My own review of installing Fedora 7
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Aladdin_Sane Jun 08, 2007 8:14 AM EDT |
Well, last night I accidentally installed Fedora 7 on my main system. What I mean is, it was so easy to get started I went for it without planning to go all the way. This system has run an RH OS since RH9. The Live CD/Install CD concept was much better than the last time I booted KNOPPIX, which is not saying much, I don't find a personal need for KNOPPIX very often. But, the F7 CD offered to run from mem instead of CD, this was very tempting and nice on a system with 2.5 GB of mem. The number one best thing about this method is that unlike traditional RH Anaconda installs, I had access to a root prompt *before* starting the install. In Anaconda you cannot get to a prompt in the earliest part of the install, only later. This allowed me to be sure that the installer could not "see" or manipulate in any other way my /home partition. With this level of assurance, there was little risk to blowing the rest of it away. So I formatted / and /boot and finished the install. Wow, that was it. That's all. For an end user this is so slick that any grease added would produce a frictionless surface, slipping right off the face of the earth into outer space. YUM is somehow faster and more efficient than it was in FC6. I was able to grab what I needed that was missing from the initial install in minutes. To do any of this, I had waited a week or so since the initial F7 release, the servers are going real fast now, and everything came down without hesitation. This system is ridiculously full of hardware (8 hard drives, and other bizarreness), but F7 swallowed it and any hiccup going down was not worth remembering to this morning. I remounted /home, and was back to my accustomed interface and apps in, I suspect, less than 2 hours. So a big thumbs up for install convenience for an end user of any relative acumen. Now, the NFS and NIS config was as painful as it has been for forever in RH OS's, but that is a different subject. |
| bigg Jun 08, 2007 8:45 AM EDT |
I've not seen such a fast installation of a full distribution before. It took all of seven minutes on my wife's laptop. One strange thing is that it doesn't give you an initrd if you don't install to the MBR (at least I couldn't get it to do so). I had to use mkinitrd, not exactly the most user-friendly situation. I've always liked the look and feel of Fedora (and Red Hat before that) better than any other distribution, but the package management drove me crazy. It seems to be much improved. Debian will remain my main desktop for now, but I did replace the Ubuntu with Fedora 7 on my main work machine. I regularly try new distributions and this is the first time anything has excited me since trying Debian Etch about a year ago. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jun 08, 2007 3:44 PM EDT |
I've always wanted to try Fedora, especially as a live CD, but both of my test systems (both old as the hills) will NOT boot from the CDs -- they just keep cycling and rebooting before anything actually happens. I've used the Fedora and Scientific Linux live CDs, and I get the same endless loop (and never boot into Linux). The Fedora live CD did work on my newer Dell box, and I will probably try the Scientific Linux CD there, too. Guess I'll have to set it up with CentOS (or even real Fedora) at some point. Not that I'm done with Debian by a long shot. |
| Aladdin_Sane Jun 08, 2007 4:42 PM EDT |
>>will NOT boot from the CDs Typically, systems newer than 1998 will boot from CD, given that they are set up right. There are compatibility issues. Older CD drives may not like the newer 700 MB CD's. I think FC4 or 5 was the last Fedora to come on the small size CD's (but they are not Live; install-only). Older KNOPPIX, also would be on the old 650 MB CD's, and is definitely a useful resource to have around "just in case." >>Not that I'm done with Debian by a long shot. Nobody ever is. At 20,000 packages and growing how could one? (Officially 18,733, but my repository collection states 21,737 total available to me.) Of the 6 systems I personally run at home, 5 run some flavor of Debian or derivative. The current stable Debian comes on 21 CD's if you download/buy the whole set. Why do I have a powerful Fedora system in the middle of a nest of Debian systems? It increases the challenge. These 2 distributions are philosophically diametric opposites, getting them to work together is about as much fun as you can have with an in-home computer network. |
| bigg Jun 08, 2007 5:34 PM EDT |
> I've always wanted to try Fedora, especially as a live CD, but both of my test systems (both old as the hills) will NOT boot from the CDs I've got an 8-year old Compaq that will boot Fedora, but of course is way too slow to do anything with it. I'd be interested to hear what happens if you get Fedora installed on an old machine. I would guess Debian is much better. I think the Fedora project has their eyes targeting reasonably new hardware, as I don't see a lot of posts otherwise, but I don't have any evidence to back that up. |
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