FC5 - good when installed, difficult to install

[Timothy Murphy]

I have installed or upgraded 3 computers from FC4 to FC5,
and had problems in each case,
although in each case I am impressed with FC5 when I finally got it working.

In two of the cases - a ThinkPad T20 and an AMD Targa desktop -
there were problems reading the CDs even though they passed the "Test".
In each case it said that there were rpm's it couldn't read,
or thought were corrupt.

I tried two or three times in each case,
and the errors occurred in different places,
and on different CDs.

I should admit that the CDs I was using were always the same.

It seems to me that there should be an opportunity to re-try a CD,
and also to keep the installation up to that point.
In fact I had to start again.

I see now there are suggestions that one should stop dma on the CD-reader,
though I haven't seen any precise instructions on how to do this,
and it does not seem to be mentioned in the documentation I have read.

In each case I finally installed a minimal system,
and then expanded it with "yum groupinstall ...".

I would have tried installing from hard disk,
though I noticed that this is no longer offered as an installation option.

In the third case - a Sony Picturebook -
I used "yum update" since no FC installation has ever worked 
on this machine.
After installing the FC5 fedora-release rpm,
and then running "yum update" the process worked without hitch,
but took over 12 hours to install 1021 packages
with 1850 upgrading and cleanup transactions.

Actually, X did not work after the upgrade.
I found this was due to the fact that xorg now uses xfs to access fonts
rather than explicit FontPath's.
(Maybe this change was older than FC5?
I may have been using a compiled version of xorg.)

On the whole I would give FC-5 an alpha,
but anaconda a gamma minus.


-- 
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