BetaTest Cadidates Available

[AdamW]

smr54: nonamedotc: so, it's kind of a messy area. For a start there is a difference between live install and non-live, here. The non-live case is more straightforward. anaconda kind of expects to have a network connection even if you're doing a DVD install: it will try and bring up a wired connection via DHCP if there is one, at start of install. if it can't, it will show the network configuration screen *before* you see the main hub, with the intent that you configure a network connection there.

if you work it out there are several cases there: a system with a DHCP-enableable wired connection where you should just wind up at the hub with a working network with no configuration required, a system with static networking so you have to configure the IP address etc at the pre-hub config screen, a system with wireless so you have to configure the wireless connection at the pre-hub config screen.

Then with live it's different again, because a) live installs can't really use a network connection for anything but updates.img anyway and b) you can configure the network outside of the installer. I'm not sure what's actually implemented for lives, but I think the design should be that you just never see anaconda's network configuration when booted live, it just confuses things. I'll check in on that.

For clarity it would be best if we're all testing the non-live case, and it would be really useful if you can say exactly what network connection _is actually being used_ - wired/DHCP, wired/static, or wireless - and whether you saw the pre-hub network config screen.

I know there was a bug where if you're using a wireless connection, you have to set the passphrase _and then select the connection again_ before it actually came up. you _may_ be seeing that. I'll have to poke at it a bit myself and see if I can make sense of all the use cases.

[nonamedotc]

For the sake of additional clarification:

All my testing has been done using either the (x86_64 always) netinstall image or DVD image - mostly netinstall. I realized that downloading 4 GB DVD images every time was taking too much time.

All my network installation woes have been with DHCP. Thankfully, in my experience, wired connections have ALWAYS worked with anaconda. Wireless connection - Anaconda has liked the wireless connections I have access to just once so far (which I have added as a comment in bugzilla - 855526) - WPA2 personal.

The "closest mirror" issue appears always (for me) - even when I am using wired connection and the hub shows "connected" when it appears for the first time.

I will make sure I include all the information henceforth!

Edit:

I left out a word and it kind of changed what I wanted to convey!

[smr54]

Ok, for me---when doing it in a VM, I don't believe I even saw a configuration dialog--in the original guest configuration, there is one wired connection. In that case, network install proceeds as it should.

On the two laptops, in all cases, it presented a network configuration dialog, showing that the ethernet was connected. (I didn't use wireless in the installation). On the right, it shows that the wired connection is connected, and gives the IP address. I just hit continue. (In a few other attempts, I tried hitting configure and also turning wireless off, but in all cases, it still exhibited the same behavior we've mentioned.)

In all cases, I've been doing netinstall.iso, x86_64.

In all cases, it's a wired, DHCP connection. I just doublechecked--in the VirtualBox install, where the guest is configured with one ethernet (DHCP) interface and nothing else, there is no network configuration dialog and the downloading from closest mirror requires no intervention--that is, after clicking the I accept my fate button, it goes to the screen where one chooses software and so on. It downloads software from closest mirror with no user intervention.

[AdamW]

smr54: that seems odd. If it was able to bring the wired connection up by DHCP successfully, I don't see why it'd show you the pre-hub config screen. I'm pretty sure it doesn't for me, and it's only supposed to when it can't actually get a connection. Could you file a bug on this, with the details from comment #138, and logs from /tmp? Thanks!

[nonamedotc]

AdamW: I just played around with this now.

I took the exact setup - booting from netinstall USB (created using dd) on my laptop with wired connection via DHCP - and booted repeatedly till the hub screen.

The closest mirror selection happening automatically seems purely random! I tried this 6 times so far. I got the pre-hub "connect to network" box came up all 6 times although it was showing "Connected" every time.

On the other hand, "Closest mirror" was selected automatically only twice or thrice. Other times, "Nothing selected" was shown in Installation source ==> "closest mirror issue". (Select "Closest mirror", does not work, select something else, go back and choose "Closest mirror" again, works!).

I would like to file a bug report - but what do I file it as ? What should I even include in the bug report?

[smr54]

Hrrm, Ok, just did it again in an effort to get you tmp logs. And... it didn't do it. Tried twice and in both cases, went right to the hub stuff, automatically downloading metadata from closest mirror.

Network issue? Hardware issue? And...it shows all interfaces, that is, if I go to a console and do ip add sh it shows both the wireless card (in a DOWN state) and the ethernet (connected with an address received through DHCP).

I was reproducing it easily today. I'll try twice more and if I don't get anything, I'm going to give up on trying to reproduce it.

OK, just tried two more times and it's working without problem (and not showing me a network config dialog.) Maybe it needed a warmup? <shrug>

In my case, the showing of the networking dialog and the issue with it not seeing closest mirror were connected.

ADDED afterwards

OK, this is almost funny. I reproduced once, tried again, and no go. So, should I file a bug along the lines of Hey, sometimes, this happens?

At this point, unless a lot of others start reporting it, I'm going to consider it some sort of minor, sometimes occurs but easily fixed issue.

Thanks.

[nonamedotc]

Looks like based on our experiences, it is extremely finicky - although not a major problem. Since, if you enable closest mirror finally, installation works without issues - no matter what. Right?

Strange indeed! As I said earlier in my post above, I would not even know what to file this as?!

[AdamW]

File against anaconda. It sounds like it's some sort of race condition in bringing up the network, to me. I'll talk to the devs about it, and see if I can reproduce here with multiple boots...

[AdamW]

nonamedotc: in your case there seem to be two problems - I'm not sure why it's bringing up the pre-hub network config screen at all since you have a DHCP-able wired connection, and then you hit the intermittent problem where source shows as 'nothing selected'. Those are probably two different bugs.

[smr54]

Well, to sum up for those who have been following....

My experience, using a netinstall.iso and minimal install--still slightly buggy. Things I've run into:

Install aborted a couple of times--this could just be my hardware, or some other factor, such as network interruption, I didn't really investigate as I could not reproduce it. I saw on the testing list that some people have had the installation abort on VMs, possibly because Anaconda was having issues with 8GB drives, misreading available space.

Partitioning will default to LVM and it is not obvious. You have to change the default of Automatic Partitioning, then, in the next screen expand the Partition Scheme Configuration (it has a plus sign, click the plus sign). When you do, you will see that it's set to LVM, a drop down box gives you the options of plain or BTFS. Note that in the next screen, when you do the actual partitioning, it will not give you any indication of file system or whether or not it's an LVM.

There are many reports of people accidentally deleting existing partitions, or it choosing the wrong partition, so if you're putting this on a machine with something important on it, be very careful. I was able to do it without major problems, but the risk is there.

It will put grub in the MBR, there's no option to choose otherwise. I'm not sure if this will change or not, but if you're multi-booting, then hopefully, you know how to change it back to the grub you want to use, or at least add your other systems.

Lastly, the network issue that Adam, nonamedotc (which I keep pronouncing in my head as a not a medic, but anyway) and myself have been discussing. At times (not always), and apparently only on systems with more than one possible network connection, at the selection screen, the Installation Source icon may have a ! and information that there is no source selected. If you go into it, choose http:// from the dropdown box and type in anything--it could be benderisgreat.com for Futurama fans, then click done when you go back, it will try to find that. It won't be able to, and the ! will reappear. Click it again, this time choose closest mirror, and click done and it should, this time find it.

Aside from the above, the installation itself seems to go smoothly, save for the sometime abort. If it aborts try again. I mentioned that some folks on the testing list were having issues with VMs of 8 GB, but for myself, letting VirtualBox give the 8GB default, I had no problems.

Once installed, I was able to add the programs I want, including multimedia from rpmfusion, flash, and java without any problems. Haven't taken it for any real test runs, but it seems to run without crashing. So, for my needs at least (but I don't use Gnome or NetworkManager, two frequent points of failure) it's more or less ready, though one has to work a bit for the installation.

[nonamedotc]

Once installed, I was able to add the programs I want, including multimedia from rpmfusion, flash, and java without any problems. Haven't taken it for any real test runs, but it seems to run without crashing. So, for my needs at least (but I don't use Gnome or NetworkManager, two frequent points of failure) it's more or less ready, though one has to work a bit for the installation.

I agree! Once installed, F18 works splendidly! I have not had a single crash of any application so far. I have install texlive-2012, octave, vlc, mplayer, flash, openJDK, etc. Pretty much everything works without problems. The system is responsive - I would confidently say that F18 is more stable than F17 was at the same stage in my hands. Of course, you have to somehow get it installed though

[DBelton]

True, once installed, F18 is a pretty smooth running OS. Mine has been running here since the pre-alpha without much of a problem at all. Biggest issue I have run into was a broken dependency here and there in the repo when I tried to update, and even those were fixed fairly quickly. (better than the ones in F17 that have been broken for over a month.. like gcstar)

[bennachie]

My experience has been much the same - Anaconda in TC7 is just about workable, although clunky and not yet entirely intuitive in its operation but, once installed, F18 is pretty good. I guess that the usual tedious hassle of setting up printers in Fedora is just the price you pay for being closer to the bleeding edge (OK, once you've dug around and installed all the usual suspects, it works smoothly enough - but why not at least create a supplementary printing meta-package?

I do have one question - is there a simple workaround for the changed security arrangements which completely block you from installinig unsigned RPMs? I have had no problem installing various useful packages in this way in previous versions of Fedora, and don't appreciate the "nanny-state" approach to such matters extending to F18 (it's bad enough to have to deal with a similar tendency from Canonical).

[DBelton]

Completely block installing unsigned packages? I haven't run into that one. I have several unsigned packages installed here and just used the --nogpgcheck option in yum to install them.

[AdamW]

Well, to sum up for those who have been following....

My experience, using a netinstall.iso and minimal install--still slightly buggy. Things I've run into:

Install aborted a couple of times--this could just be my hardware, or some other factor, such as network interruption, I didn't really investigate as I could not reproduce it. I saw on the testing list that some people have had the installation abort on VMs, possibly because Anaconda was having issues with 8GB drives, misreading available space.

If you're not doing so already, _please_, any time anaconda crashes, file the crash through the reporting tool you're offered. It's easy to do - all you have to do is feed it your bugzilla ID and password, and provide a short description of what you were doing when it crashed. The tool takes care of attaching all appropriate logs. Often, just the info the crash reporting tool provides is enough for anaconda devs to fix the bugs. This is probably the single most useful avenue we have for finding and fixing major bugs in anaconda, so please file them all. If it's a dupe, that will be detected, so don't worry that you might be duplicating an existing report.

Partitioning will default to LVM and it is not obvious. You have to change the default of Automatic Partitioning, then, in the next screen expand the Partition Scheme Configuration (it has a plus sign, click the plus sign). When you do, you will see that it's set to LVM, a drop down box gives you the options of plain or BTFS. Note that in the next screen, when you do the actual partitioning, it will not give you any indication of file system or whether or not it's an LVM.

This is slightly off. When you talk about 'the next screen' you're talking about custom partitioning, which you _only_ get if you check the checkbox that says something like 'let me customize partitioning'. If you check that checkbox, the setting of the LVM/ext4/btrfs dropdown becomes completely irrelevant, it doesn't matter. The dropdown is only relevant if you _don't_ go through custom partitioning, and leave anaconda to do the partitioning for you. Maybe we should somehow 'disappear' or greyout the dropdown when you hit the checkbox, to make this clearer.

In custom partitioning you are always basically starting from scratch - the existing state of the disks. Custom partitioning _does_ "give you any indication of file system or whether or not it's an LVM", in the right hand pane when you have a partition selected, if you click on the + next to 'Customize...'. It shows and lets you pick the device type (standard, LVM, btrfs, RAID) and filesystem.

There are many reports of people accidentally deleting existing partitions, or it choosing the wrong partition, so if you're putting this on a machine with something important on it, be very careful. I was able to do it without major problems, but the risk is there.

I haven't really seen much like this since the Alpha. I think some people are still a bit confused by the custom part UI, possibly, but I haven't seen it outright do something different from what it _says_ it's going to do, yet (except that btrfs and lvm sizing can get a bit wonky).

It will put grub in the MBR, there's no option to choose otherwise. I'm not sure if this will change or not, but if you're multi-booting, then hopefully, you know how to change it back to the grub you want to use, or at least add your other systems.

See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=872826 . The plan here is to allow you to change the behaviour with kernel parameters - one for 'install bootloader to / or /boot partition', and possibly one for 'do not do any bootloader installation at all'.

Aside from the above, the installation itself seems to go smoothly, save for the sometime abort. If it aborts try again. I mentioned that some folks on the testing list were having issues with VMs of 8 GB, but for myself, letting VirtualBox give the 8GB default, I had no problems.

It'll vary a bit depending on how much RAM your VM has, as the swap size anaconda decides on is related to the RAM size. With a 1GB VM I generally reckon on 6GB as the smallest safe size for the hard disk on a standard GNOME install, but that's not F18-specific, just my experience over time.

Once installed, I was able to add the programs I want, including multimedia from rpmfusion, flash, and java without any problems. Haven't taken it for any real test runs, but it seems to run without crashing. So, for my needs at least (but I don't use Gnome or NetworkManager, two frequent points of failure) it's more or less ready, though one has to work a bit for the installation.

I find 18 very solid for actual use atm, been running it on my desktop since pre-Alpha. I don't use any proprietary drivers, though. I use Flash from the .tar.gz provided by Adobe, rather than any repo (I find packaged flash to be more trouble than it's worth, when ultimately it's just a single file in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins...)