Friday, June 01, 2007

Abject failure to install Fedora 7

I was very excited about the release of Fedora 7 yesterday, as I've been a loyal Fedora user since Fedora Core 3 was released back in 2004.

You'll notice my use of the past tense. This is because I spent most of today trying to get Fedora 7 to install. I'm extremely glad I took a full backup of my files, as my various attempts to get the installer to run without crashing hosed my existing Fedora Core 6 system and bootloader. It was extremely random; despite having verified checksums of all the installation media, run the CD checks recommended and all previous versions of Fedora Core having installed very smoothly, Anaconda would randomly die or hang at some point during the installation process. When it crashed just after formatting my root partition, I gave up.

I was saved by two things: my careful backing up of /home before the attempted upgrade, and the ability to use my other box to burn a Kubuntu CD. I now have a system which behaves almost exactly like my previous system (hey, it runs KDE and Emacs, what more do I need) and gEDA even compiles.

I'll see how I get on with Kubuntu: other gEDA developers use Ubuntu with success, so hopefully I won't find any need to reinstall Fedora Core 6.

Update: I'm now using Fedora 7, having not really "got" the whole Ubuntu/Debian thing. Installing from a USB stick got around the CD problems I was having quite successfully.

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