don fisher <hdf3(a)comcast.net&gt; wrote: The Fedora 21 Live image uses graphics hardware acceleration. On my Desktop PC with Nvidia graphics I have to specify the kernel option nouveau.config=NvMSI=0 in GRUB to run properly. Without that option, Fedora 21 Live randomly "freezes" after a couple of minutes. Have to force a reset with the power button. (This is a known bug in the nouveau driver.) Usually I don't use a desktop environment with hardware accelerated effects, so I didn't notice this problem before with Fedora 20. The old big image has gone. There is a "Server" image which looks like the old installer but comes with a lot less packages than previous Fedora releases, and it also doesn't come with a desktop environment. The "Live" image is what most people want. (Although most people will not be interested in actually running Fedora from that Live image, but they only want to install Fedora from it.) Biggest problem with those reduced F21 images is that you need to download a lot stuff afterwards before you can start to work. So even if the installation seems to be faster, you don't save any time in the end. In fact you spend more time because you have to install many packages manually afterwards. Maybe I'm not the typical Fedora user. I don't know. I've used both, USB stick and DVD, to run the "Fedora 21 Live" image. With the proper kernel options (see Nvidia restrictions) it works just fine, even on older hardware. Speed is okay (not slower than the previous images for installation). IMHO the new variety of images is more confusing than it actually helps. And neither "Live" nor "Server" are really well thought through. But Linux was never easy, and never will be. That's why we use it. :-) Greetings, Andreas

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 2:28 AM, Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)yahoo.com.au&gt; wrote: How often are you booted from live media image on a hard drive or SSD though? Usually it's on optical media or a USB stick, and they are really slow. But it may also have something to do with the image being on squashfs. -- Chris Murphy

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:02 PM, Joe Zeff <joe(a)zeff.us&gt; wrote: Ubuntu and openSUSE have separate boot menu entries distinguishing between booting the installer and the live environment. I don't know why we don't do the same thing and just get rid of the installer within the live environment, although I know it's been brought up more than once in devel@. The other possible advantage of this is that it should be possible for the anaconda rescue option to work, which doesn't work right now with live media, so we don't have a rescue a Fedora installation option. This option is available on both non-live DVD and netinstall medias. -- Chris Murphy

On 01/26/2015 11:31 AM, Chris Murphy wrote: As I've said, I've never installed Fedora that way. I have helped friends install Ubuntu, and you can go directly from the boot menu there to installing.

On Mon, 2015-01-26 at 00:17 -0500, Sam Varshavchik wrote: I didn't think it updated/checked with each package as it went through, it did a lot of data churning about dependencies, etc., before doing the pack installation. It might spend a minute or two thinking about what it was going to do (at least it did, for me, since I didn't install much, and didn't change much beyond the defaults). Loading lots of little files from CDs and DVDs is slow, you have a device with a comparatively slow seek speed, and a none-too-fast data transfer speed. That's where loading a big disc image blob from a DVD makes a big improvement to speed. -- tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.17.8-200.fc20.i686 #1 SMP Fri Jan 9 00:01:03 UTC 2015 i686 All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists. George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 2:07 AM, Joe Zeff <joe(a)zeff.us&gt; wrote: As often as LibreOffice is updated, you're installing it again anyway even if it's on installation media. But LibreOffice is included in the Workstation product. If you want something else, launch Software, see the installed list, click the Remove button on what you don't want, and it's removed. Installation of what you do want works the same way. I think the top two biggest applications on Workstation are FireFox and LibreOffice. This is because they're popular and most everyone wants those things to start out with. But the fallout is that invariably, if you're committed to installing, you effectively download these things twice. Once in the media itself, and again when it's updated right after installation. So from the point of view of getting what you want, you're better off with netinstall media. -- Chris Murphy

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 10:29 PM, Joe Zeff <joe(a)zeff.us&gt; wrote: That's Fedora 17 and older. And the interface was unreliable. You'd uncheck packages, but because something else actually required them they'd still be installed. The whole package thing is beyond nutty for users to be involved in anyway. Dealing with them as metapackages, as an "application" or suite, is a lot more intuitive and efficient both at the front and back end of things. dnf groups install Editors That's a hidden group, so it's 'dnf groups list hidden' which I think is more than a bit buried. I suggested a Software add-on that'd show groups with appstream data (nice icon, description, glue, etc), and possibly some of these groups need adjusting. I don't see pico, nano, or joe in Editors group. *shrug* But doing it by individual packages is harder I think. -- Chris Murphy

On 01/25/2015 09:17 PM, Sam Varshavchik wrote: Once you'd selected a group, you could open up the list of programs. Generally speaking there was a core group of programs and a list of optional extras. As an example, there was a text editor group that always gave you vi (or maybe vim) but also allowed you to install joe, pico, nano and so on if that's what you really wanted.

Joe Zeff writes: I remember the group selection, I did not remember that individual packages were selectable. I can't really say if I like or dislike a Live-based approach to doing new installs. I think that the broad choices between the various spins will probably meet the need of the most users. It would be nice to add some GUI to select the individual packages, but it's easy enough to do it post- install. A Live install is much faster. I remember that it took hours to install Fedora with a large package selection set. All the constant updating of the RPM database, with each installed package, burns up a lot of time. A Live install just copies the install image to the disk, which takes much less time. Plus, you now have a pretty good confidence level that the install system will boot. If the Live image boots, so will the install. I do remember how old Fedora installers used a stripped down, custom kernel config for the installer, and installed kernels that had minor problems coming up for real. I'm sure it works. But the printer is a network printer, that's not even on the local LAN segment, and adding a network printer via the web interface is clunky. You have to know its exact URL. You can't expect a non-technical user to do it that way. This is something that system-config-printer does in a much friendlier way.

Joe Zeff writes: Searching the dark corners of my mind, I don't really recall that there were ever a lot of customizations one could do for a new install. As I recall, you had a choice of picking major components or group of packages to install, in very broad, and limited categories. You never really had a lot of leeway in terms of package selection. The installer was primarily occupied with setting up and partitioning the disks, for the install. All the disk partitioning stuff still seems to be there. When you go to install the Live image, you still have the familiar options to set up the disks, and as far as software selection goes, I guess that translates to the choice of the live images to pick from: workstation, server, cloud, and the various spins. That's not to say that the spins are perfect. There are some glaring holes. I installed the XFCE spin yesterday. You can't configure a printer with the XFCE spin, as is. The XFCE spin does not install system-config-printer, so there's absolutely no way to set up a printer, post-install. Huh? Of course, it's not a big deal to install system-config-printer yourself, but come on. This means that the XFCE live image can't print anything. You can't use the XFCE live spin to test if the printer works.

don fisher writes: There are three separate installation images for "workstation", "server", and "cloud" so-called "products". The "server" one seems to be a traditional installer, but does not really install any desktop components. Although they can always be installed manually, of course, it's a pain. The "workstation" one seems to be a Live image. If the Live DVD failed to start, that's a fairly good indication that you have a problem. Going forward, Live-based new installs appear to be the way to go, with fedup handling the upgrade path. The good thing about it is that this gives you a fairly good way to figure out whether or not you have a compatibility problem with your hardware.