Tuesday 2011-09-27

Most of today was not taken up with PPC (only about 2 minutes while I rebooted the working hardware and it actually did that without crashing). Instead most of the day was working on Fedora 16 betaRC3 issues.

Last night while installing the system got stuck in anaconda going at 100% CPU but nothing happening. I figured letting it sit all night might get it to get to the next step. Instead this morning the laptop was very very very warm and the desk had a slight discolouration from where the T61 had sat on it. I then said "oh dear", and turned off the laptop for a while to let it cool down. I then added a metal laptop riser underneath it to allow for better airflow, and rebooted for another go at a reinstall. The install this time worked perfectly, but the kernel OOPS after reboot in firmware insertion. Ok... maybe letting it run 12 hours at 100% CPU wasn't a good idea.

Let the system cool down, and reboot. No OOPs and the system got first boot going. No problems so I create an account and log in to KDE. KDE starts up and gets a crash when I try to add another desktop... known bug but trying to do trace opened up a new weird behaviour, somewhere in the KDE stack I would only get updates to apps every 30 seconds or so. It wasn't like they were stuck, just that it takes either some sort of buffer to fill up with events or a trigger like moving the mouse to get the applications to draw new data. Running a gnome app was even weirder in that it would completely grey out during these times (however xfce apps would not have this happen).

Ok do a yum update and reboot the system. Oh look a new issue. The RHGB would draw the fedora icon and then stop. No disk activity, not accepting keystrokes to F1->F4, and not able to ping. Ok reboot again with rhgb out of the grub2. .. boot fails in fsck check with no shell fallback. Ok reboot the DVD into rescue mode and find that /home's superblock needs to be "fixed" (the journal on / was able to recover but for some reason systemd.e2fsck didn't seem to be able to do so.)

Alright system boots up after a system wide relabeling and we can log back into various shells. KDE still shows problem, GNOME does not but keeps giving me sadmac faces when trying to launch apps. XFCE works without issues. At this point I am not sure if the problem is with the hardware or not so I am going to run the IBM system check tools overnight to see if it comes up with anything.

In my offtime I got a haircut and read more of the CSS cookbook to catch up with 21st century HTML.