I succeeded in the end, but this is a story about an annoying amount of pain that shouldn't have been necessary... You know, I'd like to try installing Fedora 40 (MATE spin), but found it almost impossible. The downloaded ISO couldn't be booted, whether DD'd to a flashdrive, or burnt to a DVD. The UEFI motherboard is ASRock B250M Pro4 (circa 2018), not running in any kind of legacy mode. And if that's too old, Fedora is being stupidly picky, but I'm more inclined to point the finger at how the spins are created. The downloaded file passed the checksum, and if I look into the downloaded ISO, I can read the files. So, again I'm pointing the finger at how the ISOs are created in the first place, before I even do anything with them. The two methods I used to create install media: dd if='/Fedora-MATE_Compiz-Live-x86_64-40-1.14.iso' of=/dev/sdb bs=8M status=progress sync eject /dev/sdb And wait for the return of the cursor, and the flashdrive light to stop blinking, because dd finishes and exits while the drive is still being written to. Brasero to burn a disc from that same ISO file. If I put the dd'd flashdrive into a working system, it can't mount it, so I don't expect to be able to boot it (I guessed correctly). "Unable to mount Fedora Fedora-MATE-Live-40-14 Error mounting /dev/sdb3 at /run/media/tim/Fedora-MATE-Live-40-1-14: Wrong fs type, /dev/sdb3 has an invalid superblock or missing helper program. If I put the burnt DVD into a working system, it also won't mount. And the attempt to boot from it fails with a single message: Initramfs unpacking failed: invalid magic at start of compressed archive That leaves me with two alternatives, download a desktopless spin (assuming they don't have the same booting shenanigans), and install the MATE desktop into it afterwards (I've done this kind of thing in the past), or try a prior release. Trying what might have been the easy way first: Download the Fedora 39 MATE spin, but it also fails in the same manner (checksum passes, dd'd to a flashdrive, the flashdrive can't even be mounted on a running system with the same kind of superblock error message). I don't see any point in trying something older than 39. So, then I try the server DVD download as a more generic install without being completely barebones. The download passes the checksum. The dd'd flashdrive booted. I did a dnf update, a dnf groupinstall "MATE Desktop", a reboot, and now I have to remember how to make a graphical session the default behaviour (systemctl set-default graphical.target was all that I needed to do). Fortunately I have some experience with this, and a second PC to research things as I go along, and succeeded. But for anyone else???!!! I don't remember things being this painful except for when I tried to use a very ancient PC as an experiment some 5 or more years ago. So, what has happened between F36 (the last Fedora release installed on that particular PC), and now, to make installation such a major pain? I've installed other distros, and finding a spare USB flashdrive to use has been the worst part I had to deal with. Well, that, and some of their peculiar ways to manage installing extra packages and updates. No doubt there'll be some pain in discovering whatever changes have happened to Fedora in recent releases. How to read log files, Wayland versus X, graphics already seem sluggish (on-board Intel HD Graphics 630, no super-dooper gaming graphics card here), rarely being able to print, etc... Printing's another rant: I have a central Linux server, I used to be able to print through it from any other client PC, they'd find the server, find the printers, applications could just print to them without me doing any more configuration. It worked brilliantly. These days, clients need individual printer configuration, and half the time they don't print anything. It just disappears into a black hole. It's an old-school networked HP office laserprinter, exactly the kind of thing that should be the least difficult to print to. NB: I'm only interested in the MATE spin, and *ONLY* the MATE spin, so I didn't try any other desktop spins, and I'm not going to. I do not like the other desktops. I do not want to install some other desktop then install MATE on top. I'll go as far to say that I actively *HATE* all the other desktops. I could list the reasons, but nobody ever accepts criticisms about what's wrong with them, so just take it as read they're unacceptable to me. And having more than one desktop on a system has always been a nuisance with a clutter of unwanted stuff installed, and extra downloads wasted when keeping things up to date. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.118.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Apr 24 16:01:50 UTC 2024 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. 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