On Sun, 2009-08-30 at 20:37 -0400, Robert L Cochran wrote:
Well, to answer my own question: you cannot use the version of install.img which is on the Fedora 12 x86_64 DVD. You can certainly dd the image to the USB stick, but after that the stick can't be automagically mounted (it generates SELinux errors in enforcing mode and one gets false error messages that the device is write-protected.) Nor can you boot to it.
Just to make sure of this, I used dd to put an archlinux netinstall image on the same USB stick, and it booted just fine.
So I reluctantly burned the DVD and used that to install the Alpha. Obviously, the installer isn't working right: X failed to start,
Well, that doesn't mean the installer's broken. It could mean X is broken. :) What's your hardware?
and it booted into a text-mode installation. I had no opportunity to do hard drive partitioning and there was likewise no chance to select packages or package groups, either. The text mode installer is blindingly fast: it installed 184 packages (count 'em, 184!) which is almost nothing, and left me with a glorious non-X, non-graphical, runlevel 3 installation that doesn't even do firstboot.
I ran `yum update` and updated most of these packages -- all except dhclient and one of it's dependencies.
Then I tried to `yum groupinstall` X but many of the packages needed couldn't be found by yum. I even installed yum-presto to see if the needed packages were available as drpm's.
Rawhide is rather broken at the moment due to OpenSSL excitement, that could be related.
At that point, I gave up on the Alpha. I know it will improve in time so I'm not at all whining.
Seeing the opportunity, I had a ball installing Arch Linux on that hard drive. I don't know why others might think Arch is ahead of Fedora...I only got a 2.6.30 kernel from their 2009.08 release,
Well, kernel 2.6.31 hasn't actually been released yet, in all fairness. We're shipping pre-release versions of it in Rawhide. I wouldn't expect any 'stable' distro to ship a pre-release kernel (though hey, we did it in Mandriva more than once...)