Fedora 13

Source

OK, F13 is not out yet, but testing their Alpha release made me wonder: it's 2010 and we're about to release Fedora 13, but we're still unable to boot off GPT disks? And when installing a headless system, we're still required to use VNC or mess with cryptic Kickstart files and hack together our own partition tables, as Anaconda doesn't let me customize the disklayout when booting in textmode.

So, that's two major annoyances and I haven't even installed the system yet :-\

Oh, and while I'm now fiddling with system-config-kickstart, I'm required to install intltool: 

$ yum install intltool
Install      48 Package(s)
Upgrade       0 Package(s)
Total download size: 33 M
Is this ok [y/N]:
vs. 
$ apt-get install intltool
0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1136kB of archives.
After this operation, 2949kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
-- wtf? Oh, and does anybody know what import meh is and where I get it from? 

$ yum install system-config-kickstart
Install     212 Package(s)
Upgrade       0 Package(s)
Total download size: 130 M
Is this ok [y/N]:
-- ? Speechless...

Update

There's now a workaround for the GPT disk issue, and it seems to work with FC13-Alpha and FC13-Beta.RC5. But FC13-Alpha then just hangs after/while installing the very last package. The box is pretty much frozen and I can't see the syslog any more, I suspect something like #564330 or 571241.

With FC13-Beta.RC5, Xorg is working in a VirtualBox VM, then the kernel panics. Well, let's set up a serial console for this VM:

  • Enable the serial console in VirtualBox (COM1, use host-pipe, create pipe, /tmp/fedora.log)
  • After starting the VM, we can read on the socket with "nc -U /tmp/fedora.log"


    • We still have to tweak our bootloader: 
    grub> [...]  console=ttyS0,115200n8 console=tty0 \
          updates=http://people.fedoraproject.org/~jwrdegoede/updates-572488
    However, shortly after booting, Fedora somehow detached itself from ttyS0. So we just tell rsyslog to log everything to the serial console:
    $ grep ttyS0 /etc/rsyslog.conf
*.*         /dev/ttyS0
$ kill -1 RSYSLOGPID

    Let's see if we can capture that oops now...