Installation report 2 for beta 1

[John Summerfied]

Same system as before.
This time I burned a heap of CDs to try a CD install. Fairly uneventful
(I knew
what to do about the disk partitioning by now), and the display is much
better
with "resolution=1280x800"

Actually booting was a problem. The system atorebooted about immediately
unpacking the kernel.

Finding an SMP kernel as the only one was a surprise.

No matter, boot CD1 in rescue mode. Eh? No kernel on CD1? Damn, never mind,
I'll install off the LAN.

Why did that fail? Did that duff signature matter? No? Why's that scriptlet
failing? --noscripts doesn't work? some mumble about recon<something> rang a
bell. How to I disable selinue? The likely commands get errors.

Reboot, selinux=0 and all's well, I can install the kernel and the new
kernel
boots.

I was writing this as the system booted, so I don't know what happened to
firstboot; when I turned back to the laptop it was at the GDM login.

I've not had a chance to create a user account.

Okay, I logged in to create a user account.
Quick question, why's "terminal" not in the "Accessories" list where a
Windows
XP user would expect to find it?

I create /home/userd (meaning /home/users) then used to GUI to create
"summer"
and O iverrode the UID to 1000 and and home to /home/users/summer. There
was no
error reported (recall /home/users didn't exist) and summer was homeless.

Previously, when I've create a user accound on FC/EL systems I've used
the CLI
tools (useradd|adduser and passwd). When UID 1000 is used, as here, the next
UID used it 1001, not 500. I prefer to continue from 1000 (compatible with
other distros, those that run from 1000 might break if a sysadmin forced
500).

Something needs to be done about wireless. SuSE 10.0 and Ubuntu can both
configure my Atheros wireless, Mandriva knw the wiresless there and
wanted to
ser up ndiswrapper for me: I couldn't coz I don't know where in Windows the
driver is, but at least it tried.

Fedora Core 5 beta 1 doesn't even know the thing is there, when I try to
configure "wireless" the only choice I have is "other wireless" and that
leads
me to a selection of drivers including NE1000 and many other (not) wireless
devices.

At the equivalent point in SuSE, Yast recognised the device and asked me to
configure it, installed the driver and set it up. I don't recall exactly
what
Ubuntu did, but the driver was ready installed and it was just a matter of
configuring it, just like any network device.

There's also the question of the infernal modem. Again, SuSE lead me to it,
installed the driver and configured it.

I wish to use the Atheros driver; I understand RH won't ship the HAL, but it
needs to make it easy for users to implement their right to choose to
use it.

Same for the internal modem. Ordinary users cannot be expected to have the
skills or desire to hunt round the Internet for the driver.

I could argue FC5 and EL4 are ready for the desktop, but they certainly
are not
ready for the laptop.

Plugging in a PCMCIA Orinoco 11b wireless card resulted in two! interfaces,
neither the eth1 I expected (and get on FC3). Instead, I have wlan0 and
wifi0.
Further they have the default essid "test" and I cannot set it to "" or
"any."
Nore can I set the WEP key:
# iwconfig wlan0 essid anaglorious key s:secre
Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :
    SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.

There are also lots of these messages:
search_node dbd094b4 start_node dbd094b4 return_node 00000000
ACPI-0508: *** Error: Method execution failed [\_SB_.BAT1._BST] (Node
dbd098d4), AE_NOT_FOUND
ACPI-0339: *** Error: Looking up [Z004] in namespace, AE_NOT_FOUND
search_node dbd094b4 start_node dbd094b4 return_node 00000000
ACPI-0508: *** Error: Method execution failed [\_SB_.BAT1._BST]
(Node dbd098d4), AE_NOT_FOUND

fwiw Ununtu and SuSE have them too. Google showed some discussion on lkml.










-- 

Cheers
John

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