standard ifcfg-pp1p1 or whatever they choose to call it now--I think the only ifcfg one that you see will be for loopback.

Yup!


# ls /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg*
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-lo

[smr54]

Thanks for the quick answer.

Well, the bug report says it will be fixed. Note that it will only affect folks who don't use the default NetworkManager, one reason I suspect there's almost no noise about it.

Honestly, if they decided to just stop doing it (although I suspect one reason /etc/sysconfig/network isn't showing up is because at present, in the installer, there's no host name set--note that they're still pre-alpha on this stuff, really, so that's not an issue at this point, AFAICT), it wouldn't affect too many Fedora users. Even those like myself who do make use of it can create it fairly easily.

[hadrons123]

Will be interesting to see what becomes of it.

My guess is it will be closed as WONTFIX or NOTABUG, but I hope I'm wrong on this.
NOTABUG

We have an explanation from chris lumens.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=856301
Outside of kickstart, individual package selection will not be coming back. First, package selection was always a lie. You could request packages be included or excluded from installation, but in the end anaconda would end up doing what it needed to do anyway. If you deselected a package that was required, you'd get it anyway. Second, our package selection UI has been completely different from that on the rest of the system since we started using PackageKit. This means the user had to learn two completely separate interfaces one of which was only useful for a very short time. Third, anaconda is a poor place to do package-level selection. There's not enough context for the user to decide what each package means and whether they want it or not, and no way to go about getting that information aside from having another computer present. We've also learned over time that people really just want to get the install done with and move on to using the computer. Fourth, package-level is really not how Fedora is organized anymore nor how we want to present it. Sure there's a bazillion packages in the system, but for the most part this is an implementation detail. We want to present Fedora as a complete, put-together base system to which you can add other groups to accomplish a task. That's what the current UI presents.

[Demz3]

i agree with Chris on both points there

[DBelton]

Well, mageia is now looking better and better. :(

After 15 years of RHL and Fedora, it appears I may be moving to another distro.

I really have to be able to configure the system how I want it to be. And with them taking the package customization out, it takes way too much time to do an install now.


Second, our package selection UI has been completely different from that on the rest of the system since we started using PackageKit. This means the user had to learn two completely separate interfaces one of which was only useful for a very short time.


Man is he assuming a lot. PackageKit was one of the POS packages I unchecked and didn't install.


We've also learned over time that people really just want to get the install done with and move on to using the computer.


Yes, this is true. But now it takes about 9 hours longer for me to get the system to the same state that I had right after the F17 install. So it takes much longer before I can moveon and use the computer.


ourth, package-level is really not how Fedora is organized anymore nor how we want to present it. Sure there's a bazillion packages in the system, but for the most part this is an implementation detail. We want to present Fedora as a complete, put-together base system to which you can add other groups to accomplish a task. That's what the current UI presents.


This would be nice if the complete put together package was all good. But they throw trash in there like Gnome 3 shell, Evolution, Empathy, PackageKit, etc... Without the options to customize it how I wish, I'm better off using Windows 7. Serious. If I wanted a "cookie cutter" system, Windows would be a better choice.

[Demz3]

Well, mageia is now looking better and better. :(

After 15 years of RHL and Fedora, it appears I may be moving to another distro.

I really have to be able to configure the system how I want it to be. And with them taking the package customization out, it takes way too much time to do an install now.

have fun with urpmi

[hadrons123]

Well, mageia is now looking better and better. :(

After 15 years of RHL and Fedora, it appears I may be moving to another distro.

I really have to be able to configure the system how I want it to be. And with them taking the package customization out, it takes way too much time to do an install now.
Arch is customizable. The AUR is a mess, but still if one can handle it, it wont be much of problem.

Or the other option is going cent or Scientific way!

[nonamedotc]

Arch is customizable. The AUR is a mess, but still if one can handle it, it wont be much of problem.

Or the other option is going cent or Scientific way!

I guess it might be personal preference. But, after using arch for about 3 months, I gave up on it! It felt like I was doing more system maintenance rather than doing work! Fedora for me seems to be perfect fit! I guess F18 might be more work than F17 though to set up how I want ... :)

I am curious about your statement though - what do you mean by AUR is a mess?

[hadrons123]

1.aur -> amateur package maintainers = poor package quality.

2. not much of code review.

3. Lot of orphaned packages

4. The nature (rolling release with upto date devel tools) of Arch linux is in itself makes it difficult to get packages in AUR to build all the time. There is a valid reason why fedora freezes the package management tools.

---------- Post added at 08:25 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:20 AM ----------

I guess it might be personal preference. But, after using arch for about 3 months, I gave up on it! It felt like I was doing more system maintenance rather than doing work! Fedora for me seems to be perfect fit! I guess F18 might be more work than F17 though to set up how I want ... :)

The way we are playing with TCs,RCs of F18 alpha, is way more system maintenance, I guess!

[Yellowman]

Well, mageia is now looking better and better. :(

After 15 years of RHL and Fedora, it appears I may be moving to another distro.

I really have to be able to configure the system how I want it to be. And with them taking the package customization out, it takes way too much time to do an install now.



Man is he assuming a lot. PackageKit was one of the POS packages I unchecked and didn't install.



Yes, this is true. But now it takes about 9 hours longer for me to get the system to the same state that I had right after the F17 install. So it takes much longer before I can moveon and use the computer.



This would be nice if the complete put together package was all good. But they throw trash in there like Gnome 3 shell, Evolution, Empathy, PackageKit, etc... Without the options to customize it how I wish, I'm better off using Windows 7. Serious. If I wanted a "cookie cutter" system, Windows would be a better choice.


The time it took you to write your rant you could have written a kickstart file to customize F18. :)

P.S It only take me 2-3 hours to setup my install so your either really slow or have a really complex system.

[DBelton]

Where do I put the kickstart file on a machine not attached to a network, wiped hard drive and only a burned DVD to install from?

[Yellowman]

Where do I put the kickstart file on a machine not attached to a network, wiped hard drive and only a burned DVD to install from?

I believe it's possible to use USB as well

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart#Other_kickstart_options:

[DBelton]

I guess I could put it on a floppy :)

But a kickstart file takes as long to create as going in and adding/removing packages after the install. It would save time if I wanted the same configuration on more than one machine, though.

[Yellowman]

I guess I could put it on a floppy :)

But a kickstart file takes as long to create as going in and adding/removing packages after the install. It would save time if I wanted the same configuration on more than one machine, though.

Use your F17 ks , look in /root
You may need to edit.

[DBelton]

except that a lot of the packages that were on the F17 DVD aren't on the F18 DVD.. For example, thunderbird isn't on the F18 DVD. I don't even see gparted on the F18 DVD, either.

Will it cancel the install if I have packages in a kickstart file that aren't on the DVD?

[Yellowman]

except that a lot of the packages that were on the F17 DVD aren't on the F18 DVD.. For example, thunderbird isn't on the F18 DVD. I don't even see gparted on the F18 DVD, either.

Will it cancel the install if I have packages in a kickstart file that aren't on the DVD?

It will do the same as yum

[ah7013]

have fun with urpmi

urpmi is excellent imo.

[Demz3]

urpmi is excellent imo.
when i tried it back in Mandrake8.0 i hated it

[ah7013]

Well, mageia is now looking better and better. :(

we still have package customisation in our installer :)

[ah7013]

when i tried it back in Mandrake8.0 i hated it

I don't know what it was like back then but I haven't had any problems with it now. Anything in particular you disliked about it?

[smr54]

The time it took you to write your rant you could have written a kickstart file to customize F18. :)



No, it wouldn't. If not familiar with kickstart and not running a GUI, one would first have to google it, or work from their old one, which might or might not be applicable.

I've heard this argument before, and don't consider it a reasonable answer. There's plenty of reasons a kickstart file, whether personal or commercial, is far less convenient, for partitioning, networking or anything else that the gradual direction of Fedora removes from the installer. To me, saying, Create a kickstart file, is like saying, It's not my fault, it's _their_ fault (for not making a kickstart file), when what has happened is that you have changed something to make said kickstart file necessary. Hrrm, that was horrendous syntax, but hopefully, more or less clear.

On the other hand, in this case, the installer is pre-alpha, so it's not yet time to get upset. My own preference is always for the minimal install, so package selection isn't that important to me.


Lastly, though, I have to reiterate what I've said before--the systems that do allow you more customization at installation time are far less popular than Fedora, Ubuntu (desktop), Windows, and Apple, all of which take away a lot of choice from the user.

[DBelton]

By the way...

Have I just overlooked it or is there now no option to set up if your system uses UTC or local time? I saw the time zone configuration, but no option to select UTC or local.

I haven't seen it on any of the F18 installs, not in anaconda or firstboot either one.

[smr54]

I would guess you can edit /etc/adjtime, but that's just a guess.

[DBelton]

Yep, I have already done that. But I was just wondering if I had overlooked the setting some place during the install. It used to be in anaconda, on the screen where you select the time zone, but I didn't see it in the new anaconda.

[smr54]

I hadn't paid much attention yet, and didn't even notice that till you'd mentioned it.

[DBelton]

I guess I didn't just overlook it. It was intentionally taken out. :(


Martin Sivák 2012-09-12 13:50:36 EDT

This should still be possible using kickstart. The removal was intentional.

If I remember correctly we default to UTC unless Windows was detected.


So, once again, useful configuration options were taken out.

But still, if it is supposed to default to UTC unless Windows was detected, then it's still a bug, because it defaulted to LOCAL here, and no Windows at all on this machine. Even if it defaults to LOCAL when Windows is detected, it would be wrong on my machines that run Windows since those system clocks are set to UTC as well.

I am being serious. A different distro is looking better and better. :(

[Yellowman]

I guess I didn't just overlook it. It was intentionally taken out. :(



So, once again, useful configuration options were taken out.

But still, if it is supposed to default to UTC unless Windows was detected, then it's still a bug, because it defaulted to LOCAL here, and no Windows at all on this machine. Even if it defaults to LOCAL when Windows is detected, it would be wrong on my machines that run Windows since those system clocks are set to UTC as well.

I am being serious. A different distro is looking better and better. :(


Well you wouldn't be the first fedoraforum staff to not use fedora, I used SL6 for months till they forked gnomes-hell. :)

[DBelton]

Oh well, during all of this messing around with Fedora 18, I have been forgetting some very wise advice told to me years ago.

"Never blame on malice what can easily be explained by incompetence."

[Demz3]

expect a RC3 soonish

[Dan]

"Never blame on malice what can easily be explained by incompetence." <..:lol:..> Uh, huh!

That being said ... Is it actually worth burning this (LiveCD) to disk yet, or should the average user wait until a few more bugs are (theoretically) squished?

[Demz3]

Dan

wait for RC3 dude. i'll post it when its out

[nonamedotc]

<..:lol:..> Uh, huh!

That being said ... Is it actually worth burning this (LiveCD) to disk yet, or should the average user wait until a few more bugs are (theoretically) squished?

Nah! "Wait a little while longer" would be my response :)

[Demz3]

nothin to see here

[smr54]

Apparently, even kickstarts are giving trouble as far as replacing the reduced functionality at least from text mode.



http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2012-September/110032.html

[Demz3]

i expect to see another slip in the Alpha. F18 is a total mess IMO. IMO they should push the Frozen packages into updates now or else F18 Alpha is gonna be one sloppy release. i just feel these " policies " or whatever they call them stinks. this RC3 is a dud unless they release all other updates to go onto the Alpha.

what i dont understand is, why ajax didnt build a mesa-9.0 for F18 or a Nouveau update for F18? but he did for F19? why wait for Beta or just after the Alpha to puish them. you wonder why people still use the blob driver

---------- Post added at 07:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:11 PM ----------

i just hope the Beta is better than the Alpha. cause i wouldnt even attempt to intall this in a VM let alone a production machine

---------- Post added at 08:20 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:24 PM ----------

yup, i just saw in irc, looks like a no-go for the alpha. so expect another slip ..this would have to be a world record for Fedora Project :D

---------- Post added at 08:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:20 PM ----------

AdamW

if you see this. i have a Nvidia Geforce 550ti 1 Gig Ram Vid card. RC1 booted fine for me without a problem. RC3 is crapola,

[hadrons123]

I accidentally(my fault though) hit the automatically partition the hard disk. Anaconada duly wiped my hard disk. Now I am doing recovery. The Disk partitoning method is the new anaconda is unintuitive. I read someone else was having trouble with partitioning too!. You cannot force a partition to be a primary partion in anaconda. I don't know why they removed that feature.

[DBelton]

I saw that bug mentioned a few weeks ago, Hadrons. They knew about it and the response I saw to it was basically "Oh well, people know it's a pre-release and that it can eat your data"

I couldn't get RC2 to use my existing partitioning, it pretty much forced me to repartition the drive. When I tried to do custom partitioning over the existing partitioning, the installer crashed (4 times in total) until I wiped the drive myself and then it would partition the drive.

I agree with Demz. This is the absolute sloppiest I have ever seen a Fedora release this close to Alpha.

In my opinion, the anaconda re-write may have been decent at one point, but now they are rushing around, hacking bits and pieces into it to fix bugs and it's going to be one of the biggest messes in the end.

So far, (I haven't tried RC3 yet, so I'm going by RC2), they can't even get the network set up, the system time is set wrong if your hardware clock is set to UTC (both times I installed RC2, it set mine to LOCAL and not UTC), Now there is a plymouth bug in RC2 where the screen goes black because it appears the monitor is being set to a mode it won't support, so you are sitting there with a blank monitor until the video driver gets loaded (That was fixed with the plymouth update in the repo, so it's probably fixed in RC3 as well)

Also a side note. If you want to use F18 for any audio/video that is pretty much out of the question at the moment as well. rpmfusion has a boat load of dependency problems on it's F18 packages. Cant even install vlc, or some of the gstreamer packages. Also their repo rpms are messed up for F18 currently. once of them enables the F19 repo. Rpmfusion appears to have changed how they are handling the branched and rawhide version now. They have a separate branched (for F18) and rawhide (for F19) repo definition rpm. Branched enables the updates-testing and rawhide enables the rawhide repos. You can manually edit the repo file and disable the rawhide and enable the updates-testing on the messed up definition, so that's not a big issue.

Edit:

So Dan.. to answer your question above.. WAIT!!! :D


Also, there is one thing I can't figure out. Why did they make setting up root user optional in anaconda. That should be mandatory before the installer will continue. That would have fixed all of the not being able to log in to a console after install bugs that I saw cropping up not long ago.

I believe (just my opinion here) that they took some things out of anaconda because they were going to be done in that new "first user experience" that Gnome dreamed up. But, anaconda should be totally separate from that first user crap or firstboot. Anaconda should set it up so you have a usable system even if those things don't get run. You may not have a user (other than root) set up, and you may not be able to log into a desktop, but you should have a fully functioning system otherwise.

[hadrons123]

@Dbelton
I didn't even try the RPMfusion.

I have the NTFS-3g installed. Is anyone else having issues with accessing NTFS drives?

[nonamedotc]

I couldn't get RC2 to use my existing partitioning, it pretty much forced me to repartition the drive. When I tried to do custom partitioning over the existing partitioning, the installer crashed (4 times in total) until I wiped the drive myself and then it would partition the drive.



Now that you mention it - I saw this too in the TCs. But ever since I started selecting automatic partitioning, it worked. The situation looks like this - "Take what we have to offer and you can start "using" system. Deviate from our established methods - you are at your own peril!" - i.e., just like windows! (TM) :Y

I am installing RC3 on VM with ALL default settings to see if it installs. Will try custom partitioning after this finishes.



So far, (I haven't tried RC3 yet, so I'm going by RC2), they can't even get the network set up, the system time is set wrong if your hardware clock is set to UTC (both times I installed RC2, it set mine to LOCAL and not UTC),

I still cannot enable network time on RC3. The settings screen proudly shows that RHEL ntp pools are working but anaconda is not letting me enable network time. :Y

---------- Post added at 07:42 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:39 AM ----------

Nope! No network time on First boot. Error!

Couldn't write either /etc/ntp.conf or /etc/sysconfig/network. Configuration unchanged

[hadrons123]

I did a live CD install and updated (huge update for an alpha) it and after restart, it ended by up with a dracut recovery shell.
There was an error regarding KEYMAP but even after I fixed it manually in the kernel command line, its just stuck at dracut.

[nonamedotc]

and by the way, what's up with this error that is there from TC3 (I think)

SELinux: Cannot find usage policy error is probably not in verbatim.

[DBelton]

I am still trying to figure out what the /usr/sbin/rhcrashkernel-param crap they are sticking in the kernel line is. The file doesn't even exist on my machine, so I can't look at it and see what it's for.

I also keep getting errors on boot saying it can't find a suitable selinux policy. I don't know if rebuilding the initramfs would fix that or not. It works and loads fine when it gets down to where it loads the full selinux policy.

Does anyone know if the /etc/sysconfig/i18n file is used on F18 or not? It's not being created on my system here. I am just wondering if this is another anaconda snafu.

Edit:
nonamedotc's error above looks like what I just mentioned I was getting :)

[nonamedotc]

O.K. I think I found one more issue. Not sure. Here it is.

Did anyone try to create encrypted partitions in anaconda? I just chose custom partition and checked "Encrypt" for / and swap. It started installing after "Continue". Did not ask for encryption passphrase.

@DBelton,
I will check when the installation finishes ...

[DBelton]

I haven't tried encrypted partitions yet. Just plain standard partitions are buggy enough for me! :lol:

I went into the custom partitioning, started creating my partitions. Set up a 1GB /boot a / and /swap, then my /boot disappeared from the list. I created a /home and still no /boot in the list. So, I created a 1GB /boot. In the list, I had /boot / /swap and /home. Well, when it created the partitions, it created 2 1GB partitions, mounted one as /boot and the other isn't even being used.

[nonamedotc]

Does anyone know if the /etc/sysconfig/i18n file is used on F18 or not? It's not being created on my system here. I am just wondering if this is another anaconda snafu.



Nope. Not here. I will try to change the language to something else and try installing. That might give more information.

Disk encryption does not work! It does not ask for passphrase and does not create encrypted partitions!

The bug remains where it is possible to have the system installed with NO administrator!

---------- Post added at 08:33 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:32 AM ----------

O.K. Encrypted partitions is not supposed to work!


[08:24] <nonamedotc> quick question - Has anyone tried whole disk encryption with new anaconda? Is it supposed to work?
[08:32] <kparal> nonamedotc: not yet
[08:32] <kparal> it's not yet supposed to work


---------- Post added at 08:47 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:33 AM ----------

I accidentally(my fault though) hit the automatically partition the hard disk. Anaconada duly wiped my hard disk. Now I am doing recovery. The Disk partitoning method is the new anaconda is unintuitive. I read someone else was having trouble with partitioning too!. You cannot force a partition to be a primary partion in anaconda. I don't know why they removed that feature.

Did you see this bug report? - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=855976

[DBelton]

nonamdeotc:

That is the bug report I was referring to above.. Thanks for the link :) But pay attention to comment # 5 in there..


Jesse Keating 2012-09-11 15:16:32 EDT

It's an alpha. We already warn people that it might eat their data. You have to accept your fate.

Blocking an alpha release because some user might be caught unaware that their data could be eaten, by ALPHA SOFTWARE is ridiculous.

No idea if my vote counts, but -1 blocker.


Shows what opinion the developers have of users.

Edit:

Comment # 9 is enlightening as well:


Jesse Keating 2012-09-11 17:20:56 EDT

You can mark it NTH if you want, but don't expect any code. You'd also have to get the translators to agree to breaking string freeze to introduce new strings (having string freeze prior to alpha, or even prior to beta seems pretty wrong to me).

[hadrons123]

@Dbelton
Looks like they are not even going to fix it in beta too!

@ nonamedotc
Thanks for the links .

another bug report for unable to access the NTFS drives.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=857107

[jpollard]

With this many failures I don't see how they could even all it "alpha".

Alpha is at least supposed to work, but with lots of bugs. This doesn't even install yet.

Might be the beginning of the end of Fedora... :(

[hadrons123]

I asked in Anaconda ML that if text based installer will be available about a month ago. They said its not ready.
I wonder how GUI based installation will work , leave alone the other post installation bugs.

I would be very happy to at least have a text based current arch linux type of netinstall CD.

[nonamedotc]

Edit:



You can mark it NTH if you want, but don't expect any code. You'd also have to get the translators to agree to breaking string freeze to introduce new strings (having string freeze prior to alpha, or even prior to beta seems pretty wrong to me).


Comment # 9 is enlightening as well:

Which great mind wrote the code that will wipe the hard disk without warning and then someone else says you cannot change it because we have a freeze?!

If this is not going to be fixed because of freeze, the problem is not going to be in alpha alone. The installer is going to eat the data even in Final! Sigh! :doh:

[Dan]

... the end of Fedora... :( <..:eek:..>

I'm thinking not. However, it certainly isn't a terrifically high spot in fedora's history, either. If anything, it may be the beginning of the end of fedora's long association with Gnome, and the mindset they (Gnome) brought to the table with them. But ... I really kinda doubt that, too.

[hadrons123]

I don't think this will end fedora either.
Actually Fedora is turning more into ubuntu(less user choice), but more unmanageable.

But I tried gnobuntu last week, I have to say ubiquity installer is slick. Alpha version is very good, even though they did not migrate to few newer packages in gnome.

[jpollard]

<..:eek:..>

I'm thinking not. However, it certainly isn't a terrifically high spot in fedora's history, either. If anything, it may be the beginning of the end of fedora's long association with Gnome, and the mindset they (Gnome) brought to the table with them. But ... I really kinda doubt that, too.

Hopefully.

So far though, F15/16/17 have been the worst Fedora releases ever seen. Things that worked, degraded. Degraded things quit working. And I started with FC 1 at work using Fedora (all of the tech engineers and researchers used it or RH/Solaris) - otherwise it was RH at work and Slackware at home. Been using Fedora at home for the last 10 years (about FC3). Each release was a definite improvement over the preceding release... until F15. F16 kvm would at least run F16 Gnome3... But F17 wouldn't upgrade in a kvm(had to do a full install - which wiped out my test users). Got it running... but not as well as F16. Had to drop NetworkManager (doesn't handle multiple networks + kvm very well). NM used to be usable... but it never did under F16 (VMs couldn't access internet for updates). Things worked as soon as I killed NM and started networks.

[DBelton]

With this many failures I don't see how they could even all it "alpha".

Alpha is at least supposed to work, but with lots of bugs. This doesn't even install yet.

Might be the beginning of the end of Fedora... :(

I have been installing right before the Alpha since around FC4 and this is definitely the buggiest version I have encountered. At least prior versions you were able to get the system installed and have a usable (although somewhat buggy) system.

I have noticed a major shift in the developers attitudes and mindsets in the past few years, and in my opinion, not a shift to the good. It's a "take what we are willing to give you and shut up" attitude.

What I think happened is that the developers that built linux and knew the inner workings have pretty much quit active development, and the ones left haven't a clue as to what is really going on with the system, but don't want anyone else to know, so they BS their way through it, patching up things as best as they can.

I really don't think this is the end for Fedora, though. Hopefully an awakening with a major turning point very soon in the future, but not the end (unless things progress without changing)


Oh, nonamedotc.. The freeze mentioned is just until the Alpha is released. Then that freeze is lifted. They put a freeze on right before each major milestone (Alpha, Beta, Final) so that images can be built without a constantly changing code base.

It has been interesting, though. Every bug I have filed against anaconda in F18 has been closed as NOTABUG with the exception of one. The one where it's not creating the network files in /etc/sysconfig was responded to saying it was fixed in master and left open. All other have been closed as NOTABUG.

[nonamedotc]

Oh, nonamedotc.. The freeze mentioned is just until the Alpha is released. Then that freeze is lifted. They put a freeze on right before each major milestone (Alpha, Beta, Final) so that images can be built without a constantly changing code base.



Oops! My mistake. Shouldn't be hasty! :)

[jpollard]

What I think happened is that the developers that built linux and knew the inner workings have pretty much quit active development, and the ones left haven't a clue as to what is really going on with the system, but don't want anyone else to know, so they BS their way through it, patching up things as best as they can.


Good point. And they also try to show off by how much their stuff counts by reinventing the wheel - poorly. The inappropriate optimizations is a key pointer. The combining multiple programs into one is another.

[DBelton]

Combining applications can be good... Up to a point, then it becomes one big behemoth that is impossible to maintain. (and with major security risks as well)

In this case, it appears there is one person behind it, but what is going to happen when he no longer wishes to maintain the code? Currently his ego prevents him from turning things over to someone else, so when he decides he doesn't want to do it any longer, there will be nobody that knows the inner workings.

I'm totally surprised that one of the developers hasn't decided to "autograph" the screens in their applications yet. :lol:

[nonamedotc]

Well, after the Go/No-Go meeting this afternoon, Alpha is a Go!

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2012-09-13/f18_alpha_gono-go_meeting.2012-09-13-19.00.html

[DBelton]

Yep. Just look at how many of the blockers listed that they changed the criteria to get passed. This is going to be the worst pre-release and that is definitely going to spill over into the release version.

I wonder how many of the people voting on the release are developers? Developers involved in the release and especially ones that have blocker bugs should not even have a vote.

It should be decided by Q-A and others involved, but not developers. A developer wants to push his project through and doesn't want to hear bad things about it.

Just look at how a lot of large businesses are run. The programmer does his coding and testing. Then when he feels it's ready, it is completely turned over to another group who tests it. Once it passes that, then it's turned over to yet another group that decides if it is ready to put into a production environment. Once the coding and testing is done, the developer pretty much turns it over to others and has no say in if it is accepted or rejected. If rejected, it goes back to the developer to be corrected and the cycle starts over.

But check this out


AGREED: it is agreed in principle that the relevant release criterion should be weakened so it only requires any one of the 'normal' UEFI boot paths to work, not several (adamw, 19:36:07)



AGREED: 848305 is rejected as a blocker on the basis that it only affects certain systems (so a conditional violation, so a judgment call) and appears to have a relatively simple and documentable workaround (adamw, 19:57:39)



AGREED: 856938 - RejectedBlocker - While this is a conditional violation of the F18 alpha release criteria, it was decided that the current success rates are enough for F18 alpha (tflink, 20:11:24)



AGREED: the 'local disk' requirement of criterion " The installer must be able to report failures to Bugzilla and local disk, with appropriate information included" is waived for F18 Alpha as the failure reporting tool does not currently have code for local disk reporting, and we do not think an Alpha release strictly requires this function (adamw, 20:34:32)


Then there are others where they say something was fixed, but not even tested.


Accepted Blockers, MODIFIED (tflink, 20:13:06)
This has been fixed in RC3 and will be moved to VERIFIED shortly (tflink, 20:13:46)

Accepted Blockers, ON_QA (tflink, 20:13:56)
this bug has been fixed, needs to be moved to VERIFIED. after enough karma, the update will be pushed to stable and this bug will be closed (tflink, 20:15:57)

Accepted Blockers, ON_QA (tflink, 20:16:13)
this is reported to be verified with RC3, move to VERIFIED once that is confirmed in bz (tflink, 20:17:28)
this has just been verified with RC3 -> move to VERIFIED (tflink, 20:18:35)


Not one blocker was stated as being fixed and tested.

What a crock.

[R3v0lut10nary]

I'm with DBelton on this last post. The other stuff, like inability to customize installation, doesn't bother me much. But some other things that are forced on me already by F17 (like EFI installation) are fairly annoying.

Is this going to continue? Are even more options and control going to be taken away, along with diminished quality, with each successive release?

With the decision to act as Gnome 3's flagship, Fedora team's judgement is already suspect. And it seems to be getting worse. Because at least it's easy to choose from an array of other desktop options.

---------- Post added at 06:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:03 PM ----------

Well you wouldn't be the first fedoraforum staff to not use fedora, I used SL6 for months till they forked gnomes-hell. :)

And how did you like it (SL6)?

[nonamedotc]

@Dbelton
Yeah - I was also disappointed with relaxing the criterea at every possible outlet! As for the voting, the devel team also votes in the Go/No-Go meeting along with the QA. If you had followed the meeting, it would seem as if could be seen that AdamW was reluctant in letting some of the blockers being designated as rejected blockers ...

Regardless, now that alpha will be out shortly (GA) - hopefully more people will test it and more bugs will be filed. More importantly, hopefully, most of these bugs will be fixed at least by beta ... sigh!

P.S. I have been around for only 3 releases now (15,16 & 17 - a novice!) - but even to me it looks like F18 is a rather bumpy ride :D

[Holdolin]

@Dbelton
Yeah - I was also disappointed with relaxing the criterea at every possible outlet! As for the voting, the devel team also votes in the Go/No-Go meeting along with the QA. If you had followed the meeting, it would seem as if AdamW was reluctant in letting some of the blockers being designated as rejected blockers ...

Regardless, now that alpha will be out shortly (GA) - hopefully more people will test it and more bugs will be filed. More importantly, hopefully, most of these bugs will be fixed at least by beta ... sigh!

P.S. I have been around for only 3 releases now (15,16 & 17 - a novice!) - but even to me it looks like F18 is a rather bumpy ride :D

Well honestly, from what i'm seing, it dosen't matter how many people test/file bugs seing as how so many are being called NOTABUG and it seems they are quite willing to change the release criteria to get the pile o' <insert explitive of your choice> that's currently on the table to the next milestone. My biggest concern with that is, what happens when the next milestone is release?

[Dan]

...what happens when the next milestone is release? *Sigh!*

The forum admins put in some serious overtime trying to sort the helpful stuff from the shrill howls of frustration and the raging tantrums of the unprepared and unaware. <..:(..>

[DBelton]

Well honestly, from what i'm seing, it dosen't matter how many people test/file bugs seing as how so many are being called NOTABUG and it seems they are quite willing to change the release criteria to get the pile o' <insert explitive of your choice> that's currently on the table to the next milestone. My biggest concern with that is, what happens when the next milestone is release?

It will be the same thing for the next milestone release because they just shot themselves in the foot.

The TC and RC candidates for Alpha were the last testing that will be done on anaconda until the TC and RC candidates for the Beta.

Yes, they release nightlies, but not many people get those, and they don't do DVD images in the nightlies.

So, they just lost a big testing phase. The Alpha is going to be released buggy as hell, and they won't get any more testing on those fixes until the Beta TC and RC candidates.

So they will scream and holler that the Beta criteria is too strict and they should relax them for anaconda, so it will be the same thing all over again.

Edit:

Looking back at my posts above, I notice I made an error. I stated that all the bugs I had filed against anaconda except one had been closed as NOTABUG. I was wrong. There was one more that was closed as a duplicate of another bug.. That one was closed as NOTABUG.