I have installed or upgraded 3 computers from FC4 to FC5, and had problems in each case, although in each case I am impressed with FC5 when I finally got it working. In two of the cases - a ThinkPad T20 and an AMD Targa desktop - there were problems reading the CDs even though they passed the "Test". In each case it said that there were rpm's it couldn't read, or thought were corrupt. I tried two or three times in each case, and the errors occurred in different places, and on different CDs. I should admit that the CDs I was using were always the same. It seems to me that there should be an opportunity to re-try a CD, and also to keep the installation up to that point. In fact I had to start again. I see now there are suggestions that one should stop dma on the CD-reader, though I haven't seen any precise instructions on how to do this, and it does not seem to be mentioned in the documentation I have read. In each case I finally installed a minimal system, and then expanded it with "yum groupinstall ...". I would have tried installing from hard disk, though I noticed that this is no longer offered as an installation option. In the third case - a Sony Picturebook - I used "yum update" since no FC installation has ever worked on this machine. After installing the FC5 fedora-release rpm, and then running "yum update" the process worked without hitch, but took over 12 hours to install 1021 packages with 1850 upgrading and cleanup transactions. Actually, X did not work after the upgrade. I found this was due to the fact that xorg now uses xfs to access fonts rather than explicit FontPath's. (Maybe this change was older than FC5? I may have been using a compiled version of xorg.) On the whole I would give FC-5 an alpha, but anaconda a gamma minus. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
