Fedora 14 Alpha does not boot

[tuhl]

I tried to install Fedora 14 Alpha in VB 3.2.8. Anaconda starts but the systems freezes soon. There is already a bug filed (Ticket #7387).

[Sasquatch]

You're expecting support from VB for an alpha release of an OS? Not going to happen. It's still in development and there are way too many things that can throw away all the work the put into supporting one part. Getting support when it's in Beta is at best.

[tuhl]

For testing purposes it is very helpfull to use early versions of upcoming Linux version in a virtual machine. Is there any known reason, why Ubuntu Alpha versions are usually working and Fedora Alphas not?

[stefan.becker]

Fedora is always the newest thing, so wait until its supported. Or try the next version of VBOX.

If a bug is filed, wait for response on it.

[Sasquatch]

For testing purposes it is very helpfull to use early versions of upcoming Linux version in a virtual machine. Is there any known reason, why Ubuntu Alpha versions are usually working and Fedora Alphas not?

Because Fedora keeps tinkering on their installer all the time and Ubuntu doesn't? Even the first releases and dailies are not using the graphical installer, but the alternate text mode instead. The Fedora devs test only on a few systems and it would seem they don't test it with virtual ones like VB. Things have to be fixed from the Fedora side, not VB's. I've seen several issues with Anaconda installer before here on other development releases of Fedora. They were all gone when the final was released.

[stefan.becker]

And because there are thousands of linux distros in development, its impossible to support all / all new alpha versions.

Else the development of new functions in VBOX will be stopped.

[tuhl]

It was marked as a bug.

[Perryg]

For testing purposes it is very helpfull to use early versions of upcoming Linux version in a virtual machine. Is there any known reason, why Ubuntu Alpha versions are usually working and Fedora Alphas not?

Just to put my 2 cents in here. While the alpha 1 of Ubuntu 10.10 did in fact work, shortly after they released alpha 2 all things Ubuntu went south. They are introducing the latest Xorg and it broke VirtualBox guest additions, more specifically the auto resize. So it's not just Fedora. Plus the Fedora site acknowledges that F 14 may not work for you due to an "Xorg bug" and suggest that you install using minimal graphics mode (vesa) even on metal. Looks to me like everyone has their work cut out for them.

[frank]

Recent news is that there is a bug in the current X.org code leading to a crash if the VESA driver is used and the VESA BIOS supports only version 2.0 or older (true for VirtualBox). I assume that this bug didn't show earlier because Fedora 14 uses gcc-4.5 which is a bit more clever detecting wrong object sizes (actually this is a memcpy_chk failure). So this is definitely an Fedora / X.org bug and the Fedora guys are aware of that bug.

[Perryg]

And it just gets better. Thanks Frank. I had my suspicions that something X was whacked out. Even when I got it to work the strange graphics before boot was nasty. See that is fixed in SVN as well. Hopefully soon we can put this all behind us.