bobpeers -> blog

I downloaded and installed Fedora 10 on Wednesday evening so it’s time for my first impressions.

My first problem was that I always boot from the hard drive to avoid burning disks, plus it’s faster, but a change in Anaconda meant that my disk image could not be found. Turns out that you have to copy the images/install.img file from the ISO and place it in the same directory as the ISO file. I’ll have to update my instructions for Fedora 10.

Apart from that the install went very smoothly, no problems at all and at the end my system appeared to function perfectly. I had Apache and MySQL running very quickly plus my file systems set up in fstab.

There are a few irritations though, the first one being a boot message:

Could not detect stabilization, waiting 10 seconds

It seems this is a pretty common problem but to be honest it only slows my booting time but doesn’t have any other adverse affect so it’s not a show stopper. The bugzilla report is here.

The other one was that I had backup up my /home directory to an external usb drive formatted using ntfs. When I reconnected the drive to copy the data back one of the directories showed no contents. Running ls -l in the terminal gave and I/O Error, so the data was there but I couldn’t read it.

Looking at /var/log/messages showed these errors.

Nov 27 21:09:44 localhost kernel: sdb: rw=0, want=312576705, limit=2359296
Nov 27 21:09:44 localhost kernel: attempt to access beyond end of device

and these from the ntfs-3g driver.

Nov 27 20:52:14 localhost ntfs-3g[3035]: Actual VCN (0xaef30fce1d8901e6) of index buffer is different from expected VCN (0x2) in inode 0xdd4.

My solution was to copy the data to another laptop and then copy it over to a FAT32 formatted flash drive before reformatting the usb drive. I’m not sure if this is a Fedora problem or a corrupted NTFS file system but windows had no problem reading the contents.

I’m also getting a kernel panic on an internal FAT32 partition that causing it to become read-only, pretty annoying when my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles are stored there so I can use the same profile between Linux and Windows. The message log looks like this.

Nov 28 21:08:01 localhost kernel: FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda2)
Nov 28 21:08:01 localhost kernel:    clusters badly computed (89 != 88)
Nov 28 21:08:01 localhost kernel:    File system has been set read-only

I’ve repaired the file system so hopefully there’s no more errors, it seems OK so far.

Compared to my problems with Fedora 9 it seems that Fedora 10 is a vast improvement, but I hope these corrupted file system problems are just a coincidence. Overall for a fresh install of a very new release I’m very happy with Fedora 10.

After downloading all 3.3GB of Fedora 9 last night it’s time to undo all my hard work over the last few months since Fedora 8 was released and start again with a fresh install.

Most people would think I’m nuts to do this (my girlfriend certainly does) but I get a strange pleasure out of installing a new release and wiping out the old.

I know I’ll have a few issues on the way (Apache always trips me up at some point even though I’ve got all my conf files backed up) but I’ve found that I’ve got much better at getting my system up and running again.

I’ve thought about setting my home partition on a separate partiton so I can save it between installs but having tried this once it just turned into a mess so now I just recover important files from backup after the install.

After all the testing with creating bootable USB drives and trying many different distributions I guess the inevitable had to happen. At some point in my partitioning/formatting of the USB drive I’ve typed

/sbin/mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sda1

instead of

/sbin/mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb1

Only a small error, replacing sdb1 with sda1, but the result is that I reformatted my main Windows XP Professional NTFS partition to FAT32 and in the process lost Windows. I’m not bothered about data loss as I keep anything important in my Linux partition that’s also backed up to a NAS device. What I’m really bothered about is the prospect of reinstalling Windows. In my experience it goes something like this:

1. Boot using my Acer install disk (pre SP1 from 2003).
2. Wait 30 minutes for install to complete.
3. Reboot, listen to annoyingly loud music while setting my computer preferences for the first time.
4. Reboot again.
5. Spend 2 hours (minimum) customizing and uninstalling the crap put on my computer.
6. Go to Windows update and start the painful process of getting a pre SP1 XP Professional computer to SP2. This usually requires 50 to 100 updates along with maybe 3 reboots on the way. Allow at least 3 hours for this with a fast internet connection.

If all goes well the whole process will take an entire evening. Not forgetting that the fresh Windows install will overwrite my mbr so making my dual boot laptop into a single boot Windows only machine requiring me to boot into a live Linux distribution and then installing GRUB on the mbr again. Phew!

Compared to this exercise in time wasting, installing any new Linux distribution these days seems like a walk in the park. I’ll just have to be extra careful in future when formatting drives.