BetaTest Cadidates Available

[Dan]

Third try? Ooooohkay. Once you're done deleting that one, too ...

http://www.bodhilinux.com/

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[DBelton]

Thanks Dan

The F18 installer has been nothing but a big PITA for me. Once it is installed, it runs pretty well, though. I am still running where I installed the pre-alpha without many hiccups. About the only major bug I have run into was for a week or so, systemd and selinux were fighting, and services couldn't be enabled/disabled, but that's been fixed now.

I guess it's a good thing I have a big stack of spare drives to experiment with

[smr54]

Well, as I always say, If at first you don't succeed....then skydiving and bomb disposal are poor career choices.

nothing to see here

[DBelton]

Thanks Demz!

I'm going to give Beta TC3 a try since I couldn't get TC2 to work right for me.

I don't know what Fedora's reasoning is to disable the root user, but, the installer should create some type of admin user. Either root, or a regular user with admin privileges. By not having the installer create some type of admin user, there are going to quite a few reports of people not being able to get into the system after installation. Depending upon firstboot to create the admin user isn't good enough, either. the installer itself should make certain that there is a user with admin rights.

[smr54]

What I've found, with the last TC, was that after installation started, I would get a dialog where I could create a root user--again, this was choosing minimal install.

[DBelton]

What I have found.. Beta TC3 is much worse than the Alpha was.

I am back to firstboot not running.. It wasn't even installed as part of the packages.

I did get the root user set up, but for some reason it let me enter a password less than 7 characters, then just promplty ignored it without telling me. I was able to boot into single mode and change it after the install was done, though.

Partitioning is a bad nitemare. I had 8 partitions defined on my drive, a bios_boot, a 2GB for swap, then I had four 50GB partitions, and a 100GB then the rest of the space in the final partition.

The partition spoke listed the 4 50GB partitions, but I had no way of knowing which one was which. I just had to take a wild guess at which partition I was assigning to / and which one I was assigning to /home.

Then after installing the packages, it hung at configuring installed system, and sat there for over an hour while I was eating dinner.

So, there wasn't a usable system....

Second try...

Everything went better, except it wouldn't clear the partitions that I used for my first try above. It let me assign them, but gave me no way to format them.

So, when it went to install packages... All I got was blah blah package already installed and latest version..

Still no firstboot installed or run when I rebooted...

soooo.... Third try...

deleted all the files it had previously installed to / before I started the install...

Everything went fine..

installed packages...

Still no firstboot installed or run...
No user set up (due to firstboot not being installed) but could sign in as root and create user..

/etc/sysconfig/network and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* not created (they were on my first attempt above, but created wrong. It created the files with what anaconda detected, not what I manually changed it to.)

Since the ifcfg-* files weren't created, I had no network connection since this machine is on a network without DHCP, so it must have a static network address assigned.

Still no way to set hostname in anaconda

So far, my recommendation to anyone is not to install F18. It's a piece of crap that in my opinion isn't even Alpha, yet.

i agree with you on the fact f18 isnt ready, i dont believe this new Anaconda will be finished till sometime in the F19 cycle

[DBelton]

I am pretty much in agreement that Anaconda won't be finished for F18.. I don't believe it was ever intended to be. Some features were postponed unitl F19, I believe.

But, the basics that must be finished for it to be a usable installer aren't even close to being ready yet.

I believe they shot themselves in the foot when they relaxed the criteria for Alpha. It meant less testing on those features, so, they aren't ready now for Beta, either.

Edit:
I wonder if it's too late for them to revert to the old Anaconda for F18. I'll bet it is.

Really the biggest issues I had were with the custom partitioning, and firstboot not being installed. The rest were little glitches that are easly worked around if they happen.

I was looking back to try to find out what caused the problems on my last install, but strangely, I have no anaconda log files on my drive. There is no /var/log/anaconda which usually contains the logs files.

[AdamW]

Originally Posted by smr54

Well, as I always say, If at first you don't succeed....then skydiving and bomb disposal are poor career choices.

on the other hand, we welcome you into Fedora QA with open arms =)

[DBelton]

Fedora QA is probably more dangerous than bomb disposal or skydiving

[AdamW]

"I was looking back to try to find out what caused the problems on my last install, but strangely, I have no anaconda log files on my drive. There is no /var/log/anaconda which usually contains the logs files."

That's a consequence of the bug where it hangs at the end of installation. The step where it copies the logs to the installed system comes right after where it hangs...so that doesn't happen. The hang happens late enough that the installed system is pretty much fine, but this is one of the few things that it breaks. The bug for that is https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=862801 , it's being worked on.

What package set exactly are you installing, that firstboot isn't being included? I've done two test installs of TC3 myself so far and firstboot was installed and worked fine each time. We have multiple reports from Alpha and all Beta TCs that firstboot runs. The locale bug caused it to crash with TC1 and TC2 if you used a non-English locale, but that's all that's known.

I don't want to sound pissy, but honestly, it's pretty frustrating for people to be drawing quality conclusions from TC/RC builds. Remember, with most projects you'd never see these damn builds. They are very very inside baseball. For many releases they weren't available outside the RH firewall. They are part of the development/QA process. It's just flat _wrong_ to draw quality conclusions from them. Draw conclusions from the officially released builds, not the validation test composes.

"I believe they shot themselves in the foot when they relaxed the criteria for Alpha. It meant less testing on those features, so, they aren't ready now for Beta, either."

Again, this is inaccurate. In several ways. The criteria were adjusted to be appropriate to the design of the installer in F18. these were not temporary changes to allow Alpha to be released; as I've already said, if we were doing that, we'd have done it three flipping weeks earlier and released the Alpha without a delay, wouldn't we? They are permanent changes to the criteria to make the criteria make sense in the context of the new installer design. The old wording simply was not in any way applicable to the new installer. It does not use the design that the old criteria explicitly referred to.

There wasn't 'less testing' of custom partitioning (which I believe you're referring to) in Alpha, exactly. It was more the case that the custom partitioning code simply wasn't testable in Alpha. It was utterly busted. But what's important to realize is that custom partitioning has never been required to work until Final. We would happily have shipped F17 Alpha, F16 Alpha, F15 Alpha or any other Alpha build with busted custom partitioning code. It's not an Alpha requirement and never has been.

[DBelton]

I was installing the Xfce desktop, with just about all of the other package groups that are available with the Xfce desktop.

The firstboot package wasn't even installed at all.

[AdamW]

ahhh. You just jogged my memory. That's:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=863886

I just remembered reading that earlier today. Silly bug with how the installed package set gets calculated when you switch desktops.

so firstboot is only installed when you install Gnome?