Who says Linux is hard to install?

Well…
I do.
Admittedly, I’m particular about how it’s installed.

I started upgrading our internal server about 10:30 this morning. First, I had to come up with a way to work around my KVM not being happy with my trackball — I’m going down the path of one pointing device per machine (but I can still share my monitor and keyboard).

The install didn’t work. Fortunately, Fedora provides traceback details when it blows up. It didn’t get past mount all lvm, or something like that. So, OK, I can deal with that, it didn’t like my changes to the partitioning scheme that removed the LVM partition.

So I tried again with LVM partitioning but still using the set of partitions I would like. That blew up in the same place with the same error.

So I tried a default partitioning scheme figuring I could resize the default “/” partition and add my partitions post install. Using the rescue boot disk, I resized the partition — but not correctly. It refused to boot and wanted me to approve about a million errors fsck found in the file system (the superblock said it was an 80GB drive but it was physically set up as a 5GB drive — my resize wasn’t quite complete. I tried booting back into the “live CD” I installed from and resizing the partition with the nice GUI tool — but it complained of the same problem.

So I tried installing with a 5GB “/” partition and no other partitions — that way I could just add my additional partitions and not have to shrink anything. Somehow in the process I managed to get the installer messed up so that it was writing the file system after installing the software. That’s backwards and effectively erased what it had installed.

But that seemed like a good path to go down (the small “/” partition, not the erase after install). So I gamely tried again. This time it seemed to stick. After the install (One nice feature of Fedora 7 is the install takes place in a running Linux OS — the CD starts up the OS and lets you play with it as much as you like before installing — of course, if it actually installed, that would be better.), I set up the additional partitions (thanks to the LVM GUI, that was easy). Then I copied over the files from “/” to the new partitions and rebooted.

It stopped cold on the syslog daemon startup. Back to the rescue disk and after some thought I looked at my older PC — thankfully I have my old system running Fedora 7 to compare with. The SELinux context was wrong on the new partition mount points. I reset that (using my older system as a model) and finally had a system that booted by about 9:30 this evening.

Now I’m updating the base software, and have added in my additional drives (with, I hope, the correct SELinux context changes). I’ll reboot and then install the rest of the software and try to get the services I care about running….