DgtizeD

Following in my adventures in discovering the total uselessness of fedora core [3,4] I have discovered a whole new set of issues to complain about. I discovered the best way
to fix both the weird iso image sizing/md5sum problem and the unreliability of the cd install medium to successfully install every package is to do a network install. Which works great for me since wuarchive is accessable as a nice reasonable speed of about 8 megs a second. Somehow I don’t think it works well for most people though.

I fail to see why distributions like Fedora core are immensly popular. Fedora core and any corresponding system based on rpm and dependent on the anaconda installer all suffer from the same fatal flaw. If any single rpm fails to install, the entire install process is halted and must be restarted. It doesn’t pause and ask you for a different source for the rpm, in this day and age it could probaby even download the specified rpm online, let alone just wait for you to clean the install disk.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that as near as I can tell Fedora Core install disks are the most finicky disk images I have ever encountered. The only possible way I can even get a system installed is to install bare GUI desktop install.

Yet once the base system is installed the problems still continue. Apparently it’s only possible to manually select all the packages you didn’t get to install with yum. There is a gui for selecting additional packages but it suffers from the same problem the original install gui suffered from, ie a single failure kills the whole process. I don’t know if this is better here or worse, on the one hand at least you can try several different combinations without needing to walk back through the entire disk formatting procedure, but on the other it would definitely seem logical to allow the tool to download packages from a remote location if the cd fails.