Ubuntu 1, Fedora 0

[John DeDourek]

Stefan Held wrote:
> Am 16.03.2007 13:38 Uhr schrieb "Timothy Murphy" unter
> <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie>:
>
>   
>> Yesterday I downloaded and burnt the Ubuntu Live CD (6.06),
>> and it worked like perfectly on the 4 machines I tried it on.
>>
>>     
>  
>   
>> In my experience there is something basically wrong
>> with the CD reading part of Fedora CDs,
>> as many people report problems installing Fedora this way.
>>     
>
> Why should it? Did you verify the sha1 summs of your download?
>
> Did you test the same CD on a bunch of identical Machines/CD Drives?
>
> Did you try to burn the CD with 4x speed only? Then test again?
>   
In fact, I have had a significant difficulty with Fedora over the past 
several years in
this regard.  The Fedora kernels have apparently been fairly sensitive 
to a few
models of CD drive, particularly older models.  The problems here almost
always occur when installing on older machines.

I am currently trying to install Fedora Core 6 on such a machine, (an older
IBM NetVista) ant it reports that the install CD is not found, even though
it booted from that CD.  The media is satisfactory on many other drives,
and has installed many machines.  Just to make sure that the media 
hadn't gone
bad, I mounted it on a newwer machine, mounted the iso image via the 
loopback
device and did a recursive compare of all the files.  The compare 
completed without
error.

So, there are two possibilities:
--the media doesn't read on the CD drive in the older machine to a 
sufficient degree
  to complete the install
-- there is a bug in the particular set of drivers that Fedora Core 6 
uses to read
   the CD.
(I actually suspect that it is really a combination of both; the 
particular drive gets
occasional read errors on the particular media, and the error recovery 
in the
driver has a bug such that it doesn't recover.  Thus the install works 
only if
the CD drive reads the media perfectly).

I have tried the Fedora 6 respin.  This definitely has updates.  I do 
not know if
the install kernel was updated however.  In any case, this did not work on
the machine in question.

For what it's worth, the Fedora 7 Test 2 live CD does work in the same 
machine.
This leads me to hope that Fedora 7 has corrected the problem.  
Unfortunately,
Fedora 7 test 2 was released as a DVD image only.  The machine in question
has only CD drives.  So I can't attempt a CD isntall with test2.  That 
is unfortunate.
If the test2 CD isos had been released, we would know whether Fedora 7
corrects this install problem.  (I suppose I could go back and test 
"test 1", but
with test2 out, that has a low priority demand on my time.)