Fedora 11 install is a fail [solved]

[Gomer_X]

You guys were asking on the show last night if anyone has installed Fedora 11 yet. I'm not usually a distro hopper and I don't think I've EVER installed Fedora in the first 2 weeks after a release but I went ahead and gave it a try tonight.

Sorry to say I'm typing this from Debian, not a new Fedora install. I tried several times and did everything I could think of but no luck.

It kept bombing out because 2 Gnome packages (Gconf2 and Gconf2-dbus) conflicted with each other. I looked and haven't read of anyone else having the same problem. I did find a thread on the developer mailing list talking about the conflict, but it shouldn't have made it to production.

Oh well. Maybe it will sort itself out.

I did a fuller write-up on my blog if anyone is interested.

[Chess]

That's a bummer. I've done 3 flawless installs on three different machines including my eeepc 1000he and a Thinkpad x61s (so both 32 bit and 64 bit versions) and have not encountered that. I have to say that I find Fedora 11 to be quite impressive.

[CptnObvious999]

I have installed Fedora 11 on my laptop and media-center and both worked great, however I did do the KDE install so maybe that made the difference. Very polished and nice distro. Have had a little trouble with PulseAudio though.

[Gomer_X]

I went back and gave it another shot last night. I wiped the Fedora partition completely and started from scratch. This time it installed just fine, although I didn't enable any repositories. It seemed to work OK but I didn't have time to do a full upgrade to the latest packages.

The first thing I did was mount my Debian /home partition so I could start seeding the Fedora x86_64 install DVD on bittorrent again. The partition mounted OK and I got Transmission up and running but it wouldn't seed and couldn't find any peers. I messed with the firewall a bit and couldn't find anything wrong with the default setup. I thought SELinux might be blocking things because the DVD iso file was on a partition without proper contexts but I didn't find any errors. At this point is was very late so I gave up and went to bed.

I also found out that the Gconf2-dbus package that was giving me problems is OLPC specific and shouldn't be installed at all. No idea why the system was trying to install it. It's possible it was a momentary hiccup in one of the repo mirrors.

I'll try a few more installs to see if I can reproduce the error and maybe do a full write-up later.

[Chess]

I recommend you install the yum-fastestmirror and the yum-presto plugins. These will enable yum to search for the fastest mirror and the deltarpm (presto) support for 70-90% smaller downloads for updates.

[eddie]

We just net installed f11 on an old Dell G1 (Celeron-333 with 256m ram) and it actually works under gnome. It was not as unresponsive as I thought it would be. We immediately installed icewm and started using that desktop instead though. It came with flash 3.5 beta 4 among other goodies.

[jturning]

They definitely rushed this roll out. Normally I wait a month because they're cutting edge and issues get fixed. But the last preupgrade I did from Fedora 9 to 10 worked flawlessly when it came out, so I tried again. The preupgrade couldn't setup my display correctly to where I could do the upgrade. Same thing with the DVD upgrade, and this is a pretty standard HP laptop with Nvidia graphics. I could have researched the command do do the vesa display, but I ended up just doing a fresh install to see how ext4 works. One of the DVD options was doing an install with basic video driver which should have been an upgrade option since they screwed up something there. The install was pretty quick after setting up the partitions how I like (separate home partition...). After install I enabled extra repos, installed the Nvidia driver and Broadcom support which was super easy, and I was good to go. Now just some tweaking to get everything setup just how I like.

Positive impressions, seems nice and snappy with a faster boot up. The Yum Presto plugin makes updates snappy, and Fedora is a heavy update distro especially compared to my Slackware desktop. Firefox 3.5 seems pretty snappy and I haven't encountered any crashes. The 64 bit flash has been fine too. Seems nice, so unless there is another major annoyance, I'll keep running Fedora on this laptop until Fedora 12. But I'll definitely wait a month before upgrading unless there is a feature I just have to have.

Bugz

[jturning]

If you're playing with Fedora 11 this is a good site with help:

http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/161/26/

I used the chart to edit my grub.conf file and get the graphical boot working. Used a few other tips as well since it's been while since setting up a brand new Fedora install.

Bugz