Michael Wiktowy wrote: >> Personally, I am willing to put up with problems installing a >> distribution if I really want to install it, >> and I have put up with enormous problems in the past to install Fedora - >> the worst being, as I mentioned, on Sony PictureBooks. > > In my experience, Sony has notoriously suck-tastic support for > recordable media in their drives due to their love for DRM. I really don't think DRM has anything to do with the problems I had with the Sony PictureBook - problems I might say that everybody had with these machines. The essential point was that the PictureBook was very picky about boot devices - for example, you could only boot (Windows or Linux) from their own PCMCIA-CD reader. But Fedora was particularly difficult to boot, and in fact I never succeeded in booting Fedora 2 to 5 from a CD on these machines; I always installed Fedora in a different way. > Since > Ubuntu disks from ShipIt are pressed and not burned on recordable > media, could it be that you are having issues with a particular > brand/type of recordable media that you are using to burn Fedora > images on? I'm not sure what you mean by "Ubuntu disks from ShipIt". The particular Ubuntu Live CD I used was downloaded and burnt in exactly the same way as my Fedora CDs. > Just a thought since, by my recollection, I have yet to > have any issue, *ever*, with a Fedora CD not booting and I have been > tracking various stable/unstable versions on a wide variety of > machines since before Fedora. So, you are very lucky. If you read this newsgroup/mailing list you must have seen many people complaining of exactly the same issues as me. > I have had some problems with a few > other distros but mainly in the kernel loading stage due to missing > hardware support in the initrd. Actually, Fedora in the past has been pretty bad on my SCSI only machine, for the reason you give. I always upgrade on that machine, so I have an old compiled kernel to fall back on. To be fair, with Fedora 6 I had more disk space, so I installed (rather than upgraded) it, leaving Fedora 5 on another partition in case FC-6 didn't work. The Fedora-6 kernel did in fact work OK. [I'm not a great fan of Fedora - or any other distribution - kernels; basically, I have more confidence in Linus and his team and prefer to keep kernel and distribution distinct.] >> I wish Fedora would undertake some modest investigation >> to see what problems people have with installation. >> I have suggested this, but been told that it would be a mammoth task, >> which I find difficult to believe. > > The proper course of action would be for you to first troubleshoot > your own kit to see if the issue is local to faulty (broken or by > design) hardware. Sorry, that is a silly remark. As far as I am concerned, if Windows runs OK on a computer, and Knoppix and Slax boot OK, but Fedora does not boot, then the fault lies with Fedora not with the machine. > Then, once you determine that you are not at fault, > point your finger at the Fedora Project by filling out a bug report > recording your hardware details and what you have done to verify that > you have working hardware (booted several other burned CDs, did a > media check on the Fedora CD, etc.). That is how this truly mammoth > task of getting 100% hardware support is accomplished ... not by > writing inflammatory emails to public mailing lists accusing the > Fedora devs of ignoring some huge shortcoming in their distro. I'm afraid I have come to the conclusion that the Anaconda developers are not at present open to suggestion; they share your view that if their program does not run on your machine then there is something wrong with your machine. > ... and in the end, Fedora (or at least used to) provides an > old-school floppy disk image for those systems that can't boot from CD > for some reason. I doubt they do for the LiveCD though. You could > always try a syslinux boot to CD boot floppy. Do any machines have floppy drives nowadays? -- 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
