I just installed 5.1 on my home machine as an upgrade from 5.0 and it went well. I went on to install it on two machines belonging to a friend and everything went horribly wrong. The first machine was fine except for its very small root partition. Having got through the installation process, I skipped the installation of LILO because on that machine, /dev/hda is occupied fully by NT3.5 and DOS. Linux lives on /dev/hdb. The plan was to boot either from the "custom boot disk" or my own equivalent. Having made the custom boot disk, the system fails to boot from it because the disk was poor. It would have been useful for the installation process to leave an image file somewhere, or to indicate how to make another custom boot disk. Having booted from the custom boot disk for my home machine (which I luckily had brought with me), I discover that the modules don't work at all. A little investigation showed that the relevant packages were all OK, but rc.sysinit gets very confused about which set of modules to use. Setting the /lib/modules/prefferred symbolic link doesn't work because rc.sysinit starts by deleting it. The real problem is that Red Hat 5.1 now assumes that you boot from LILO -- otherwise, "lilo -I" will not work. IMHO this is far from ideal. In the end, I generated a placatory /etc/lilo.conf that made rc.sysinit work, but the system still doesn't actually use that LILO configuration to boot, of course. Nevertheless, it gets the right answer. I have to say that Linuxconf was also something of a mixed bag. Having eventually navigated my way to the portion of Linuxconf that deals with PPP (by examining every option until I found it), I set up a dialup account. The "Connect" button didn't work, and I had to use "ifup" before I got the error message indicating that the ppp package was not installed. Linuxconf then initiated a connection perfectly (rather than just playing dumb). However, when I came to exit that part of Linuxconf, pressing the Quit button did nothing. I had to switch to another xterm and kill the program manually (with kill(1)). This was reproducible; it happened several times. Hence I think that Linuxconf is not really ready to be used by newbies yet. I also had some problems with a PLIP install, which are outlined in a separate article. My criticisms are not all negative, of course. The new rescue disk system is great. The GNOME beta is also looking good too. -- PLEASE read the Red Hat FAQ, Tips, Errata and the MAILING LIST ARCHIVES! http://www.redhat.com/RedHat-FAQ /RedHat-Errata /RedHat-Tips /mailing-lists To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject.
