F14 on eeepc: good news, bad news

fredex · #1 5th September 2010, 02:57 AM

Not sure exactly whether to try to bugzilla or not,... my F14 alpha issues are all kind of vague, weird stuff that's hard to pin down.

I'm running an eeepc 901.

I've made a bootable usb using the liveusb creator. things kinda more or less work. specifically, the rt2860sta wireless works. for a while. then it quits. only way I found to make it work again is to reboot. the NM applet doesn't say it's disconnected, but it doesn't work.

when I try to run yum update (or the gui updater) it tries to update over 300 packages, runs for HOURS and HOURS (probably a combination of a slow computer and a slow USB flash drive). somewhere early in the downloads the wireless goes down so I have to plug in a wired network, then it proceeds. hours and hours (and hours) later it's still futzing around doing cleanups. I left it for a day and a half (I did say it was slow) where it seemed to be stuck, still saying it was cleaning up but no visible activity I could find.

gave up, rebooted. now the flash drive won't boot.

ok, so using a different approach I did a fresh install on the usb flash drive--boot up the live CD and choose "install to hard drive". choose the flash drive. fine. installs. reboots. (I've also actually done a real install onto the usb flash drive with F13 beta, which worked fine, so I believe this method is legitimate.)

same problems. after a bit of network activity wireless goes down. never mind, just use wired network. trying to run all the updates takes forever (and ever, amen). may or may not ever complete. resulting system either won't boot, or when it does, no network is enabled. can't start network, only device is 'lo'.

went around this 3 or 4 times before giving up. tried the LXDE spin, just for fun. no difference.

Good news is that the built in rt2860sta driver works fine, for a while, which in F13 it never did at all.

tried using yum update with a list of things to update, by installing 25 or 30 at a time to see if I could get it updated in chunks, since doing all 330 of them didn't work. after the second batch, that was the time a reboot had no visible network.

I'd like to assist by reporting bugs against all this, but it's a little hard for me to find concrete things to report, here.

Anyone else seen such problems? Or suggestions for dealing with them?

BenderRodriguez · #2 5th September 2010, 03:29 AM

If you are trying to install a system to a USB flash drive then i can say only one thing, you are mad...

You will not only hose it due to wear (unless you use ext2 ) though having it on a usb flash drive is still mad and slooooooooooooooow.

You can search for problems by issuing for example dmesg in console.

fredex · #3 5th September 2010, 03:33 AM

mad, perhaps. but the point wasn't to have a usable system for long-term use. I just wanted to play with F14 and see how things worked, without having to hose the existing f13 installation.

and I used ext4 on the flash drive.

BenderRodriguez · #4 5th September 2010, 02:59 PM

I should say sorry for calling you mad so i am saying it: I AM SORRY FOR CALLING YOU MAD.

But it is not a good idea to use an Alpha system like Fedora 14 Alpha and install it on a usb flash drive, it will be both VERY slow and practically unusable unless that usb flash drive has some good read/write speeds though it doesn't matter since latency on usb flash drives is quite substantial. I'd recommend using some usb drive but i recommend a rotational disk or maybe an ssd (though the old ssd's are crap from what i remember).

mwesten · #5 5th September 2010, 03:25 PM

I have F13 installed on a USB HDD. It's not exactly a speed demon, but works fine and is entirely usable. All updates installed too.

For F14 Alpha, I concur. I picked up the Live CD for a peek myself and put it on a flash drive. Tried a USB HDD first, but got a boot failure. In any case, It seemed to be running OK until I left it alone for a few minutes. I'm guessing that it went into the screensaver and couldn't come back... Perhaps running it "Live" just needs a bit more stability than it has right now. Of course, I'm sure what they really need most is for people to install it, keep up with the changes, and help to get it there.

fredex · #6 5th September 2010, 05:46 PM

Bender:

No worries, no need to apologize. I didn't take "mad" as an insult!

I realize that a usb flash drive is going to be dog slow, I probably shouldn't have put quite as much emphasis on the slowness. my main point was that after the lengthy waits bizarre things kept happening.

I'm thinking of picking up a cheap USB drive just for such playing. I've got a 500 GB usb drive now, but I have stuff on it and don't feel like backing it up (to network storage) so I can hack at it.

BenderRodriguez · #7 5th September 2010, 06:03 PM

I also have an USB drive (rotational) and i made a separate partition for such stuff though i only keep system rescue cd in case something happens with my system

I am personally primarily using a USB flash drive to boot live cd's or fedora 13 dvd (after making a succesful bootable usb flash drive i make a dd image to easily put it on in the future). It is definitely easier nowadays to make a bootable usb drives since the introduction of hybrid isos