My Fedora 16 fiasco

I was very much looking forward to testing Fedora 16, to finding out about its latest new features and enhancements, so I downloaded the ISO images for both GNOME 3.2 and KDE 4.7 and on I went to test. I was so confident that both would be so great that I decided to wipe out Mandriva from one of my machines to make room for Verne. Unfortunately, my experience was short lived and a bit of a disaster.

To test and install Verne, I decided to use my HP 2730p and 2740p tablets. Specifically, I wanted to install both on the latter, being a model that´s usually demanding and difficult in terms of hardware recognition. That would also allow me to compare how KDE and GNOME squeeze the latest from Fedora camp following an accurate approach. My plan was also to install the KDE flavor on the former, given that I like Fedora better than Mandriva myself. Unfortunately, I was not able to get anything working.

On the 2740p, both the GNOME and KDE Live desktops would load perfectly and smoothly (albeit without support for the on board Broadcom Wireless card, a disappointment, I have to admit), so on I went with the installation. I used all standard steps, nothing fancy, choosing to use the full internal drive in both cases. I got identical results: an apparently good and complete installation that wouldn´t boot. In fact, it rendered my hard drive useless, for I was getting your typical "non-system drive found..." error. Because it happened in both cases, I started to worry that my drive was indeed broken, but after a quick Kubuntu installation, everything was working fine, so the conclusion is that both Fedora flavors were failing on me miserably.

On the 2730p, the error was even more interesting. Both GNOME and KDE Live desktops would load, but with a very weird and persistent screen flicker that would not go away. First time I had seen anything like that happening on a machine that has proven its worth with Linux, successfully running Fedora 14 and 15 in the past. Thinking that the problem could be down to the Live Desktop and hoping it would go away after the installation took place, I decided to go on anyways, but in both cases the installer would crash when completing the post-installation steps... Argh!!!

Here's a video of the terrible screen flickering:



Now, here's the crash (apologies, the quality is not that great!):



So there you have it, no Fedora fun for me. This is particularly disappointing because I am using machines that ran previous versions of Fedora smoothly. There may be a remote chance that it is all down to the ISO files I downloaded being corrupt, but I doubt it (EDIT: Indeed, it has nothing to do with the quality of the ISOs). I will download them again and give it another go anyways (EDIT: I did and didn't work), but I don´t keep much hope that I will be able to enjoy Fedora 16 any time soon (EDIT: Sounds about right, unfortunately).

How was your experience? Did you encounter any installation problems?