On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:35:37 -0800
Robert Miesen <[email protected]> dijo:

> Out of curiosity, did you make sure to format the non-data storage
> partitions? If you didn't format partitions such as /, you will almost
> surely end up with leftover programs and configuration files from the
> previously installed GNU/Linux distribution messing up your new install.

There were only two partitions, / and swap. When I installed Unstable I
told the installer to use the whole hard disk. It created and formatted
a new / and a new swap.

The old Grub was in the MBR, and the installer should have overwritten
it with the new Grub. During the install I had a choice of Grub 2, Grub
1.5 or LILO. I started with 2.0, and when I got the error message that
Grub had failed I used the back button to try 1.5. That failed also, so
I went back again and used LILO. But when I installed LILO I told it to
install it to sda1 instead of sda, thinking that doing so would make it
easier to fix later. That was a big mistake because it left me with a
messed up Grub 2 in the MBR. And, unlike Grub 1.5 that I am familiar
with, repairing a broken Grub 2 is challenging. The available commands
are useless and there is little on the net in the way of help or
documentation. I'm sure that will change in the future, but for now,
Grub 2 is just not ready.

It's really annoying when an install takes an hour and a half over the
net, and then screws up at the very end, leaving the user with an
unbootable system. 

I was so bummed at Debian and all the problems I have had with it that
last night I installed Fedora 12. As expected, package management sucks
compared to what I have been used to in Ubuntu. But otherwise it is
very nice and I have not had a single major problem so far. And I note
that it installed Grub 0.97, not even 1.5 that has been out for a long
time.

As I educate myself to the RPM way of doing things, I am hoping that
the package management suckage will diminish. Fedora 12 does come with
a nice GUI Add/Remove Packages utility, but it's not nearly as fully
featured as Synaptic. I need to figure out repositories; that is, I
assume there is a sources.list file somewhere, but I need to figure out
where there are other repositories and how to add them. That will be
today's educational adventure.
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