As i said last week, Red Hat has released Fedora Core 8. I was pretty anxious to get it and install it on my own desktop, even though I had it downloaded pretty rapidly it took me a few days before I installed it.

I wanted to do a complete re-installation, this in general is really what you want to do. I had some bad experiences with a Fedora Core 7 upgrade so that was a no go.

So, I started the installation Tuesday, clicking through the new installation wizard powered by Anaconda 11.3.0.50. I noticed the nice “Additional Software” option during the installation, which made a connection through the internet to get the latest packages. Very nice indeed and very hopefull, I took the time to select the perfect packages and include for instance Xfce.

Unfortunately my enthusiasm was about to be crushed like a little ant.

The installation started, I got the text “Transferring image, …”, but then suddenly I also got the notice: “An error occurred transferring the install image to your hard drive. This is probably due to a bad media”.

What the hell? The harddisk is just fine, I checked it before the installation as for the DVD that was fine as well during the media check it said “PASSED”. The only option i had was “OK”, so i pressed that. It promptly went to “Starting install process. This may take several minutes…”.

Ok, perhaps they were just continuing with the installation from the DVD, I figured it didn’t matter that much and went for a drink. When I returned I was treated to the following:

Exception Occured

An unhandeld exception has occurred. This is most likely a bug. Please save a copy of the detailed exception and file a bug report against anaconda at http://bugzilla.redhat.com.

Well, that sucks! The installation stopped and I’m left with an uninstalled computer, but as I’m all for open source and fixing bugs I figured I would file the bug report. I noticed i had the following option to get the bug report to Redhat: “Save to Floppy“.

UHM??? Are you freaking kidding me? A FLOPPY, i can save my bug report to a FLOPPY! We are living in 2007, this isn’t 1990! PC’s don’t come with floppies anymore, mine doesn’t even have one so how am i supposed to save this bug report? Seriously folks, you need to offer BETTER ways to file bug reports, for instance:

1. Mail report to anywhere I want
   You can get repositories in Anaconda, sending mail shouldn’t be that hard
2. Save to a USB device
   It’s really not that hard to mount something, i could probably have done it myself at the prompt but was too pissed to put effort into it.
3. Upload to a HTTP form/page
   It shouldn’t be that hard having some form up where bug reports are filed/uploaded, hell you guys could easily let me file the complete bug report from within the installer. Sure it will take some time to build but it will also generate a LOT MORE bug reports

So, there i was with a broken installation. I retried many times and failed. In the end i figured it would be a good idea to burn the DVD on another workstation and on another DVD. This wasn’t heading anywhere.

The DVD that i was currently using was a Octron DVD+R Recordable (RW) (serial J-403H02407146434D07) and it was PASSING the media check but FAILING during the installation throwing me Exceptions. So, i tried a different DVD, this time a Intenso DVD-R Recordable. This one PASSED the media check as well, however the installation went without ANY issues.

So, to conclude, there are a few things that can be wrong here:

• Anaconda can’t handle installation from a RW DVD
• Anaconda can’t handle DVD+R (I strongly doubt that, I’ve always used DVD+R)
• The MEDIA check in Anaconda isn’t working properly
• My burner is doing something that Anaconda doesn’t like, the working DVD was burned on a different desktop.
• K3b is doing something that Anaconda doesn’t like, the working DVD was burned with Imgburn (Windows *sigh*)

Either way, I’m quite done with Anaconda at the moment. I feel they should seriously put more effort into optimizing the ways we can send in bug reports, Save to floppy is a serious joke.

So, time now to actually start enjoying Fedora Core 8. Hopefully i’ll be back with better impressions soon