Yesterday, I installed Fedora Core 3 on the machine we use as a file server. The previous week, I installed Fedora Core 3 on Jack’s machine, so we are all using the same release now. Since Jack was running SUSE 9.0 before that, I hope this will cut down on the number of questions from Jack that I will have to research before I can answer them. I am a lot more familiar with where RedHat/Fedora Core puts files and how it expects you to do things than I was ever able to become with SUSE.
The server install was not without incident. I tried to upgrade it from RedHat 9, but the upgrade failed after about half an hour of checking rpms and doing the preinstall process. Since I had moved all data off the server in case I had to do a format and install, I just went ahead and formatted the fixed disk and installed a fresh copy. Although I will probably use ssh to do most of my work on this box, I set it up so the xfce4 (a lightweight desktop environment) would be installed, in case I was logged in directly. Oddly enough, telling the install process to install xfce4 did not cause the X windows subsystem to be installed. When xinit failed to work, I went back and used yum groupinstall “X Windows System” which fixed the problem.
I had to lie to system-config-display process and tell it that our old monitor is a Dell 1700. It is actually a 1728 something, but that isn’t on the list. Without tricking X Windows about the monitor name, it refuses to display at a high resolution than 800 x 600.
The longest part of the process was finding homes for all the files on the file server while I messed with the server. At one time, I would have thought it was impossible for casual use to fill up a fifty gig filesystem, but that was before we learned the joys of digital audio files and photos. In a very tedious process, Jack ripped some of his old vinyl, out of print albums. Although he has compressed them into other formats, he still wants the original ripped versions archived since they were so hard to create. These files, even tar’d and compressed, are huge.
I am glad to have all the PCs back to a supported version, even though technically, of course, Fedora Core 3 isn’t supported by anything but a very active community. It seems ironic that Microsoft’s decision to end-of-life Windows 98 last year is what made me finally decide to start messing around with Linux in the Fall of 2003, since I did not want to run an unsupported operating system. Microsoft reconsidered its decision, but not before I had discovered that Linux could do everything I wanted, and more.