A few days ago I successfully installed Fedora 8 (FC8) on Dell Inspiron 9300 (the laptop is slightly more than 2 years old). My laptop is setup up as dual boot. FC8 replaced FC7. I encountered several problems, that I managed to resolve after some searching. The purpose of this post is to share what I found with others who might be facing the same problems.

The first problem I encountered was that the install stalled during the initial boot at "running /sbin/loader". A solution is provided on the Fedora 8 "Common Bugs and Known Issues" page. See "Booting Installer on Dell Laptops" on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common

I needed to append "nohz=off nolapic" to the install instruction (which you can edit via the tab key).

Unfortunately I then bumped into the next problem. During install I got an error message: "Unable to read package metadata. Maybe due to a missing repodata directory. Ensure install tree correctly generated...."

I had verified the media, which was supposed to be OK. But after several attempts, I decided to reburn the DVD at a lower speed. At 4x max (instead of Auto speed) in K3b. The error didn't re-occur with this new DVD, and I could proceed. I think the cause is that my DVD player isn't very good anymore (2 years must be old already for a DVD player).

The install worked, but it was an upgrade from FC7 which itself was upgraded from FC6 (which I think I had also upgraded from FC5, but I can't remember for sure). Apparently this is too much and several daemons failed to start up (incl. HAL and NetworkManager) and several attempts to correct that failed.

After trying to fix this for a while, I gave up and opted instead to reinstall FC8 but as a clean install. (I had all my data copied to another computer). This solved all the deamon problems. And I was even happy to see that WiFi worked out of the box.

One last problem remained however, that was that my camera could not claim the usb connection. After some searching on the web I came accross this solution: edit /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules
Change the permission setting in the line with "usb_device=0644" to "0666".

Now I am happily running FC8 ;-)

Otto

I have the same laptop and ran FC 3-7 without issue (well not too many problems). For some reason I cannot fix two issues with FC8 on this laptop:

1.) No sound, VERY annoying!! How did you get it to work??

2.) NetworkManager applet does not open network device switcher, no errors, just never launches.


do you have these same problems??

I have no problems with the sound or the NetworkManager, after I did the clean install (I didn't test the sound before the clean install, so don't know if it worked or not before, but it works now for sure).

Did you do a clean install?
If you didn't I'd recommend you do, especially if you have upgraded before.

For the sound in previous versions of Fedora I used to have to go to Volume Control -> preferences and add "External Amplifier" then tick this option under the switches tab. But in FC8 I did not need to do this adding the "External Amplifier" option shows that it was already selected by default.

Hope this helps somewhat.