Fedora 19 Installed on XCP 1.6

Well I just wanted to install Fedora 19 and didn’t want to move hardware around right now plus I need to move some web/game server functions to virtual systems again anyway so I built an Fedora 19 guest system on one of my XCP 1.6 nodes to play with for a bit.

They didn’t change much on the Anaconda Fedora install, you can still only select one group of packages i.e “Web”, “Infrastructure”, “Gnome Desktop”, Cinnamon Desktop”, “KDE Desktop”, etc.. Someone sincerely believes that limiting us to the selections they feel are necessary to your environment for a simple UI (User Interface) install is a ok. So now you have to take the time to build a kickstart or manually install the packages you wanted after initial install. Not very time efficient when you just want to do a quick UI install as opposed to installing a group of systems using kickstart.

They also kept the the partitioning User Interface clumsy and illogical, at least to me it is. I like the way the let you select the disk or LUN’s to use but when you go to partition its a mess. Looks like they want you to declare your mount points before you have even created the volume groups and decided which disks will belong to what volume groups!

Once in the partition screen you can use the drop down to create an LVM volume group but you have to already have to have a mount point selected and in my case that mount point belonged to another disk and volume group. I was able to get it to work but you have to temporarily assign the highlighted mount point to the new volume group, create your new mount point making it about 1mb and then switch the mount points around later and adjust the sizes. Then you have to make sure you double-check to insure when you highlight the mount point it shows the proper size and volume group designation! Then the interface kept dying on me so I decided to add the extra disks and volume groups manually after the initial install along with the extra software packages I want.

After everything is selected you hit click install and then it asks you for a “root” password and to create a regular system user and that password while you watch it start the process of installing packages below. That is way to bizarre and backwards. This should come before you hit install.

I love change and there has to be change. We are conditioned that way as humans to survive because if we didn’t change and adapt in a world that hurtles around the sun and has winds, water and other elements that change the environment we do not survive.. Digressing here but in the Linux world for some reason we have lost something, its almost as if the people developing this are former MS Windows people bent on taking away options and hiding things. I understand the need for more acceptance to keep this going but taking away options and ASSuming everyone wants to dumb down options is the wrong way to go.

Anyway got it installed had to do a bunch of manual stuff no problem just extra time plus it was able to pickup my proper timezone here in Fedora 19 as opposed to Fedora 18 so some progress. Plus after all of these years of using Linux since the early/mid ’90’s I still love it and its my OS of choice but my old friend BSD is a peeking around the corner!