Fedora 9 a Bit Behind the Curve On Installation

bsk_cw writes "Today, many Linux users are getting blasé about the ease with which they can install Linux. Possibly, they've been spoiled by distributions such as Ubuntu, which is actually easier to install than Windows. Unfortunately, Fedora 9, the latest version of this community edition of Red Hat, was a bit too much of a blast from the past for Computerworld's James Turner." (Except for bits about the installation, the review is actually quite positive.)

Shoot!

[XanC (644172)]

Imagine what Fedora 9 would have done to UbuntuDupe's hard drive!!

Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[croddy (659025)]

"actually easier to install than Windows" (!!)

I'm not sure what rock he's been living under, but Linux has been a lot easier to install than windows for ages. Ubiquity, Anaconda, Debian-Installer... sure, the old Debian boot-floppies installer was kind of a pain, but when you want to get your OS installed quickly and easily you don't exactly reach for silvers from Microsoft.

Lately I got a bit tired of Wine's partial support for Steam so I've been trying to get some kind of Windows installed on my system to run some games. It's been a comic horror show of 0000007B this, 80070241 that, swapping out different optical drives and dumbing down BIOS settings to try to get either the XP or Vista installer to not bluescreen or otherwise give up on life trying to copy data from the installation media.

Thankfully, when I need a sane, easy OS to regroup and try to find out what the cryptic hex codes barfed out by Microsoft's fragile-as-glass, no-system-logs-provided installers, I only have to reach for one of my Linux discs to get things up straight away.

And let's face it... if your goal is to quickly get a quality browser, IM client, office suite, and some basic development tools installed, you're going to have an easier time popping in an Ubuntu disc to get there even if Windows is preinstalled on the box!

Re:Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[satoshi1 (794000)]

I have never had Windows fail to install for any reason.. The only problem I have ever had with Windows is when I install Linux first and then Windows wipes out GRUB. Then I gotta find a GRUB ISO and figure out the GRUB commands to restore the bootloader (floppies? what are those? while I have a floppy drive still, I have a hell of a time finding disks, even at a tech school). So now I always install Windows first so it's all happy and in place and then let Linux have its way. Windows doesn't even have a clue. It's really best this way.

Re:Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[pembo13 (770295)]

Installing Windows on most IDE/SATA interfaces cards requires a floppy. Grub does not require a floppy to reinstall, at least not for Fedora.

Re:

[secolactico (519805)]

Installing Windows on most IDE/SATA interfaces cards requires a floppy.

I think SP2 slipstreamed into the install disk recognizes SATA and SAS. Or you could slipstream the drivers themselves, which I don't recommend to anybody who isn't comfortable mucking with inf files.

Re:

[sumdumass (711423)]

If you get a good embedded sata controller like the one built in to modern nvidia nforce motherboards, each sata socket shows up as an standard IDE channel to the OS, allowing you to use it without specialist drivers (if you're not using raid).

Surely you mean just in "real mode" (only at boot) and not all the time and durring "protect mode" operation (once the 32bit OS is running and the bias no longer controls the SATA channel) right? Otherwise you would lose a lot of the benefits of the SATA channels an

Re:

[amorsen (7485)]

I'm betting they just provide an int hook that a generic IDE driver can use until a protect mode driver gets loaded.

It's much worse than that. AHCI-controllers can emulate regular IDE controllers in hardware. Not some BIOS-INT-thing, but actual emulation. Most computers I have seen with AHCI-controllers run them in IDE-emulation-mode.

Re:Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[Shikaku (1129753)]

Super Grub Disk is a nice way to semi-automatically reinstall GRUB.

It also teaches you the commands, and tells you what it's doing. Very cool little ISO file.

Re:Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[kryptkpr (180196)]

I have never had Windows fail to install for any reason..

While the plural of anecdote is not data, I think I know what the GP is talking about and have experienced it myself.

There are some known AHCI problems [microsoft.com] with a common ATI southbridge chipset which made installing Vista impossible unless you first disable AHCI (I assume this is what the GP meant by having to dumb-down BIOS settings).

So, lets try XP I thought. Too bad it has no drivers for the sata controller at all, and I have no floppy drive. I ended up having to inject the controller drivers into the XP CD and re-burn it. The XP installer then saw my disk in IDE mode, but not AHCI mode..

I gave up and left the controller in IDE mode.

For reference, Ubuntu 7.10 had no trouble on the same machine.

Re:Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[MMC Monster (602931)]

I never had a problem installing Windows 2K or XP on my machine either.

That being said, I *always* had a problem getting them into a usable state once they were installed.

Problems include:
1. Having to install multiple service packs and other packages, often with multiple reboots.

2. Searching for the right version of drivers for my hardware on the internet. (Why can't they just use repositories like debian?)

3. Installing all the applications I generally use. (Again, central repositories make it much easier. They can even be used by proprietary applications with a validation on first run.)

Re:

[immcintosh (1089551)]

Because Microsoft do not write drivers, do not take any responsibility for them and only redistribute the ones they build onto the distribution CD

That's something of a non sequitur. Ubuntu, Fedora, and all the rest also do not write the drivers. They do not take any responsibility for them. Yet the fact remains that their installations have much more complete driver support without all the hunting and fishing around. But still, their installation CDs aren't really different in nature from any Windows

Re:Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[ratboy666 (104074)]

And your experience is an anecdote. Here's mine.

I am a Solaris/Linux user. Around two years ago, I decided to build a PVR (personal video recorder). I had heard good things about Windows XP, and the mainboard I had chosen had a note in it stating that "USB 2.0 function can only be obtained with Windows XP". And all the hardware (video input devices, video display) came with drivers for Windows XP. So I bought a copy of Windows XP (retail). Assembled the system, and attempted to load Windows XP.

After loading from the DVD drive, XP booted. However, the DVD did not show up. I reinstalled. Same thing. I assumed that the DVD was defective, and replaced it. Same thing. Tried a CD. Same thing. Turns out I need a driver from the CD supplied with the mainboard in order to use the CD/DVD. How do I get it there? XP also doesn't recognize the network adapter (same deal, I need a driver). The drivers are too large to put on a floppy.

I gave up on trying to use XP for this application, and installed Linux. At least it recognized the DVD and network "out of the box" (Fedora). I then put on MythTV (I had wanted to try a Windows PVR program, but, hey... Windows didn't work).

I tried XP on another box. It also didn't work. Turns out to need a "hard disc driver". In fact, the only thing that XP works on (for me) is a VMware session. Hell, even Mac OS works there. And that's where that copy is running today (along with MS Office and some other Microsoft stuff -- development tools, and a laser printer driver).

The only thing I conclude is that you must be a Windows XP expert. Or, that Windows XP came pre-installed. I understand that VISTA supports additional (modern) devices, but I am not going to pay hundreds more to find out it doesn't.

Re:Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[WK2 (1072560)]

Windows never really failed to install for me. I've had other problems, like trying to hunt down drivers, having to disable drivers in order to get Windows to boot, Safe Mode failing, and Windows ME blue screened on its first boot.

The main problem I have with installing Windows is that it takes so long. Why does it have to take 1 hour to install an OS? You pretty much just copy a bunch of files onto the HDD, right? Even on a slow CD drive that shouldn't take more than 10 mins max. And why does it ask me questions at several different parts of the install? It should ask them all at once. If it only took a few minutes, this would be forgivable, but if it's going to take an hour, I would at least like to set my options when the CD boots, and then let the install go on for the next hour while I do other things. I shouldn't have to babysit my computer. And why do I have to boot twice to install, once from CD, and once from HDD? And I have to answer questions on each boot.

Microsoft could learn a lot from Linux about OS installs.

Re:

[TheThiefMaster (992038)]

Vista includes a lot more drivers on the disk, because it's a new release, so the drivers actually existed when the disk was pressed. You can load drivers from cd or usb pen during the installer (no more needing a floppy drive!). It asks all the questions at the start. It doesn't spend years loading drivers for hardware that hasn't been used in 5 years before starting. You only boot once to install. It even installs faster than XP did.

I'm not surprised Windows ME bluescreened on you on it's first boot, it w

Re:

[croddy (659025)]

Well, the hardware is all fine. Linux runs on it as solid as a rock. The XP installer apparently doesn't crash as long as I disable AHCI. Of course, it wouldn't install at all until my Windows-using friend helpfully reassembled my installer, being sure to include the SATA drivers that Microsoft apparently never cared to add when they updated their installation media. I guess you need a floppy disk drive if you want to do that at install time and don't care to remaster the damned installation media before yo

Re:Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[L0rdJedi (65690)]

So your big complaint is that a 7 year old OS (SP2 was released in 2004) doesn't install on a device that was released 3 years after it was? And of course, that hardware wasn't widely available until probably a year or two later.

Have you tried installing Red Hat 5 on anything modern recently with much success?

Yes, it's so horrible that an OS from 2001, when floppies were still pretty common, needs a floppy to install a driver that didn't even exist at the time.

Oops, I forgot, this is Slashdot. We're suppose to complain whether it makes sense or not.

Re:Of course it's easier to instal than Windows!

[swillden (191260)]

So your big complaint is that a 7 year old OS (SP2 was released in 2004) doesn't install on a device that was released 3 years after it was? And of course, that hardware wasn't widely available until probably a year or two later.

Damned right. If these idiots would just download a more recent release of Windows XP, with all of the updated drivers in place, they'd have no trouble at all.

Re:

[Daimaou (97573)]

No, the problem is that a 7 year old OS ONLY supports floppy disks to install drivers when 7 years ago, CD-ROM drives were ubiquitous.

It was a stupid design decision by Microsoft and has nothing to do with Slashdot readers.

Swap issues

[kernowyon (1257174)]

I actually had a look at the link! One of the issues was -

Finally hit ctrl-alt-return to restart the window manager and found it had hung trying to mount swap off the fstab. For some reason, the installer didn't like trying to reuse the swap partition left over from the previous install, and it made something go pear-shaped during the initial boot.

This is something which seems to plague some Linux installs - if I recall correctly, Vector Linux (or was it Puppy?) has a similar problem with re-using swap partitions which are also used by other installed distros.
The fact that the author managed to get things going by telling the installer to repartition the drive seems to confirm this. It is a long time since I tested Fedora, so I have no idea if this problem is common with that distro.Luckily, most users will probably not have multiple distros installed and this should not prove an issue to them.
Kudos to the author for reporting the issue as a bug though - that may help to get this sorted for the next release.

Reading the frackin article.....

[phoenixwade (997892)]

"(Except for bits about the installation, the review is actually quite positive.)"

I must have read a different article (whupps, sorry, it's slashdot, I know I'm not supposed to RTFA, backsliding again, I suppose)

the first page was complaints about the installer, a paragraph or two that's positive about the performance, and then a complaint that you have to buy the enterprise edition for support, because you can't buy support for Fedora...

Didn't do much for me as a review of the new Fedora, and it certainly didn't seem like the rest was "Positive".

Re:Reading the frackin article.....

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

...and it certainly didn't seem like the rest was "Positive".

0.001 > 0. Any questions? :)

Re:Reading the frackin article.....

[The Master Control P (655590)]

What about for large values of zero?

Has Fedora fixed the packager manager performance?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Last time I tried Fedora/RedHat I was totally put off by the performance of the package management system. Not only did I experience RPM-hell with dependency shit but it was slow as hell. I mean the package manager would sit there and bring my computer to its knees for a long freaking time.

Not too good if you ask me. But hell who needs Fedora anyway when there are much better distros without that RPM crap.

Linux is much easier than Windows

[sc0ob5 (836562)]

Linux is MUCH MUCH easier to install than windows, it has been for many years. No layman that I know can fully install windows XP or Vista. Let alone trying to install it on a RAID partition. Not only that but you don't need to load a drivers for your video/network/raid/sound, surely that counts as part of the install process. Also the installer installs applications as well not just the OS so you have to consider that as well. I mean if your count the number of applications that can be installed in the installation then compare it with Windows and what you would need to do to get those applications I think it's pretty clear that a Linux installation even if you have to read a small blurb about what you are doing is so much easier, quicker and superior.

Simple fact is that if you think it's hard you are either a Windows user or an idiot or quite probably both.

I guess "installing" Windows involves taking the newly bought HP/Dell out of the box and plugging it in.

Re:I guess he never installed Slackware 3....

[by Anonymous Coward]

What about the old Gentoo installer?

You know, a webpage full of instructions.