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20031119 Wednesday November 19, 2003

Fedora Core 1 has killed my Red Hat 9 box I don't know if it was Fedora or me, but it appears that my main hard drive on my Red Hat 9 box is hosed. Here's what I posted on Experts Exchange and the Fedora Mailing list:

I tried to upgrade to Fedora Core 1 from Red Hat 9. I experienced some issues with disk space, and based on someone's advice, I deleted /tmp and created a symlink /tmp -> /home/tmp. I did not have /home/tmp created when I tried to install Fedora. It warned me about having a relative symlink during the upgrade, so I rebooted to undo the symlink. I've rebooted a number of times since then, and did get in to rm /tmp and mkdir /tmp. Now it appears I'm hosed - here's the message I get on startup: 

Creating root device
mkrootdev: label / not found
Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 2 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 132K freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel
_ <- Flashing cursor

I received a few responses from the mailing list, but my main hard drive appears to be hosed (unrecoverable). I tried doing a clean install, and Fedora again complained about not having enough disk space to copy the images over.

Finally, I took a break and thought of a workable solution while putting a turkey in the oven. I have another machine that has the exact same hardware as my Linux box - it has Windows XP on it, but I'm not using it. So I'm in the midst of installing Fedora on it, and then I'll move the hard drive. I lost all my configured stuff: Apache, CVS, Tomcat, DNS, DHCP, CUPS, but I was able to select most of it in the installation process. Let's hope all these packages are the latest and greatest - then I won't have much configuring to do. Posted in General at Nov 19 2003, 01:45:56 PM MST 6 Comments

Comments:

All I can say is Mandrake man...I have been practically doing back flips to get my one Red Hat friend to recognize that Mandrake is much easier than Red Hat in so many ways it is just silly. Other comments might mention different distros, which I am sure are great to, but Red Hat just isn't the best one to choose for daily use...and believe me, I have tried it on new and experienced users alike...it always comes back to Mandrake (or Debian if you are that type of user).

Posted by Dan Allen on November 20, 2003 at 06:40 AM MST #

Yep, seems like RedHat really screwed us all over. I am actually deciding on some other distro to go with for all our boxes at work since RH will not be supported soon enough. Try and get Knoppix or the Linux Rescue Disk and you should be able to at least back up some of your system. Try Debian 3 and see if you like it. It is not rpm based, uses .deb instead, or Mandrake is another good one, for pay. I myself may try Fedora to see what it has as well.

Posted by dsuspense on November 20, 2003 at 09:05 AM MST #

Gentoo is where it is at.

Posted by John Cavacas on November 20, 2003 at 06:16 PM MST #

Gentoo is great if you are the type of Linux hacker that likes to tweak the most out of your Linux install. But I cannot spend the time rebuilding from source anytime I need to upgrade something in production. I am hearing good things about SuSE, and maybe Fedora will be used by those who are used to Red Hat.

Posted by dsuspense on November 20, 2003 at 06:46 PM MST #

That's the thing: Gentoo doesn't force you to tweak everything. I wouldn't recommend it for linux newbies, but if you're at all familiar with linux and how things work it's just a much smarter way to manage upgrades and dependencies. And compiling from source has never been a problem for me -- most things compile very quickly (exceptions that prove the rule: glibc, mozilla and subprojects, X, etc.) and because you're compiling from source and declaring the sorts of libraries you want, you don't have the RPM problem of fulfilling an optional package dependency -- why do I need to compile all of GNOME to compile SSH on my server? On my server I'd just declare a '-gnome' (that is, do NOT include optional 'gnome' support) in the dependencies list and everything Just Works.

Posted by Chris Winters on November 21, 2003 at 07:44 AM MST #

Like Chris said, you don't HAVE to tweak everything. On top of that, you don't even have to compile applications if you don't want to. There are a lot of already compiled versions of things you might need. With Gentoo, or say Debian, you have control over what you do and everything Just Works. Give it a try on a spare box you'll be impressed.

Posted by John Cavacas on November 21, 2003 at 02:53 PM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
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