Problems with Installer (SOLVED sort of)

[rjb3353]

Hello,
I am following the recommendation on one the the slides that comes up during the install process to come here to let you know how my Ultimate experience has been. Well so far it has been abysmal, I have after at least 6 attempts of installing Ultimate Edition 2.9 given up trying to use your distro. I even downloaded the iso 3 times and burned them to disk, and yes the downloaded iso passed the md5 check as well as a file integrity check by Power ISO after the burn process, I even ran your disk check that you have as a menu item during the boot process. After all this effort I have encountered random installer crashes on every attempt, some happened soon after beginning the install but most happened either half way through the process and the last two right near the end of the process. If I remember correctly it crashed while downloading the language packs.
I would have liked to have tried this disto but I simply cannot afford any more time trying to get it installed.
I was trying to install it on my Dell Precision m6300 laptop with an Intel extreme x7900 processor, Nvidia Quadro FX3600m GPU, and 4GB of DDR2 memory. I know that Linux works well on this laptop as I previously had Mint Linux installed and before that Mepis, if I remember correctly Linux was even an OS option when you bought the Laptop new from Dell back in 2007/08.
Wish I could have gotten it installed, there seemed to be a lot of interesting things in your distro, oh I had no difficulty running Ultimate Edition 2.9 as a live distro.
Robert,

[pclinuxguru]

I offer Ultimate Edition distro on so many laptops its not even funny.

What I have learned when it comes to things like this are,

There is more then one way of accomplishing things, if the installer fails, make note of why and come here to ask for the why.

Chances are one of us may have encountered this and searched for the FIX.

Next

There is a distro or version for all,

If one fails, another succeeds.

Pick the distro or version of distro right for your hardware. One size does not fit all in this case.

Next

Rather then kicking ones azz and making things 100 times more complicated then needed, ASK read and learn.

[rjb3353]

Hello,
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my post, the problem I have is I get no indication from the installer as to why it fails, it just crashes either to a black screen or the whole screen gui freezes with the only way to get out of it is to power down. I wish I knew why the installer was crashing I think I am going to download one of your previous releases and see if it too has a problem with my laptop, if it does not then maybe there is a bug in the current release that does not like my laptop for some reason. I have been using Linux off an on for quite a few years now and I agree with your comments about hardware compatibility being different from distro to distro, however I usually find this out during the live session. Up until now I have not encountered problems with installers not being able to finish the initial install. Do you have any suggestions as to how I might determine what is causing the installer to crash, is there a log file that is written some where on the incomplete install that I could find during a live session? If I knew why it was failing then I could ask an intelligent question.

I offer Ultimate Edition distro on so many laptops its not even funny.

What I have learned when it comes to things like this are,

There is more then one way of accomplishing things, if the installer fails, make note of why and come here to ask for the why.

Chances are one of us may have encountered this and searched for the FIX.

Next

There is a distro or version for all,

If one fails, another succeeds.

Pick the distro or version of distro right for your hardware. One size does not fit all in this case.

Next

Rather then kicking ones azz and making things 100 times more complicated then needed, ASK read and learn.

[pclinuxguru]

I have a hunch why.

For kicks, download ubuntu 11.04 and try the live version. Let me know if it works.

[rjb3353]

Well I just downloaded and successfully installed Ubuntu 11.04 however cannot get my wireless card working it says that the correct driver is installed and active, it is the same driver that you have on v2.9 and I could even get that one working during the live session by activating the driver and then entering my security info. But that is not the reason for trying it out. It did install without problems, do you think it handles the grub install differently? I am tempted to give one of your earlier releases a try now just to see if it installs without difficulty. I have never run into this with your distro before but this is the first time trying it with this laptop, in the past I was always using it on my main desktop, EVGA X58 motherboard, Intel i7 920 processor, 6GB of DDR3 ram, Nvidia GTX 470 GPU

I have a hunch why.

For kicks, download ubuntu 11.04 and try the live version. Let me know if it works.

[pclinuxguru]

Suspect your problems are 100% driver related.

Some time back they moved the drivers to kernel. Your problem is the kernels are not offering the needed drivers.

You could test this further with say long term supported Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Could just be the fact that support was removed due to age of your hardware in question.

If it was me, I think I rather try and find the wireless solution with 11.04.

Some work, 11.04 can and will look and perform just like Ultimate Edition 2.9 with the same software pack.

[rjb3353]

If all the issues were driver related then why was everything working during the live 2.9 session? My wireless card even functioned and I was able to get online. Do you think I ought to compile a custom kernel? I have not done it in a long time, does it still work similar to the old 2.4 days? or have they made a lot of changes as to how you compile a custom kernel now. Are the necessary tools installed by default or are there additional items that I need to install on the system before messing around with a custom kernel. Also if you think I ought to try this should I make say a 500MB /boot partition? Or should I locate the drivers and compile kernel modules that get loaded during boot?

I have been considering building a Gentoo system, I have been thinking about doing this for a while because it will force me to learn a lot about the internals of Linux during the process. Do you think that attempting this would be too difficult for someone that is not a programmer?

Thanks for all your assistance.
Robert

Suspect your problems are 100% driver related.

Some time back they moved the drivers to kernel. Your problem is the kernels are not offering the needed drivers.

You could test this further with say long term supported Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Could just be the fact that support was removed due to age of your hardware in question.

If it was me, I think I rather try and find the wireless solution with 11.04.

Some work, 11.04 can and will look and perform just like Ultimate Edition 2.9 with the same software pack.

[pclinuxguru]

Must have miss read, I thought 2.9 live did not work ?

If it did work, why are you not using 2.9 then ?

[rjb3353]

I just tried installing 2.9 again. Downloaded a fresh iso (passes the md5) and the install is almost finished when I get this error message. I had forgotten about getting it before. I apologize I am on disability and one of my issues is I have problems with short term memory. here is the error message

"Error while installing Packages"
An error occurred while installing packages:

E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

The following packages are in a broken state:

This may be due to using an old installer image, or it may be due to a bug in some of the packages listed above. More details may be found in /var/log/syslog. The installer will try to continue anyway, but may fail at a later point, and will not be able to install or remove other packages (possibly including itself) from the installed system. You should first look for newer versions of your installer image, or failing that report the problem to your distributor."

This happens during the install of the language packs, when I click on the okay button to close the above message the installer crashes and returns a small window titled "Installer crashed" Then there are instructions for filing a bug report.

I downloaded my iso from the Source Forge link on this page
http://ultimateedition.info/ultimate-ed ... ition-2-9/
Oh I am using this image

Release Name: Ultimate Edition 2.9
Architecture: x64 (64 bit)
Release Base: Ultimate Edition 2.8 (Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat)
Environments: KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Openbox, LXDE
Filesize: 2.9 GB (2,935,584,768 bytes)
MD5SUM: 5b0ba38fb1f7c33e810b5d090d68b5e6


Hopefully this will help in trouble shooting what is going on
Robert

Must have miss read, I thought 2.9 live did not work ?



If it did work, why are you not using 2.9 then ?

[pclinuxguru]

installed via DVD or flash drive ?