I noticed recently that Fedora Core 5 includes Xen (or at least makes it easier to install). I hadn’t used my Debian installation for a while, so I decided to wipe it and install Fedora. After I found the network install (boot.iso) and struggled a little to figure out the full URL I needed to enter for it to find packages, the installation was off and running.
Similar to Debian, it installed some packages I didn’t want, but the installation was fairly painless. It ran a long time, but I’m sure a large part of that was downloading packages. I actually started the installation twice, but the first time I entered a location in Norway (mostly because I had a better idea what path I needed to enter) and the downloads were taking forever. On the second attempt I found a server at NC State, and the installation went much quicker. It would be nice if the installer provided some assistance in identifying a fast mirror and the necessary path.
I did encounter two small problems:
- When it installed the grub bootloader, it incorrectly identified the windows partition, so windows would not boot. After digging around on the internet, I figured out how to modify the grub commands to make it work.
- After booting to Fedora and logging in to the Gnome UI, I ran the software update tool. Surprisingly, there were tens if not hundreds of packages that needed to be updated. I kicked off the process and it ran for at least an hour before I left for work. When I got home I was able to reboot and everything ran fine, so at least the update ran smoothly
More observations to come…