Fedora 9 was released a yesterday!

I jumped on the downloads (Installer DVDs of 32bit and 64bit) as soon as I could, burnt the 64bit DVD, and rebooted, hoping to have it installed within half an hour.

I already had 10GB of empty space at the start of one of my 750GB drives in preparation - all I had to do was tell the BIOS to boot the DVD and install it!

Well, that was the idea… If only it was that easy… Linux is never (at least in my experience) that obedient

I got into the second step of the installer (the first is chosing the language), where it asks you to chose your keyboard layout/language. I picked “United Kingdom”, and clicked “Next”… and the whole installer (minus the mouse cursor) froze. I assumed it was processing something, and waited a couple minutes… no change. CTRL+ALT+F1-8 did nothing (normally they’d switch to other terminals/logs). CTRL+ALT+Backspace did nothing. CTRL+ALT+Del did nothing! I lost my patience at that point and pressed the reset button…

I rebooted and tried again: same error. I rebooted and tried the default “US - English” layout: again, same error. I rebooted yet again, and tried the text-only installer… I’m sure you can guess what happened when it asked me my keyboard layout… Yup, it did it again.

I have now given up with trying to install it, at least for - I might try it again in VMware, or burn the 32bit DVD (or perhaps a 64bit LiveDVD, if there is one) and try that instead, once I can find a bit of spare time.