Giving up on red hat / Fedora.

Many years ago, Red Hat released version 6.2 of their Linux Distro. That was round about the time that I gradually started being a full time linux user. I had installed different flavours on my computer before but never really got around to being a full time user (since I never managed to get X11 working properly)

By the time that Red Hat Linux 7 was out, I was a full time Red Hat user. By the time Fedora 10 is out, I will not be using their distros any longer. Though upgrading from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 on my media server wasn't too bad, upgrading my Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 9 was a nightmare. It's not the first time that I have had trouble with fedora upgrades either.

I had already tried to do a live update using yum. It starts of an infinite loop of never ending dependencies and makes no attempt whatsoever to do the actual installation. So tried the DVD upgrade. The trouble is that the fedora installer does not recognize my IDE hard drives at all.

There were various suggestion in many blogs, in the end I came up with a suggestion that libata.dma=1 should be passed as a boot time parameter. That did cause the hard drive to be recognized (by this time, I had rebooted at least 20 times).

The installer went forward a few steps and complained about some partitions not being labeled. I had labeled what I thought were important ones but not the others. I didn't know that swap had to be labeled (what's the logic behind that?)

When the fedora installer fails, there is no recovery mechanism you have to reboot. I rebooted into rescue mode and did the labeling. The installer progressed a bit further now and complained about one of the files on the DVD having an incorrect check sum.

That was the last straw. The DVD was downloaded using Jigdo. The mirror that I was redirected to was appallingly slow and it took more than 2days to download the files needed. Less than 50% of the files in fact had to be downloaded, because I had used the 64bit DVD as the base (the 64 and 32 bit versions have more than 1000 files in common)

I know that using Jigdo means I don't have to download the whole DVD again, i can just download the offending file but damned if I will bother.