Installation stalling help

[AndyHardy]

Hi forums, linux newbie here having a torrid time trying to install fedora 16. I have a PC running fedora 12 (single OS, no windows on a new hard drive). The PC is an elderly device, pentium 4 dual core processor, 32 bit (I think). I have tried to start from live disk images, but the boot up (from live cd or install cd) always stalls sometime after it's finished checking the hardware. Could someone please tell me what on earth is going on. I have left the machine on for 20 minutes with it stalled, so I think I can say it has stalled - unless installing fedora should be left to run overnight or something.

Is it even possible to run fedora 16 on an 8 year old P4 based PC?

I hope someone can stop me from going bald here!


Cheers

Andy

[goodfella]

Originally Posted by AndyHardy

Is it even possible to run fedora 16 on an 8 year old P4 based PC?

Andy

One of my compile farm machines is that age and it does fine.

Get yourself the iso image for FC16 and burn a DVD. Install the DVD and
do not request any remote repositories. Also choose "graphics desktop"
when installing.

The machine I mention above has a P4 single core and has installed Linux
from RH 5.2 to todays releases.

[nonamedotc]

Originally Posted by AndyHardy

[ ... ]

The PC is an elderly device, pentium 4 dual core processor, 32 bit (I think). I have tried to start from live disk images, but the boot up (from live cd or install cd) always stalls sometime after it's finished checking the hardware. Could someone please tell me what on earth is going on. I have left the machine on for 20 minutes with it stalled, so I think I can say it has stalled - unless installing fedora should be left to run overnight or something.
[ ... ]

Just make sure that the CD you burned and the image you downloaded are fine. You could test the CD on a different computer to see if it boot properly and verify the checksum of the image that you downloaded and wrote to the CD.

Just basic steps - might be helpful though.

[Colors]

Your PC needs also 768 MB memory to run F16 installation.

[AndyHardy]

Originally Posted by Colors

Your PC needs also 768 MB memory to run F16 installation.

I'll have you know I have a whopping 1Gb of RAM on this machine!! Thanks anyway I'm trying the DVD in a laptop to see if it boots...

---------- Post added at 07:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:14 PM ----------

Originally Posted by AndyHardy

I'... I'm trying the DVD in a laptop to see if it boots...

Which it seems to do - so the disk works in the laptop, but not in the desktop...

[AndyHardy]

Originally Posted by goodfella

One of my compile farm machines is that age and it does fine.

Get yourself the iso image for FC16 and burn a DVD. Install the DVD and
do not request any remote repositories. Also choose "graphics desktop"
when installing.

Would you mind posting a link to FC16 iso ? - all I can find is fedora 16 in i686, i386 and various other flavours, but I can't find one called FC16

Cheers

Andy

ps, I've tried updating via 'preupdate' on the command line, however that chunters away until it gets to 'no more mirrors to try' (doesn't sound good) then I get prompted to reboot, which I do but nothing gets upgraded.

[marko]

Originally Posted by AndyHardy

Would you mind posting a link to FC16 iso ? - all I can find is fedora 16 in i686, i386 and various other flavours, but I can't find one called FC16

Cheers

Andy

That's because there is no such thing as "FC16", he was meaning "Fedora Core 16" which is an obsolete term. The Fedora project dropped the "Core" part of the name years ago. Just look for Fedora 16, here are are all the different ones:

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all

If someone writes "F16" they're just using an short version of the name, it's not a distinct version but just plain old Fedora 16

[nonamedotc]

Originally Posted by AndyHardy

[ ... ]
ps, I've tried updating via 'preupdate' on the command line, however that chunters away until it gets to 'no more mirrors to try' (doesn't sound good) then I get prompted to reboot, which I do but nothing gets upgraded.

This tends to happen when you have some third party repositories enabled and try to preupgrade (althought might not be the only reason).

So, to start with diable third party repositories before trying preupgrade. Post the output of

yum repolist

[AndyHardy]

[Andrew@Hardys ~]$ yum repolist
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
adobe-linux-i386 | 951 B 00:00
adobe-linux-i386/primary | 11 kB 00:00
adobe-linux-i386 17/17
fedora/metalink | 1.0 kB 00:00
fedora | 4.2 kB 00:00
fedora/primary_db | 9.7 MB 17:35
updates/metalink | 1.0 kB 00:00
updates | 4.7 kB 00:00
updates/primary_db | 5.1 MB 09:02
repo id repo name status
adobe-linux-i386 Adobe Systems Incorporated 17
fedora Fedora 12 - i386 15,366
updates Fedora 12 - i386 - Updates 7,716
repolist: 23,099
[Andrew@Hardys ~]$ ^C
[Andrew@Hardys ~]$

OK so what does this stuf ^^ tel me?

[AndyHardy]

Doing some reading and it looks like I need to re-size the boot partition to >500MB.

[marko]

Originally Posted by AndyHardy

Would you mind posting a link to FC16 iso ? - all I can find is fedora 16 in i686, i386 and various other flavours, but I can't find one called FC16

Cheers

Andy

ps, I've tried updating via 'preupdate' on the command line, however that chunters away until it gets to 'no more mirrors to try' (doesn't sound good) then I get prompted to reboot, which I do but nothing gets upgraded.

Just checking but you do have all your Fedora 12 repo files corrected so they point to the archived repos for Fedora 12? They should point to

for fedora.repo:
baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os

for fedora-updates.repo:
baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/updates/$releasever/$basearch/

[AndyHardy]

Which I can't do arrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhh!!!!!!


gparted wont let me make the boot partition (/dev/sda1) bigger than 200MB, and I cant do anything to the lvm partition to make it smaller to make room for a bigger boot partition


any advice would be gratefully accepted right now

[marko]

Originally Posted by AndyHardy

[Andrew@Hardys ~]$ yum repolist
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
adobe-linux-i386 | 951 B 00:00
adobe-linux-i386/primary | 11 kB 00:00
adobe-linux-i386 17/17
fedora/metalink | 1.0 kB 00:00
fedora | 4.2 kB 00:00
fedora/primary_db | 9.7 MB 17:35
updates/metalink | 1.0 kB 00:00
updates | 4.7 kB 00:00
updates/primary_db | 5.1 MB 09:02
repo id repo name status
adobe-linux-i386 Adobe Systems Incorporated 17
fedora Fedora 12 - i386 15,366
updates Fedora 12 - i386 - Updates 7,716
repolist: 23,099
[Andrew@Hardys ~]$ ^C
[Andrew@Hardys ~]$

OK so what does this stuf ^^ tel me?

Those look ok, but like I said before, you have to make sure your repos have been corrected so your F12 points to the archives.fedoraproject.org area since Fedora 12 is End of Life. That could be why it complains "no more mirrors to try"

[AndyHardy]

Originally Posted by marko

Just checking but you do have all your Fedora 12 repo files corrected so they point to the archived repos for Fedora 12? They should point to

for fedora.repo:
baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os

for fedora-updates.repo:
baseurl=http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/updates/$releasever/$basearch/

Sorry for the general greenhorn annoyingness of this question, but how do I do this?

[nonamedotc]

Edit the corresponding files under /etc/yum.repos.d to reflect the changes suggested by marko.