Re: Ubuntu 1, Fedora 0

Michael Wiktowy wrote:

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.

So you are saying the everyone with this hardware is having problems
but it couldn't be the hardware's fault ... hmmm ... odd sort of
logic.

The Fedora CD#1 would not boot on this machine.
(Nor would RedHat-9, as a matter of interest, though RedHat-8 did.)
SuSE did install, Knoppix and SLAX booted fine.

So I had to go to a lot of trouble to install Fedora.
That's all I am saying.

I don't believe in attaching "fault" to inanimate objects,
but if I did I would say that Fedora CDs and PictureBook
were maritally incompatible.

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.

Have you had similar problems on other distinctly different hardware?

Yes, as I said I had a lot of problems with an Asus SCSI-only machine.
(As a matter of interest, I had even more trouble installing Windows-2000
on this machine, for the same reason - the SCSI controller had to be loaded
before one was told that the SCSI controller had to be loaded.)

I also had problems with the x86_64 distribution
on an Athlon64 machine (as did many other people).
The 386 version ran fine.

And I was unable to install Fedora-5 on an AMD Sempron machine
from CDs because of repeated CD reader failures.
Again, when I asked about this I found many people
had had the same experience.

You are saying that Ubuntu boots fine on these machines?

Pleez.
I am not a Ubuntu ambassador.
It was a sheer fluke I tried a Ubuntu Live CD -
I had just read about it on SlashDot, and downloaded and burnt it.
The fact that it booted on all my machines simply confirmed
the view I have expressed that there is something wrong
with the Fedora installation when it comes to reading CDs.
Nothing I've read in this thread has changed my opinion on this,
or given me the slightest hope that anyone involved with this development
might possibly look into the problem.

Do any machines have floppy drives nowadays?

The important question is, do *you* have one? They are cheaper than
dirt these days and might save you some grief.

You suggested that one could install Fedora from floppies.
I doubt if that is true, but in any case it would irrelevant
to the vast majority of users since very few if any machines nowadays
come with floppy drives.

As I have explained (many times) when I have problems with Fedora CDs -
which is too often the case - I install from the hard disk.

I certainly would not purchase a floppy drive for this purpose.

Incidentally, I have never had any problem booting Fedora
from CDs made with "mkbootdisk --iso".

If you expect a team of Fedora devs to come over to your house and
read your mind in order to find out what the specifics of your problem
is, don't hold your breath.

I have actually communicated with the Anaconda developers,
and have received more or less the same answer as you gave,
that the "fault" must lie with the computer.

The commonest symptom is fairly easy to describe:
the installation fails while reading one of the CDs,
and the error message states that it could not find some RPM.
The installation then bombs out,
and one cannot read the logfile as suggested
since there is no system running on the machine.

When I had the same problem installing Windows on a ThinkPad
(I was told a DLL could not be found)
I was able to take out the CD and re-insert it,
when the problem was no longer reported and the installation continued
from where it had stopped.

IIRC, this used to be possible with RedHat ...







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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

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