Anaconda Sucks 🙁

A few weeks ago, I downloaded Fedora Core 5 and burnt it to a DVD. I finally got round to (trying to) install it yesterday evening.

All I can say is, what a freakin’ disappointment.

Why oh WHY does Anaconda always seem to crash on me? This has happened now for the past two versions they’ve released (four and five). For version four, I just assumed that it was a dodgy CD (corruption can sometimes happen if you download a large file), but two times in a row? This has got to be more than a coincidence.

What basically happened is that around 96% of the way through copying the files, it came up with a message saying that a particular package was corrupted – the only options given to me were to retry or reboot. This in itself is stupid – it should at least give the option to “ignore”, so that it can just ignore any packages which might have been corrupted, and then you can maybe download the proper versions from the net once it’s all there. It should at least fail gracefully! What actually happened is (after I’d selected the option to ‘retry’), it then waited for about ten minutes, before coming up with a message saying “An unhandled exception has occured. This is probably a bug”. And then made me reboot.

Needless to say, the system was NOT in a consistent state when I rebooted, the installation was only partially completed… I managed to back up my files, but couldn’t start the GUI and had to do it all from the commandline.

What I don’t get is why this happened two times in a row on my installations of Fedora Core, but has never happened on any of my other Linux installations (and I’ve tried about four *nix distros – Gentoo, CentOS, Ubuntu and FreeBSD).

Needless to say, I am now switching away from Fedora Core. If the upgrades between versions are going to be this painful, I don’t want to use it anymore — I’m going to stick with something like Ubuntu — you can upgrade automatically and it downloads all the required packages from the net, rather than having to download a whole CD (or four CDs in the case of Fedora) or a DVD.

Grrr.