rm-rf.ca

Just a quick note on installing Fedora 12 on the wife's new Inspiron 15. She's been a Ubuntu user on her previous laptop for a year or so now as suspend/wireless problems just continually popped up after Fedora updates or upgrades, but with new hardware I figured it was time for another go.

Once installed it was awesome, full resolution (Intel graphics), working sound, working wireless (I sprung for the upgrade to Intel wireless which IMO pays off for anyone planning to run Linux), working webcam, and most impressive of all beautifully working suspend, all without doing anything. Really working nicely for her.

However there was a crippling install bug that I'm sure would block most people looking to get started where the partition changes fail with "cannot commit to disk after 5 attempts" no matter what layout you select. Pretty sure it's bug #533731 and probably the same as a similar bug filed against F11. This one is marked closed on rather shaky grounds, but I'm in the unfortunate predicament that I didn't save the stack trace or try to auto-file the bug when I ran into it.

To get around it I used an F10 live CD (note this is prior to the F11 anaconda storage rewrite IIRC so I believe this is why it works) to create the partition layout I wanted, then aborted the install and switched back to the F12 live CD, which so long as you don't try to actually make any partition changes (aside from changing fs type), works fine.

Sadly this means to re-open the bug I probably need to re-create it, which means I need to trash her partition table (the F12 write does seem to have some effect on the partition table), re-install with the two live CD approach, and re-sync *all* her data. (not a quick process) And to carry it through to completion I probably need to repeat the process to test proposed fixes leaving her effectively without a laptop. Not sure when/if I'll have time to undertake that, but regardless in case anyone lands here looking for a solution, my advice is a Fedora 10 Live CD.