Fedora Core 10 is now available. Here if you're interested. Having had a good experience with previous installs, rather than wait for Fedora to iron out early bugs, I downloaded the DVD and set about installing it.

I run two Fedora machines here. One an old one with a big disk and old small processor with 500Mb memory. The other my main machine, about two years old. The old machine doesn't (didn't) have a DVD reader until yesterday. Hence I'm still running Fedora Core 8 on that system. Good enough for what I use it for. I'd already decided that this time I'd upgrade the small system, hence the purchase of a new DVD reader/writer. I bought an LG GH22 LP20 (nice product name?) from Dabs. My main machine had a Plextor PX-712A which has seen sterling service over the last few years. I put the new reader in my main machine, swapped the Plextor into the smaller machine.

So, I download the DVD, run a sum and order check on the ISO image, which matches at 086fd570518ac58d3966c43c1b6d146e38919d8d. Booted OK on the small machine with the new DVD. Now Fedora (sensibly) has some sort of disk check on an install (lots of tee'd off users if they booted using a duff disk!). I ran the 'test' and it very quickly told me that there was 'something' wrong, with the disk. Mmm. Had I installed it wrongly? Reboot into FC8, bung in a CD and check it reads OK. No problem. Put in the FC10 image and that reads OK, I can view the directories no problem, so it looks like the device is reading the DVD?

Perhaps it can't install FC10 onto FC8? Slim chance but feasible. So I try and run the FC9 ISO disk. Again it fails the TEST. Now I'm puzzled.

Back to my main machine. Boot into the FC10 DVD, ran the TEST, no problems. Did a full install (sorry, update). Keep my own software, partitioning etc, just uplift the OS to FC10. Installs without a hitch, in about an hour or so. Reboot, no problem, yum update..... yes, as usual, 150 patches to go on! Why... OK, lets leave it there.

So now I'm puzzled. WTF is going on? Is Fedora getting Vista'ish, needing lots of resources before it will run? Doesn't match with failing the disk test... that runs OK on my main machine. Won't run on my tiny ?Centrino? processor? Possibly, but again failing the disk test doesn't match. AFAIK the software being run when I select the disk test is from the DVD? I tried skipping the disk test (old machine), but that immediately bombed out and re-booted.

So. I'm left scratching my head as to why the new Fedora won't install on my old and small machine. Any ideas?

First use of FC10 on my main machine this morning and I'm faced with the usual SELinux crap.

Last weekend I installed MarkLogic database. That seems to write files to a couple of odd places (according to SELinux at least), so when I boot I get warnings galore (quite unintelligable) and a suggestion that I 'relabel' the entire disk set.

Targeted policy relabel is required

What?

OK. I do that and get such helpful debug messages as

Context Unconfined: object_r:user_gnome_home_t:s0 is not valid(left unmapped)
Context system_u:object_r:evolution_server_exec_t:s0 is not valid(left unmapped)

Plain old fashioned jibberish as far as I'm concerned. Hopefully sooner or later someone will either replace the SELinux guys or find a way of making the reports usable. I've yet to hear of any use for it.