Fun with Fedora

I don't want to be the guy who rants all the time, because life's too short to spend it complaining.  But I had such a negative experience that I'm going to share it anyway.  Thumper's Mother can scold me later...

I had to test some things for work on the new shiny Fedora 14 release, and decided that it was the most brain-dead and hard to setup Linux distribution I've ever worked with.  (After some reflection, the only other serious contender was Topologilinux, who's built-in upgrade system used to leave the installation unbootable.  But that was back in 2002, and since they're essentially some fancy installation scripts around Slackware, I'll cut them some slack (no pun intended), since I don't expect them to maintain the entire Slackware repository.)    All I wanted to do was get VMware tools installed properly, and to do that I needed to install gcc and some kernel headers, which sounded simple enough.  I'm willing to overlook (what I perceive as) the grave crimes of any distro that doesn't ship with gcc and the kernel headers included, because I realize that not everyone uses systems the same way I do.

Now, granted, I've never worked with Fedora or RedHat before, and Gentoo's package management system has pretty much spoiled me for life, so I was prepared for a bit of a learning curve to get everything setup properly.  The first task was networking.  I'm behind the firewall-proxy setup at work, so I didn't expect networking to work out of the box.  I'm even willing to overlook the fact that there is no happy graphical utility to set a system-wide proxy configuration.  Nobody else seems to do this either, despite the fact that it would just have to dump two environment variables to a config file.  But, on a modern Linux distribution, and especially on standard hardware environments like a VMware virtual machine, I expect my network devices to come up under DHCP without any user intervention.  So I wasted several minutes trying to play with proxy settings, before I realized that I had the more fundamental problem: eth0 does not start by default.

The next thing I expect from a software system, is reasonably descriptive error messages. If there's a network problem, I expect to see something to the effect of "Unable to connect to fedora.com," or even "Unable to download package database" or even "Plug in your network cable you moron."  But, the message yum gave me was something like "Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repoman.xml)," which just doesn't help me at all.  Now, maybe they tried, since the word "retrieve" is in there, which sounds vaguely networky, but it's not terribly descriptive.  It sounds like the kind of generic error message you get when the programmers were either too lazy to implement proper error handling, or the errors are obscure enough that the programmers could not have reasonably predicted them.  So I went digging around with yum, trying to rebuild package databases, and running obscure maintenance-looking commands, trying to figure out what could possibly be weirdly screwed up on my stock install.  After fixing my proxy settings (aka, copying the environment variables so many places, yum has to get it right), I was confronted with a different error message.  Now yum was listing websites and telling me it was failing to connect with them.  Somehow, after giving yum access to the Internet, it was finally giving me an error message that looked definitively network related.... go figure.  Clearly something else was wrong.  I managed to convince myself that the sites in question really did exist (at this point I was praying they weren't dumb enough to ship with dead mirrors), and that I really could connect to them through the proxy and the firewall at work.

After longer than I'd like to admit, and double and triple checking the network connectivity and proxy settings, I gave up and started digging around on Google.  I finally found some other poor saps looking at the same error message who had managed to find a fix.  Apparently, and for reasons I cannot adequately explain, yum is unable to access HTTPS sites out of the box.  This is, as you might imagine, a severe limitation, when all of the default mirrors include https:// in the URL.  So, I went and hand-edited my repo list, and converted all of the https:// to http://, and prayed that nobody was running a https only mirror.  That finally worked for me, and I was able to start the onerous process of matching up real-world package names like "gcc" and "kernel headers" to the cryptic, numbered formulas that seem to be the best non-Gentoo package managers can offer.  I'm really hoping that this was an issue with the Squid proxy at my work, and that the Fedora folks didn't ship a release that was unable to validate SSL certificates.  For that matter, I'm not completely sure what added security running over HTTPS really gives you.  I'm hoping they checksum the binaries, so the only advantage I see to HTTPS is to make it so that people upstream from me can't tell exactly which packages I'm downloading...

Meanwhile, I had another problem: yum was deadlocking itself.  Apparently, yum will happily spin for over 10 minutes, trying to acquire some internal yummy lock.  Furthermore, Unix file-locking being what it is, killing the competing processes doesn't release the lock.  So, I had to go Google around for the lock files yum uses, so I can kill all the yums on my system, free the locks, and try again.  (I had by this point accumulated quite a number of hung yums.)  Somehow, this was unsuccessful.  So I logged out, and restarted my X session.  No luck.  I rebooted.  No luck (after reworking the solutions for eth0, and the proxy above).  I finally figured out that whatever system-tray icon their default session launches to inform me of all the wonderful updates I'm missing was also running yum, and hanging in some new and interesting way.  I never solved that one.  But, if I killed it, and all my hung yums, and cleaned all the lock files, finally I could install packages.  However, mistyping a shell command would cause my shell to hang indefinitely... I can only assume it was asking yum what I meant to type, so it could offer to install it for me, but that yum was still horribly broken in some unusual way.

This, is the Linux distribution that gets all the money?  I fear for our novices...