jim tate wrote: >>> I downloaded and burnt the Fedora-7 Test Live CD some time ago, >>> and this does not boot on any machine I've tried it on. > Well you are definitely doing something wrong, I have downloaded a > number CD's, DVD's of fedora 5,6,7 test 1,2 and burn and run them with > no problems. > Is this just a excuse to go to ubuntu? Not that it is important, but in fact I bought a ThinkPad T43 running Ubuntu a month or so ago. I ran it for a couple of weeks, after changing from Gnome to KDE. My main observation (as I mentioned in a post here, I believe) was that the two distributions - Ubuntu and Fedora - were more or less indistinguishable, and that the difference between KDE and Gnome on either was far more significant. I decided to move this machine over to Fedora mainly because I am running Fedora on 6 other machines (if I include a seriously sick Sony PictureBook), and it seemed simpler to stick to one distribution. I've always been very happy with RedHat and Fedora distributions, but as I indicated I have serious misgivings about the Fedora installation setup, which have caused me a great deal of trouble on several different types of machine. I'm willing to put up with this because I'm happy with the final product, and I regard installation as a one-off step on the way. If I try to install from CD and it does not work, I install from the hard disk. This has usually worked without problem. On a couple of occasions I still had problems, in which case I managed to install a minimal system, and then "yum updated" it over the net. But the fact remains that I have had problems with the CD reading part of the installation on almost all my machines. I always start by running the CD Test on all the CDs, which I assume should catch any problems. (I've never had a failure with this.) For those who want a detailed account of the problems, the worst difficulty with FC-6 was on an Athlon64 machine with the x86_64 distribution, which never installed or ran properly. The i386 distribution installed OK, and is running well on this machine. The worst problem I have had was with two Sony PictureBooks, using the standard Sony PCGA-CD51 CD reader; I never succeeded in installing Fedora from CDs on these machines (that amounts to 12 attempts in all). In one case - I think it was Fedora 4 - I had to install SuSE first, and then use that to get the Fedora ISO images over by WiFi. > I hold Linux meeting once a month and the Ubuntu people are spreading > the FUD around that Fedora is a bleeding edge, unstable, distro, these > guys are beginning to sound like $MS people. I never heard anything like this. The only people I've heard going on about Fedora being bleeding edge (an illusion of grandeur, in my view) are Fedora people, excusing something wrong in the distribution, which is wrong just because someone made a silly mistake. > Fedora 5, 6 , I have installed both and did updates on a number of > boxes, i386, X86_64 and had no problems. This is the sort of response I usually get when mentioning problems with the CD reader part of Fedora installation. It seems to mean "I'm OK Jack, don't bother me with your problems". -- 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
