Matthew Newton tries Fedora 2 after his readers suggest him to. After years of using Mandrake, Matt is looking into moving into Fedora if the bugs he encountered get worked out in the final.
Fedora: Trying on a New Hat
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“I took advantage of the bandwidth here and snagged all four ISO disc images for Fedora Core”
“It’s a treat to watch Fedora boot.”
“It was time to download updates.”
“Once you’ve fired off that second command, the package manager begins downloading various packages, a process that takes several hours.”
“A few hours later, it was time to reboot.”
“It’s a treat to watch Fedora boot.”
Is this guy sarcastic, or what?
And while I used to be turned on by eye candy, now I’m more partial to a desktop that is simple, straightforward, and speedy. I want to be creative when I’m using my PC; I want to get work done; I don’t want to spend my days tinkering with the way my windows look and behave.
It seems that more and more people start to feel like that.
Also: but there’s no mistaking Gnome 2.6, with its extremely speedy file manager, Nautilus
That made me grin. Who would have imagined that anyone would ever write a sentence like this with a straight face, when Nautilus 1.0 came out.
It’s too bad Fedora’s default Start menu is so poorly organized and packed to the gills with stuff most users don’t need, however. There’s a hex editor and a “TNEF File Viewer,” for example. (What the heck is a TNEF file?)
This is weird, maybe he selected a full install or something. I can’t imagine that those apps are part of the personal desktop installation.
Do they or will they release stable versions of this distro, or is it simply a test platform for Redhat?
Also, anyone know any distros that are currently shipping with KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, and kernel 2.6? The only two I know of are this and Gentoo. This distro (or at least this version) doesn’t seem quite ready for prime time just yet, and Gentoo doesn’t like my PC for some reason
That’s it.
For RedHat/FedoraCore to truly compete with more ‘solid’ distributions such as Gentoo and Debian, it needs to slow down the update treadmill and do some more thorough testing: gnome 2.6 has been extremely crashy in my experiences with Fedora Core 2 test2, but my Gnome2.4 desktop in Debian is chugging away fine…
You wanna compare stability?
Stable debian with a FC2test2 version, which was whole month and half before release, and running first version of 2.6 gnome?? With SELinux enforced, but not configured?
I think kernel developers already opened 2.7 branch kernel, you should check that stability too and compare it to stable 2.4 and 2.6:)
DEVELOPERS TEST RELEASE means something, don’t you think.
I was running RedHat 9 untill they ended my free up2date. I still hadn’t “dared” to try Fedora Core 1, because everyone was talking about “bugs”. They said it was buggy, but never said what kind of bugs it was.
So, I desided to install Fedora Core 1 (clean install, no update here). And I’m still using it and still waiting for the bugs people are talking about. I use it daily. So, where are the bugs people?
And I’m good at finding bugs. I’ve managed to crash every OS I’ve tested in the strangest way. So, I should’ve found some bugs, shouldn’t I?
Then again, I encountered more bugs when I was using Windows. =]
Core 1 had some embarassing bugs when it was released… But most of them were fixed soon after with an update, that’s probably why you didn’t encounter them. So far my experience with FC1 has been very very good (after those bugs were fixed). Until I decided to upgrade to Rawhide of course…
“And while I used to be turned on by eye candy, now I’m more partial to a desktop that is simple, straightforward, and speedy. I want to be creative when I’m using my PC; I want to get work done; I don’t want to spend my days tinkering with the way my windows look and behave.”
I really agree with this part. While I think it’s great that you *can* tweak your Window Manager of choice all you want – I’m finding more and more that I don’t want to. I like to re-install my *Desktop* system (there’s a world of difference between Desktop and Server) 2 or 3 times a year. And often times when I go from one installation to the next, so much of my system will change that I don’t really feel comfortable/confident in keeping my home directory. I always back it up … but I prefer to install new and just copy over what I need/want.
The point: I lose a lot of customizations (by my own choice) each time I re-install. So a distro that looks good out of the box and has a good set of menu defaults is very much desirable for me. I also like having a nice looking, intuitive control panel so I can configure my system without refering to man pages or HOWTO’s.
“But as I’ve said before, while a geek like myself….”
He can’t be serious that a bout this. No geek would ever use either Mandrake or Fedora, ever.
Lol thats what I thought too.
Why do people always complaining about bugs in free software. Go off and buy Xandros in that case.
“But as I’ve said before, while a geek like myself….”
He can’t be serious that a bout this. No geek would ever use either Mandrake or Fedora, ever.
Nah, it’s not like you’d call Alan Cox or Havoc Pennington serious geeks
He can’t be serious that a bout this. No geek would ever use either Mandrake or Fedora, ever.
This is one of the biggest problems facing Linux. This “holier than thou” attitude.
Tell me, Mr. “Geek”, what kernel do you use? No “real” geek would ever use a kernel written by some one else.
Hey Darius,
I am using Arch linux right now, a nice distro.
And I am running 2.6.5 kernel, kde 3.2.2 and gnome 2.6
Not tried it yet, but any performance improvements? Fedora Core 1 was very slick, but it ran like a dog — no better than WinXP. The boot-up in particular was really slow; for some reason, it starts X twice, and even disabling rhgb and Kudzu it took way longer than Slackware or Debian.
Equally, GNOME on Mandrake and Slackware seems so much faster. Fedora is very polished and well-engineered, but I hope the developers really work on performance. Otherwise, it’s hard to recommend a WinXP user to give it a try — he/she won’t be impressed by something just as sluggish as WinXP.
He can’t be serious that a bout this. No geek would ever use either Mandrake or Fedora, ever.
I do (Fedora), I wanna be productive from the start.
Those were my starts on using Linux, when I was configuring everything (and I must admit I learned a lot about X, WM and DM). Now I just want to start using the system (I only set my Logitech multimedia keyboard, WM to roll-up on doubleclick title and single click, everything else works as it should in gnome 2.6).
Tweaking and configuring was the reason I left KDE. I don’t ever wanna see the pain of kcontrol ever or any preferences dialog in KDE. Face it, software should just work (WITH hidden options of tweaking, all software using this options should NOT be included in distribution), and not “Tweak it to get it started as you’d like”.
Same goes for server services too. Base config should work, nice example is samba or apache.
First config works, but you can tweak as much as your soul wishes (:I do it a lot:)
I’ll almost certainly try Fedora 2 when the final comes out.
I doubt however that it could replace my favorites Suse Pro or Debian Sid (Debian Sid, contrary to what its other name, “unstable” suggests, is normally quite cautious in accepting bleeding edge packages, like now it is the case with Gnome 2.6)
On one point however I absolutely agree with Matthew Newton: Mandrake.
Even if 10.0 official feels a lot less buggy than 9.2, there are still other problems, IMO.
URPMI is one: it doesn’t in any way compare with apt. apt4rpm or yum, which are a lot easier to set up and use.
Then another one is that root graphical login has been disabled. I don’t care if it is a good or bad thing, but I don’t need babysitting, thank you very much. If I did I’d go back to MS.
I thought Test 2 was the current version, but just looked on their site and saw that Test 3 was available. Anyone tried it?
A quick perusal of the Fedora site will tell you all about it.
(I expect you already know that, though. Acknowledging that, however, would reduce your smarky quota.)
What this guy is reviewing is a test release. There’s been no release of Fedora Core 2 for anything other than testing purposes. Wait a few weeks for the real thing.
If you check the feodr page, there is a schedule that they are adhering to.
Core #2 will be release in middle of may.
And if you want a non beta product, there’s always Fedora Core #1.
ooooopps
work = word :S
this is one messed up board. Last week I posted a message correcting an article, next day my post was deleted. Couple of you are bashing each other and yet none of it is deleted. You people are messed up.
People, take your little sissy spats somewhere else, you’re wasting my time a nd many others with your taunts and hissy fits.
Now back on topic, I wonder if Fedora will do a very base install of Linux with just what one needs to get a GUI desktop of choice working or will it throw in everything including the kitchen sink like Redhat of old.
I’m personally enjoying Arch Linux with Kernel 2.6.4 and Gnome 2.6 and its great.
Couple of you are bashing each other and yet none of it is deleted.
its the weekend. The mods need a break too.
You people are messed up.
Its more fun than you think. Comeon try it. I double dog dare you to.
Every new release of Fedora seems to become a bigger disappointment than the last. The buggyness of this system never seems to be a priority of the developers. I can’t say that I believe that things are going to change any time soon, and therefore I doubt that I could ever recomend it to anybody.
Good post.
Pity that it wasn’t even understood that you were being sarcastic.
What does my personality have to do with your man hood? :S
I’m like … rubber … and you are glue, or something … so, like – your insults … ya’know … bounce of me, yo. And stick to you.
Pity that it wasn’t even understood that you were being sarcastic.
The intelligent among you “got it”. Mission accomplished.
This is neither a serious review or a serious distro.
Read the first comment and you get my point.(by russian guy)
xerxex2, what distro do you use? I’d like to know so I can start using it and become one-three-three-seven.
> Sticks and stones may break my bones, but hollow points explode on impact.
sounds funny.
is this a riddle?
what would the solution be?
sorry, as not native english speaker it is difficult to recognize, if this is a riddle or just nonsense
This is not a matter of which distro you use.
I’m not a geek,but I can say that I leaved MDK and Fedora behind me.
This review is a joke.
Magazines like that should start making reviews of Suse and other serious distros instead of wasting time on hobby projects.
Then linux should really be taken serious by non geeks also.
On Eric Raymond’s (who i believe uses Fedora too) website he has an essay about “Hackers” and points us to a funny and interesting link about the word geek
http://samsara.circus.com/~omni/geek.html
User interface is my life? What is that supposed to mean?
Some of you either live on your parents money, or you have too much time, I don’t have time to tweak my GUI. Some of us have paid jobs
Good for you. DO you want a cookie?
Yeah, strawberry one
WTF? Thats the point I was making. A distro like debian/gentoo/slackware dosent hold your hand with ugly guis like fedora.
So up there Gnome is different??? As I said I don’t have time to play with WMs and DMs.
Um I dont use RPM-based distros. AFAIK fmwm is a double click away(RPM). Thats sounds pretty easy.
Yeah, right and mom sets you up with config to start it and config to look just as you please
Which distro still hasn’t got sophisticated installer that takes care of dependancy
mandrake urpmi install ….
debian apt-get install ….
gentoo emerge (or something, don’t really care for this one)
(old) RH rpm -Uhv … (that one sucked)
YDL, fedora yum install …
If you’re such 37337, all of those can be tweaked to compile from sources always
Ignorant? Are you responding to my post? When was I ignorant?
Helloooo,…. the same time you made your first post???
Magazines like that should start making reviews of Suse and other serious distros instead of wasting time on hobby projects.
Yeah, right.
sarcasm[i]
And even more, they should provide reviews like “Linux From Scratch for my grandma”
[i]end of sarcasm
What’s your point of serious distro???. Everyone uses one that he thinks is the most suitable for him.
As long as user (and be it geek or grandma) gets the job done, distro is not important.
It might be a hobby distro to you, but to many of us it is just a plain functional desktop. Some of you on this thread say It is so easy and does everything for you so it sucks, others say its a hobby distro that needs to be tweaked, neither have used it, or did so for only five minutes is my guess. So It’s either a hobby tweak distro, or a brain dead distro right? The fact that both sides think they are right proves Fedora has done It’s job well.
Fedora as a distro is NOT beta/testbed whatever you call it, why do you think SElinux did not make it for default, mozilla isn’t latest, KDE, rhythm box or why 2.6 wasn’t in FC1. It uses new stable releases in most cases but even that is not a guarntee for inclusion.
🙁 forgot an ending bold tag.
🙁 forgot an ending bold tag.
And you call yourself a geek? As if.
I have gnome 2.6 running on mandrake 10 current with 2.66rc2. got kde3.2.2 on FreeBsd 5.2.1 current so i think fedora will get icewm and enlightenment. (but of course a bit of gnome will be installed for streamtuner and gaim.) (maybe i’ll forget gaim if i can get centericq to do msn.) Must not forget mplayer and what will it require?) downloading CD#3 now.
I am running nothing as a server. with that said, i just want all the newbees out there to be aware that the state of current in both mandrake and freebsd has been quite stable, though the ftp sites hosting mandrake10 current are quite in flux and you have to hunt around for one that has all it’s folders and hdlist.cz. but the mandrake urpmi does the job for you, once you got a working ftp host pumping to ya.
and freebsd portupgrade done properly works like a charm and makes you wait in slow anticipation like a new jar of ketchup. and beware freebsd if you don’t want to edit config files, after hunting down what to write in what config file. though with freebsd, i feel the most in control.
stay away from linux as a media player unless you want a new hobby. ( for instance, realplayer does not come out of the box). and mplayer is still in development.
it’s a nice hobby!
Oh yea, looking forward to what fedora has to offer this round. Enlightenment and Fedora.
geek = someone who likes to tamper around with things. Basically wants to get their “hands dirty”. May also want alot of control over system.
Uhm that is not true, that would go more into the direction of a hacker.
Of course hackers don’t have a problem with a readymade distribution either, as long as they get the sourcecode with it. I’m not quite sure what would be the term for a person who wants a lot of control but has no programming skills (though they are very frequent).
A geek is usually used as a term for people who spend a lot more time with a computer than with other people and typically know a lot about it.
I can honestly say that I’m a geek and a Fedora user. And no, I’m not proud of it.
But not ashamed either.
If you doubt me, try “define: geek” in Google, some of the definitions are actually quite funny.
This comment thread has become totally geeky though.
A little from column A and a little from column B. I am 17 you know.
Your answer show that age, yes. I would go even lower to 13 for you.
Then dont. Default KDE 3.2 is damn sexy, dont you think?
1.x wasn’t, then I never looked back. Everytime I use one any KDE app I get bad feeling, and try to avoid them after that. And it’s not the fact of RH-CripledKDE. Preferences-menus-toolbars are the reason. Just too bloated for my taste
I should hope so. I hate people who mooch off welfare. Im proud of you.
Same here.
Blah all I have is blueberry. Mighty good.
Promises, promises. But I shouldn’t be stealing cookie from a little boy.
Nope you said you dont have time to play with GUIs. I meant installers/config tools and ASSuMEd you did too.
So, there’s a point of using yum, apt, urpmi, gentoo emerge? I use yum and apt, and it’s not working different than debian. apt-get install software.
Mom? Dont you be bring’in momma into this. Ill smack you up old skool style.
Don’t forget you’re 17. I can’t beat children, it’s forbiden
Whats your point? Nothing wrong with automated dependacy handling. Actually, Id say its a MUST.
So, no geek-ish here. I see…
Dude you can call me ignorant but if you cant back it up, I cant make a rebutall.
What’s the difference if you do? You don’t make sense anyway.
First answer one question (and then I might make you happy):
What would be the right article? Linux from Scratch for my grandma???.
And remember gentoo or other distros are not 31337, “Linux from Scratch” is the tool to get all the chicks and show who is 31337.
🙁 forgot an ending bold tag.
Shame on you
Hey, i mostly use debian, but i still have a redhat 9 box laying around which i didn’t upgrade to fedora core 1 because upgrades were reported as tricky.
Are upgrades working/supported now?
but your using it now right?
No.
I was brought up decent. I like to share
Still wouldn’t be fair.
You’d have to. Im pretty huge.
Damn, every geek on this planet is huge:) And people think that they are tiny geeks with glasses
Gentoo is a comprmise. Not as many girls, but atleast I have time for them.
You would have more time if you didn’t compile but run the same
while [ 1 = 1 ]; do
./configure && make && make clean
done
in few terminals to impress these girls. Helps if you set up nice to work at low priority. btw. And it’s just as stupid as if you compile but not make changes to the source. For some things I have to do that or at least specify different configure parameters
What you expect me to wipe out VI and start writing my own packages?
At least that, from 31337 as you
Well im coherent enough for you to write a resposne to my posts. So its good enough.
Don’t be because I’m leaving now for a beer, oh, I forgot you’re 17. Tommorow
Yes. me.
Some bugs in anaconda and system-config-display.
A bug with gstreamer and alsa seems hard to fix.
Some bugs with the kernel.
Feedbacks in mailing are quite positive. Test 3 is now my day to day system.
FC2 test 1 : horrible !
FC2 test 2 : work, many troubles with SeLinux.
FC2 test 3 : good (SeLinux disabled by default), some glitchs.
I did it again.
, geez what should my punishment be this time…hmmmm
What releases? There’s been only one release.
Q: why cant gentoo users get laid?
A: cause they are still waiting for their girlfriends to compile
umm..geeks suck, everyone should aim to be nerds, at least they can write in proper english. Plus nerds are smart and they win at Jeopardy. My 2 cents.
btw anyone who uses linux can call themselves geeks, the only people who cannot call themselves geeks are those windows XP users who think because they can use AIM and play Counterstrike, they are geeks…those guys should be the ones getting flamed, not people who make the effort to try the alternative. Linux users cannot afford to get religious, and say that distro X isn’t real because its not hard enough.
Q: why cant gentoo users get laid?
A: cause they are still waiting for their girlfriends to compile
They have girlfriends?!
when i find myself talking to other computer people who have never really had any experience with linux and mention to them that I dont run windows on my computers I run linux. then i explain to them all the neat stuff i can do with it, Id say almost all of the time they are very curious and ask me if i could show them my laptop cause they wanna see it. Usually they follow by asking a bunch of questions like can it do this or that on it, can it network with my windows computers and so on..
Some of their first impressions they have are that they really like how they can customize everything and anything, they like all the eye candy and different things they can do.
most windows users dont wanna have to mess with config files. they want everything to work out of the box and they want the most bleeding edge software availabe. Usually if they find something that doesnt work out of the box that windows can to they get a negitive impression of linux.
I have tried almost every distro around.. i like to play with new versions of all the distros when the come out just to see whats new and improved and im always looking for the best thing i can recommend to windows users. I currently use slack cause everything just works.
when they ask me what distro i think they should try i find myself recommeding suse because i feel that suse will give them the best first impression of linux. Almost all the time everything will work out of the box and it has quite a bit of eye candy
Downloading the torrent DVD ISO – been wanting to try something with kernel 2.6, and this is probably the best way to get it
Downloading the torrent DVD ISO – been wanting to try something with kernel 2.6, and this is probably the best way to get it
No, no it isn’t. It’s unfortunate for you Linux guys and gals, but there are currently no decent, stable distros that ship with the 2.6 kernel.
Fedora Core 2 test 3 is among the worst of them.
No, no it isn’t. It’s unfortunate for you Linux guys and gals, but there are currently no decent, stable distros that ship with the 2.6 kernel.
I am using Arch linux with 2.6.5 and it seems just fine.
I am using Arch linux with 2.6.5 and it seems just fine.
That’s all good and fine, but is that a stable release?
It’s called success. Every online service which is open to the public for contributions will quickly degrade into a mess once enough users take notice of it. Self-moderation systems like the one of slashcode can improve this, but they are a lot of work to do right.
Also OSNews has still the option to implement user accounts, which would reduce the noise factor a bit.
That’s all good and fine, but is that a stable release?
I guess it depends what you mean by stable, does it work fine for me — yes, so to me i would consider it stable. But Arch does not call it an official stable release if thats what you mean.
From the website:
Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution targeted at competent linux users (read: not afraid of the commandline)
Next …
But Arch does not call it an official stable release if thats what you mean.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I mean. Therefore, it seems like my original statement still stands.
Darius drop by http://www.archlinux.org they ship with kernel 2.6 kde 3.2 and gnome 2.6..
“those guys should be the ones getting flamed, not people who make the effort to try the alternative.”
Why try the “alternative” when what you have at the moment works just fine for you?
So if you use a distro and it is stable for you.. you still shouldn’t consider it stable. But if a site labels it stable then it is stable?
Anyways, Darius. Yeah that line is a bit scary at first. Arch doesnt have a GUI installer, it is text based. But is still quite easy to install, I think u can go through the whole install with about 5 menu choices. To make it easy, they just have a Auto selection for each part. You may need to use the command line a bit..but there is no compiling of apps or anything like that. And a full system update is as easy as: pacman -Syu
Just my 2cents, I am using it and am quite happy with it.
I think Arch would be little overkill for my purposes, as I just wanted to get something up and running with kernel 2.6 and to check out what the new Gnome and KDE are like. I don’t plan on actually using it for more than a day or so.
In that case, try out a liveCD that contains the software you want.
In that case, try out a liveCD that contains the software you want.
AFAIK, I don’t think there is a live CD with kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2, and Gnome 2.6
I know what you are but what am I?
This is the greatest thread EVER! =D
I believe that the new Suse 9.1 liveCD has the 2.6 kernel and 3.2.1 Kde, not sure if it has 2.6 gnome tho.
ftp://ftp.oregonstate.edu/pub/suse/suse/i386/live-cd-9.1/LiveCD-9….
[offtopic]
Why the hell everyone here is bashing every OS article? Because you don’t use it, it doesn’t mean it’s bad. I don’t use Debian but doesn’t say it’s bad. So moderators mod all these people down. I’m getting sick of this pollution of this nice site. Like 20% of the people here is ontopic the rest are just offtopic/flame comments.
[/offtopic]
As I could see the FC2-t3 is pretty decend compared to the previous versions of FC2. I’m glad they disabled SELinux by default, it might be a nice feature but have to implent it my own way
There are some glitches left, but i’m sure they are gone in the final version.
If you wish to try out a smooth gnome 2.6 system install slackware and dropline(and compile the 2.6 kernel yourself
)
– my couple of cents
As someone modded-down said, this place is a train-wreck now. When people aren’t arguing, they’re mouthing off on matters about which they know very little; most regulars here are ‘armchair OS engineers’ and believe they know what’s best for anything.
Never mind that they’ve never contributed a line of code to a project in their lives — they just want to waffle on ignorantly and tell coders what they should do. It’s laughable, and sometimes even Eugenia gets things so disastrously wrong that it’s worrying.
Screw it. I come here for quick news updates on OS developments, but otherwise it’s worth very little. OSNews.com is not remotely well-respected in serious computing circles and among real coders.
Trigger-happy mods: this is obviously OT, so you can either waste time modding it down or try to understand what the problems with OSNews are. Putting your hands over your ears and silencing people won’t make the problem go away…
I am impressed with fedora too. It seems faster on my dual 1 ghz then redhat 9. Other then not being able to get any higher resolution than 800×600 its awesome.
often if your monitor can have higher resolutions than those available, the problem is that the HorizSync and/or VertRefresh settings are wrong in your XF86Config-4 file. if you look up your specs and enter them correctly (along with adding the resolutions you actually want to the Display subsections of the Screen section of that file) it should work properly after you restart X.
Calm down woman. If you don’t want to visit Osnews then don’t. I think this site is pretty good,every OS got it’s shot. I think that this thread became screwed because the review sucked. You can’t make a serious test in 20 min. The guy was just on his way home for the weekend and “snagged” something together. I can agree with you though that this site may not get respect of “real coders” and never will if reviews like this are linked.
really, the comments on the articles are as bad as on most other sites. keep reading the articles, they are good, and ignoe the comments-section completely…
regards,
marillchen
“stick and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me”
An old english proverb. It basically means that one should not be hurt by that which others say.
“hollow point tips explode on impact”
A marketing phrase decribing a particular kind of munition which is most aptly used for killing.
Mixing these two statements together forms a rather ironic juxtaposition. “hollow point tips” is literally “overkill”-as in far more damaging than “sticks and stones”.
Yoseline,
Don’t get too upset about this thread, or for that matter OSNEWS. This thread is the result of boredom. Most of these comments were posted over the weekend-when there was little in the way of new or interesting “news” items. The article upon which this thread is formed said literally nothing-ok we now know the author has chosen to try fedora and ….. well nothing. We know nothing about his experiece with fedora-other than about downloading ISO’s and using yum for package updates. Hmmm, trully in-depth reporting at it’s finest. If you stick around long enough here at OSNEWS you will actually find a couple of though provoking posts-though they occur rarely, once in a blue moon, when they do come they are great-so don’t miss ’em……
>>Then another one is that root graphical login has been disabled.
It hasn’t been disabled. The icon for the root user is just hidden. Open up the KDE Control Center, go to System/Login Manager, go into Administrator mode, click the Users tab, and in the “Hidden Users” section UNCHECK root.
I’ve tried Fedora and it’s the last time i’ve ever tried it. I’ve always had my disk detection in my bios at auto which always resulted in LBA. Never had a problem with that.
Then i installed fedora, told diskdruide to use an ext3 partition, wrote partitiontable to dev/hda and there it went. After i rebooted i noticed my bios was suddenly telling me my disk were in CHS format instead of LBA but never the less, fedora booted. But then i tried XP again, it refused to boot and gave me an “error loading operating system” message. Partition magic was unable to fix this issue and my ntfs partition was lost. After trying many many distro’s i now had found the one which isn’t able to read an ntfs partition because of their weird anti ntfs policy, but is able to destroy your ntfs. Good job!
Luckily i had a tool to recover part of my ntfs partition but still xp wasn’t able to install again. The solution:
Forcing the bios to use LBA mode with the disk. XP was able to install again.
Here’s a more technical explaining of the bug.
The BIOS tries to adapt its mode based on the
partition table.
So here is what happened:
– kernel 2.6 doesn’t try to give the logical geometry, and gives the
physical geometry instead [2]
– diskdrake uses the physical geometry to generate the CHS information
(which is a broken duplicate of the linear sector number)
– the BIOS sees the partition table uses a different CHS geometry, and
adapt to it
– … and Windows computes the CHS to read its stage1.5 based on the
previous geometry that it keeps in its boot sector. Alas the CHS
doesn’t get the same sector and Windows’s boot dies (with very bad
error detection)
You need to read a book on how BIOS works, an OS can not change how your BIOS sees your physical disk. It sounds to me like you changed your BIOS, partitioned your disks, and then later realized the oops but at that point it was too late. Your BIOS can never adapt to a partition because it does not know what a partition is. All it does is a basic health check and provide hooks to hardware functions. Once your BIOS initializes, it bootstraps the boot sector and unloads itself. The bootsector contains the code read into memory to read and boot from a partition.
Why the heck should i mess up something in my Bios? It always had the setting auto which resulted in LBA. What does auto mean? Well that it detects how the Harddisk layout is, LBA or CHS. How do you else explain how it suddenly changed, and what use would auto be if auto didn’t detect a thing.
Info:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-April/msg00288…
And here’s a quote of a guy named buck who posted at osnews:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6169
Quote: ”
I’ve just tried Fedora test1 and it’s UGLY. Not UI-wise of course, but the configuration, never detected an old SB128, the bottom panel kept freezing totally, the kernel didn’t boot after recompiling etc etc. FreeBSD relies more heavily on command line, but it’s so straightforward… You always know where the stuff that you need is, and the documentation is there. AND the bootloader actually works, because Fedora rendered my XP install unbootable with grub due to BIOS started seeing that HD drive in CHS mode instead of LBA mode. All in all, Go FreeBSD!
“
The OS did NOT change how his BIOS see’s his drive. This is just another classic example of a guy that doesn’t know what he is doing trying to explain what he does not understand.