My (unpleasant) fedora 10 installation experience

Pierre-Yves pingou at pingoured.fr
Mon Dec 1 15:08:46 UTC 2008


Lev Shamardin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Today the file system on my wife's laptop got corrupted (that's another sad
> fedora, kerneloops and tuxonice story) and I decided to reinstall everything
> from scratch using Fedora 10 installation DVD. The laptop previously had Fedora
> 9 installed, so my plan was to reinstall the system and then restore the /home
> partition with fsck & co.
> 
> The installation process from the DVD went quite smoothly, but when I got to the
> first boot there were some surprises. Since I was going to recover /home later,
> I was not planning to create any users at the first boot, but skipping the
> "Create user" screen required to press the "Use network login..." button and
> cancel the dialog, otherwise the firstboot continued to complain that I
> definitely need to create a user.
> 
> This laptop uses wireless to connect to the internet, and guess what? Is is NOT
> yet configured when you are running the firstboot. On the Date & Time screen I
> selected "Enable network time protocol", pressed forward, and then hit Cancel on
> the "Contacting NTP..." dialog (I supposed that I don't want to wait for the
> network timeout) and... Firstboot crashed leaving me with an empty screen with a
> mouse cursor on it. Ctrl-Alt-F1/F2/etc. brought me to another empty screen,
> without a mouse this time. Fortunately Ctrl-Alt-Del from that mouseless screen
> worked fine.
> 
> Next boot showed firstboot again allowing to test these bugs and finally get
> through them to discover another surprise.
> 
> I've selected "Russian" keyboard during the installation process. Usually this
> assumed that there are two keyboard layouts (English and Russian) and you can
> switch between them with a hotkey. But not in the default state of the GDM after
> the first boot. The only option I had was Russian input! I tried all common
> layout switch shortcuts but have not managed to find one to switch the layout to
> english, but I had to type something in english since I have not created any
> users and my root user had both english login name and password. So I had to go
> to the menus, search for USA keyboard layout and only after this had a chance to
> try login to the system. It really seems to me that these layout defaults are
> insane. Is it that common to have non-english login names and passwords, really?

Actually I can answer to that one: Yes it is ! :)


About the installation I also saved my /home while I switched to Fedora 
10 from Fedora 9.
On the partition screen I said this partition is my /home and on the 
firstboot I said I want to create user foo. I had a nice popup saying 
that user "foo" already has a /home folder do you want to use it, or do 
you want a new one ?"
I said I want to keep my /home... Here I was, new F10 no data lost on 
/home and the same user...

Dunno if that can help you...

Best regards,

Pierre




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