Ubuntu 1, Fedora 0

[Timothy Murphy]

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