fedora 18 installer...very good, but no dual boot w/mageia

[oj]

I just installed fedora 18 on a couple computers and found the new installer works fine. It wasn't any more or less 'disorganized' or 'confusing' than any other distro, including doing custom disk partitioning which I see is one of the big complaints people have had. Works for me. It looks like it's going to evolve swiftly into a very capable tool.

Unfortuantely the one system I hoped to actually use I installed on a laptop that has Mageia 2 installed already. My first 4-5 attempts to set up dual boot with the two have failed. I'll be digging into this over the weekend, but there may be one or two insurmountable problems, fedora used grub 2 (and installed the images who-knows-where) and it used LVM. We'll see, but I'm not going to lose sleep over this one. (btw Mageia works, I'm using it atm)

I don't see what all the stink is over the new fedora installer. It's worked well on 2 installs now, one on an old beater system that ended up completely set up and ready to go out of the box. Next up: try whole disk encryption.

[marast78]

I only briefly tried it in VBox. Non-EFI setup went fine in GUI, but even if it wasn't, it's possible to use 'basic video driver' so it would work in nearly 100% of cases, if the installer doesn't choke on something else, which happens with every distro out there sometimes.
Problematic seems to be the EFI boot part. There is no option for VESA driver and it's probably the reason why it refuses to install in GUI mode on some systems in EFI mode, including VirtualBox. I'll take some time to search later if it can be remedied, too busy to fiddle with my setup again.
This installer is what RHEL7 will be based on, so it must be otherwise rather solid stuff, but sure, RedHat will polish it for it's needs more.

[oj]

If I'm not mistaken, nomodeset will call the vesa driver, they eliminated the xdriver=vesa as redundant. At least that's what I gathered from some discussion forums where people were hammering out f18 boot issues.

BTW at first I was having a hard time getting the installer to boot past the grub menu, it would go black and sit for a long time apparently doing nothing. I finally got the graphics going and saw that immediately after the grub menu the system goes into some kind of integrity check, which took more than 5 minutes. It said I could skip with esc but pressing esc didn't stop it. I wonder if I had just walked away and waited 10 minutes the system would have come back alive and gone on with the install.

You might want to just wait it out for a time if the screen goes blank right after the grub screen. I'm going to give it a shot here today.

I also see grub legacy options are gone, fedora does not want to support something the upstream vehemently denounces as a bad idea. (eg installing boot loader to a partition) Fedora talks about installing it's grub package in the MBR and using it for multi boot systems, forgoing chain loading, which I've read is 'fragile' in some instances.

I think my dual boot problem could be solved by reinstalling f18, not using LVM and installing grub2 to the MBR. I didn't change anything in the boot loader options, so I think it may have skipped it, seeing as it detected the presence of a boot loader already.

[oj]

Dual boot works now, I'm in Mageia atm but also have f18 on board. Both work pretty good on this older hardware.

The issue was indeed LVM. The only difference this time was that I used standard partitions for fedora. I did have problems with the fedora partitioner, it would get to a point where it reported 50 GB free space but when I tried to set this to /home it said there was no space on the disk. I had to restart the installer to get through this, but ultimately I booted Mageia and used diskdrake to set the partitions. Then in the fedora installer I just used "reclaim space" on them by selecting mount points and checking the "format" button.

Note that the partitioner will not make the changes in mount points until you select the format option.

There is no place to change the boot loader behavior as far as I can see. It installed grub2 and added Mageia to the menu.lst. In other words it's using fedora's boot loader, which is what was recommended in all the forums I looked through trying to figure this out.

With these 2 systems on here I have everything I could ever need, not the least of which being a mobile platform for evangelizing about Linux in general and Mageia in particular. I'm a happy camper, a big thanks to both the fedora and the Mageia teams.

Just like Mandrake back in the day, it just takes a couple trial and error whacks at it and you'll know your way through this new fedora installer. I'm going to keep testing fedora, so I'll keep my eyes peeled for any options with boot loader settings...

[marast78]

Yes, this several minutes pause is somewhat normal on more systems it seems.
The nomodeset parameter indeed defacto makes the video to fall back to VESA, as majority of today's kernel drivers require KMS. If KMS is not possible, VESA is used.
Problem is with UEFI. 'Basic video' fallback is not possible there, so the installer must detect the video card as well as possible to avoid that problem. There is one report of e.g. Matrox card for which intel driver was being loaded, hence no video. Again, because of UEFI, yet other unnecessary problems exist..

[marast78]

K, so I finally made time to install F18. Here's the result: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthrea ... ost1629187
Aaah. It's somewhat sad, but life is life.