Fedora 9 -- the live CD ... and why it's not working out

This wasn't the first time I tried Fedora — or Fedora 9 for that matter — via live CD. I must have burned my first CD of the distro soon after it was released.

Now that I was resolved to replace Debian Lenny on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) with ... something that didn't have Lenny's seemingly unsolvable screen-refresh issues, I decided to give Fedora 9 a try. I knew that it was a little less than three weeks until the release of Fedora 10, but since I was ready now, Fedora 9 it was.

I first tried the live CD on my Dell desktop. It booted, but not after the usual Fedora disc access errors, which take up a minute of time before the disc boots and then seem to have no effect whatsoever on subsequent loading and performance of the OS and applications.

Fedora 9 loaded, I configured the network and then ran the system for awhile on the Dell.

Then I needed to prepare the Gateway. I plan to keep Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the main distro on the laptop, so that part of the installation was going to stay exactly as is.

Before wiping Debian off the drive, I rsynced the Lenny /home files to Ubuntu's /home partition. (I did forget to archive my Puppy 3.01 configuration, which I'm not happy about losing.)

Previously I had Ubuntu set up to have its own separate /home partition on the extended partition. Debian, however, had the root and /home directories on the same partition.

This time I wanted each GNU/Linux distribution to have their own separate /home partitions.

Here's how I divided up the 30 GB hard drive:

I started with a 1 GB swap partition on hda1. Then came Ubuntu's root partition on hda2 and space for a Fedora root partition on hda3, about 10 GB each.

The rest of the drive was configured as extended partition hda4. On that extended partition, Ubuntu's /home directory was living on hda6, and that left hda5 for Fedora's /home directory.

This way, if any of these two distros needs to be replaced, the /home partitions should remain intact and can be used as /home for any other Linux distros that could potentially take their place.

I also planned to keep Ubuntu's GRUB bootloader on the master boot record with a stanza in its menu.lst chainloading to a second GRUB (or LILO or ...) located on the secondary distro's root partition. I've found that setting the bootloaders up this way solves all problems with menu.lst updating when new kernels roll through the two distros on the drive.

Before I began, I downloaded a new Fedora 9 ISO and burned a new disc. I booted the new disc on the Gateway, and while I got the same errors early in the boot sequence on the Gateway as I did on the Dell, the disc did load, and I was in the GNOME desktop in fairly good time.

After checking out Fedora for awhile in the live environment, I was ready to install.

I always like live CDs that allow you to install while in the live environment. It's one of the things that makes distros like Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS so successful. You can try the distro with a live CD and if the hardware responds even halfway well, install right then and there.

I clicked Fedora 9's "Install Fedora to disc" icon.

Nothing happened. I clicked again. And again. Still nothing.

I rebooted the live CD and tried to install again. It wasn't working.

At this point I could've begun downloading the install images and burning them to disc, but I didn't.

I liked the fact that Fedora has a fairly deep repository that included most of the applications I wanted. I wasn't crazy about needing to upgrade every six months — especially upon seeing the Fedora Project's recommendation that you do a full install instead of the kinds of upgrades you're encouraged to do in Debian and Ubuntu (as in changing your sources.list and update/dist-upgrade).

And I don't know whether it was my hardware that refused to install Fedora from the live CD, or a glitch that affected every user of the live image, but I was ready to move on.

Wiping Debian Lenny from the drive was a big step, since I'd been running the distro for well over six months on the laptop and had grown quite fond of its many improvements over Etch. But my X configuration's refusal to cease slowly degrading during every computing session made it easy to run Ubuntu more as well as consider jumping back into distro-hopping mode for a secondary system.

At this point, it's all about having a reliable pair of distros on the laptop that each allow me to get work done without causing problems.

Coming up next: Now that Debian Lenny was gone and Fedora wouldn't install, I turned my attentions to CentOS 5. I had done a couple of successful CentOS 3 installs on a different system, and ever since Red Hat shook up its Enterprise Linux with newer packages and a greater emphasis on the desktop experience with version 5.2, I had been eager to see how it played out in CentOS's 5.2 clone of RHEL.