The past 2.5 weeks have been a little hairy for me, I finally came back from a month long business trip and, well, I had some computers to update. And another to update at the same time to sync it with the other two instead of updating every 6 months. And, a birthday gift to reformat.<\/p>\n
First, the old PIII 450 laptop was a breeze to update; a bit peppier on just about everything, except videos are now completely out of sync instead of occasionally just a bit. Maybe changing from Gnome to XFCE will do the trick … but, obsolescence moves on, my outright need for videos has been … well shifted back to the DVD player at the cottage is back in service with a “new” tv. And, well, read on. In the meantime, the bootup sequence is slightly different from the other systems, the line with the three advancing “line heads” \u00e0\u00a0 la F10 is there instead of the advancing line on the Fedora logo on the other systems.<\/p>\n
Next was my P4 2.8. Funny thing happened, the Palimpsest Disk Utility said that there were some fatal errors on my HD. So before doing anything, I got another used HD and reformatted it. What fun to eradicate Ubun… to have an opportunity to enjoy a new installation. \ud83d\ude42 Palimpsest again comes around and says that the new drive has fatal errors. A quick net search reveals that this apparently isn’t a bug, it’s working like it should and well I have two used drives with “fatal errors”.<\/p>\n
Next is a new Acer Aspire One. This one was fun. Over about 6 hours, my brother and I tried to get F11 on the machine; no, my 512meg usb ramstick was not big enough for a CD, and it we couldn’t make it bootable to put in the net install. Couldn’t get his 1gig mp3 player to boot. Several other ways later, we finally tracked down a USB dock and put in a CD player, and it worked.<\/p>\n
Then my PIII 550 used-to-be-a-casino-server-then-a-printer’s-server-then-my-main-desktop server formatted nicely on the 80gig drive … which died about 100 packages out of 1100 from the end of the install. Hey, I still have that HD with an install that Palimpsest says has bad errors; things boot up nicely. I still have to put in some of the daemons, my brother is interested.<\/p>\n
In between I’ve bought a 16gig usb memory stick. Nice story: The price is $49.99, ok I’ll buy it. The cash register says $67 with tax … hey, that’s not right, and lower down the price says $59.99 before taxes. I show the clerk the price tag on the shelf … and thanks to Quebec’s consumer protection laws, the new price is $10 off the “correct” (lower in this case) price at $39.99. Including all taxes, that’s less than the $49.99 price.<\/p>\n
Then I ran out of space on the Acer trying to add Google Earth … what’s the deal? Seems maybe I made a typo or something during the setup, the system said 5.9gig drive when another utility recognizes the full 160gigs. So I decide to reformat today, and I finally get a bootable image onto the USB memory stick and after 3 attempts (the first was good but I had a snag in the setup, something about I can’t do an ext3 filesystem given the existing ext4 on the usb stick, and I can’t do an install under ext4 — I think I forgot to uncheck the usb stick as a target) I finally get the net install iso on the stick. The repo? Duke University. Really good, since a yum update only had ONE update; they keep their images up to date!<\/p>\n
I’m finally in the process of doing all the little details and transfers and installs, and all just under the wire — I’m off on another business trip tomorrow!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The past 2.5 weeks have been a little hairy for me, I finally came back from a month long business trip and, well, I had some computers to update. And another to update at the same time to sync it with the other two instead of updating every 6 months. And, a birthday gift to … <\/p>\n