2009-03-30

Getting back into Fedora

Well, after a timeout from Fedora, I decided to try it out again. First I got a newish computer from Dell, an Optiplex 360 with XP downgrade. The XP and Vista DVD's get used as testing dual boots and maybe some stuff for OCSng later on.

Now what OS should I run? I had been running CentOS-5 since I am a server admin, but was I brave? was I stalwart? was I human enough to run Fedora? Being brave and stalwart (but not necessarily human) , I went to Fedora 11 Alpha. I must say this is an Alpha was very solid and I did not run into any install bugs which is better than say Red Hat Linux 5.1 from 1998 or so. It installed the custom packages and started up really nice. Accounts were created, and the various Must Have applications (Firefox, OpenOffice, Shihen-Sho) seemed to work on a short checklist. And then the little applet told me it was time to update so I did.... since it was going to update 2.5 gb.. I just let it run for the night and came back in the morning..

to a less than functional box. For some reason glibc had removed itself and that was that. Hmmm wait, what was that thing that mmcgrath, skvidal, and the rest had said.. oh yeah... update rpm and yum first then update the rest. Duh.

So a reinstall of the alpha, and a careful

1. rpm -qa --nodigest --nosignature --qf='%{NAME}\n' | sort > remember_me_stupid.txt
2. yum -y update rpm
3. rpm -qa --nodigest --nosignature --qf='%{NAME}\n' | sort > foo
4. comm -1 -3 remember_me_stupid.txt foo ... ok changes look ok and stuff runs.
5. yum -y update yum
6. repeat test
7. yum -y update
8. get lunch

Rawhide was actually very usable. No children were eaten and I was able to install all of the education and other games I play with my kid. Ok tuxracer works great.. orbit works great.. and nethack worked great. And I was able to watch the Sesame Street YouTube videos so everything was in a normal set.

Oh look an email that rawhide was opening up.. cool lets see what we can do to test.

1. yum update firefox
2. hmmm firefox says that it can't run..
3. ooooh xulrunner should have been updated too. Hmmm ok
4. yum update xulrunner
5. back to Electric Company.

Fast forward to last night, I have 2 GB of updates in Rawhide. yum -y update (hey I feel lucky).

This morning.. open up gnome-terminal. Ok its running. Open a new tab, hmmm where is my typing going? Well the control codes are going ot the top tab, but my keystrokes are going ot the bottom tab. Now that is a cool bug. Hey look keystrokes to GMAIL and Firefox also seem to do the same thing... hmmm I wonder where I should post this one?

Well I have to say that is going to be a fun one to figure out tonight. Doing a bugzilla search on a different computer didn't show a quick match.. so I need to figure out what 'borked'.