Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Wednesday 1 April 2009, 8:24 PM
Some Days You Eat the Bear...
and some days the bear eats you. Sigh.
Today was going to be a good day. The Fedora 11 Beta was released yesterday evening, and I had already downloaded it last night at home - both the LiveCD and the full DVD. I was going to burn it first thing today, and then try loading it on all the laptops, to see which ones worked best. The answer: none.
First attempt, the HP 2133 WSVGA (1024x600). Go straight for the throat, with the most difficult system, right? It started out strong, the LiveCD booted perfectly and the graphic installer ran just fine. But when I got to the disk partitioning, it produced an "unexpected exception", and the installer crashed. Ooops. I took a couple more runs at that, with minor changes, always the same result.
Second attempt, the HP 2133 WXGA (1280x768). The LiveCD booted, and the graphic installer looked even better. But it produced exactly the same crash. Not a big surprise, but still disappointing.
Third attempt, the Lifebook S6510. After two failures, play it safe. This one should be dead easy, it's a standard Intel chip set. LiveCD boots ok, installer runs, doesn't crash... looking good as it copies the LiveCD to disk... then it fails, saying that it was unable to mount the target file system. Grrrr! A couple more tries, with the same result.
Last attempt, but not very hopeful by now. The Lifebook S2110, which can sometimes be difficult because of the AMD CPU and ATI graphic controller. Everything goes exactly as for the S6510 - including the "unable to mount" message. Sigh.
I suppose I am doing something wrong, I just don't think that the Fedora Project would make a beta release that fails to even install on four different computers. But it beats me what it is.
Like I said, some days you eat the bear...
jw 1/4/2009
P.S. This was not, unfortunately, and April Fool's joke.
Today was going to be a good day. The Fedora 11 Beta was released yesterday evening, and I had already downloaded it last night at home - both the LiveCD and the full DVD. I was going to burn it first thing today, and then try loading it on all the laptops, to see which ones worked best. The answer: none.
First attempt, the HP 2133 WSVGA (1024x600). Go straight for the throat, with the most difficult system, right? It started out strong, the LiveCD booted perfectly and the graphic installer ran just fine. But when I got to the disk partitioning, it produced an "unexpected exception", and the installer crashed. Ooops. I took a couple more runs at that, with minor changes, always the same result.
Second attempt, the HP 2133 WXGA (1280x768). The LiveCD booted, and the graphic installer looked even better. But it produced exactly the same crash. Not a big surprise, but still disappointing.
Third attempt, the Lifebook S6510. After two failures, play it safe. This one should be dead easy, it's a standard Intel chip set. LiveCD boots ok, installer runs, doesn't crash... looking good as it copies the LiveCD to disk... then it fails, saying that it was unable to mount the target file system. Grrrr! A couple more tries, with the same result.
Last attempt, but not very hopeful by now. The Lifebook S2110, which can sometimes be difficult because of the AMD CPU and ATI graphic controller. Everything goes exactly as for the S6510 - including the "unable to mount" message. Sigh.
I suppose I am doing something wrong, I just don't think that the Fedora Project would make a beta release that fails to even install on four different computers. But it beats me what it is.
Like I said, some days you eat the bear...
jw 1/4/2009
P.S. This was not, unfortunately, and April Fool's joke.
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