My desktop is now a doorstop, and Fedora 15

Back in July, I thought it was time to upgrade my computers to F15. So, I took two computers over to my brother’s and we did backups, and proceeded to reformat my desktop.

First, there were a couple of problems, and we had to reinstall a few times.

Then, disaster struck: as we were trying to restore the backup, the hard drive with the backups died.

In the meantime, I ended up eventually updating my laptop using another backup medium. F15 is interesting with Gnome 3: To say the least, it’s different, and changes the paradigm. There are a bunch of things I haven’t gotten around to figuring out. However, the most curious thing about it is … in its differences to Gnome 2, it’s still intuitive and generally easy to get around. It’s a curious feeling that my only real “complaint” is that it’s different. Six of one, half a dozen of the other applies here.

So when I finally got my desktop back after about five reinstalls, of course the first thing I noticed from my beloved box was that it can only use Gnome 3’s Fallback Mode. Then I started noticing a funny thing: everything would freeze when the screen saver when on. I think it may be a video card issue, or a memory stick issue; as long as the screen is active, it’s the same old computer. However, when the screen saver is activated — not the screen lock, but rather when the signal to the screen stops, everything locks up; having to reboot it every time I wanted to use it made it useless.

After months of using my laptop only, and eventually reformatting my server since CentOS 6 finally came out, I decided to take my server box and switch out the 500 gig HD and switch in the desktop HD. Funny consequence is that the server box can handle Gnome 3. However the bells are tolling for the 80 Gig HD; the system monitors are saying that there are too many errors on it. I’ll eventually have to add it to my pile of hard drives with the word “evil” written on it, and have to either find another old hard drive to put in it, or buy another one. As it is, it appears that the 1TB drive I bought as a second backup medium is an external-only device, although I’ve been known to be wrong on many occasions. 🙂

The 500 gig HD is now in an even older Celeron 1.1GHz box I found on the street; the server has been renamed to reflect where I found it. And the old desktop … I guess I’ll either have to diagnose it or just get it recycled.