Sunday, November 11, 2007

Fedora 8 Headaches

I should have known better: if it ain't broken, don't fix it. My main system is a 64 bit machine which, until yesterday, ran Fedora Core 5. On top of that I ran several 32-bit distros in VMWare.

The system was just fine, yet I decided to get adventurous and upgrade to the new Fedora 8. Big friggin' mistake. First of all, the installation DVD got consistently stuck at about 30% of Checking dependencies in packages selected for installation...

So I grabbed a Fedora 7 DVD which I burnt a while back and never got around to play with, and tried it out. The upgrade worked (I could not afford a fresh install, since I needed to keep my data). And I should have stopped here. But no, I got greedy and retried the FC8 DVD. No more hanging at checking dependencies... hurray! But wait.

After rebooting the system, pirut (the front end to YUM) does not work anymore (crashes every time), the Gnome desktop forgets to repaint after a while and looks like a Windows 3.1 desktop back when an application leaking GDI resources messed up the entire machine.

Oh, and because of the new 2.6.23 kernel, I had to recompile VMWare's kernel module, which would have been ok, had it worked. But in the good old tradition of kernel developers who don't give fudge about backwards compatibility the kernel source is now incompatible with VMWare Server 1.0.4.

I always thought that it would be easier to test my software if I limited myself to fewer distributions. So thank you RedHat, you are out.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fedora 8 Pain in the Neck

How is it possible that Fedora Core 8 be so shabby? I know that Fedora is a kind of trial version of Red Hat but this is a total turn off. What is the point of releasing a version if users can't even install it?

After starting the DVD install, I kept getting a pop up saying that "You have specified an install method which isn't supported by Anaconda." It turns out that, back on the first page of the installation, you must edit the install option and add the parameters, "apm=off acpi=off pci=noacpi" whatever that means.

After clearing that hurdle, the installer got hung up when checking for dependencies.

Is this how Red Hat typically treats users or is this just a really bad stumble for them?

Anonymous said...

Regards to All
I was upgrading Fedora5 to fedora 8 but got stuck at checking dependency. This is ridiculous...
How could this happen with this Well known Fedora OS???
Can anybody help me???

Anonymous said...

haha... me too, get stuck in installing fedora 8 in vmware at that section "checking dependency" ...... go to hell fedora