12:45 AM

I was going to shout Huzzah! again, because I’ve completed upgrading Arbonne to Fedora Core 2. The standard http downloads took too long and timed out frequently, so I ended up mounting the ISO images I got off Bittorrent (thank goodness for the torrent) and copying the RPMs into a yum repository as the base. Actually, that was pretty sweet. If nothing else, I’ve learned a lot about yum and package management this week. Last week it was networking - always something to learn when you’re running Linux.

So, I finally updated all the packages and was pretty sure that I was ready to try rebooting and launching into Fedora Core 2 and the 2.6.x kernel, especially since my screen went blank when I logged out this morning. I sshed into Arbonne from Tigana, did a quick shutdown -r now, and watched the screen come alive with the standard scrawling text.

Then when I got to the point where the X server starts up, I got a blank screen. Argh! C’mon, Charlie Brown, kick the football!

So there are some hopeful bug reports out there that may have some clues as how to fix this, and when I reboot into the 2.4 kernel it works fine. Also, I’ve had Fedora Core 2 working on Arbonne before, so it’s not a hardware issue. I’ve got everything kinda configured so that I can use Arbonne (webserver’s down, though, not sure why yet) but I have to ask myself, is it really worth it? I asked myself that earlier this week, but I dodged the question at the time. Now I’m writing this on a computer running Red Hat 7.2 that just works. End of story. (Okay, the T key is flaky, and I’d like to get the second mouse buton working again, but those are hardware issues.)

So then, once I finally get X running and log in, everything’s just slightly - off. The icons are all smaller. The font looks different, even though it probably isn’t. I am dismayed at all the little things I’ll need to change. And that doesn’t count all the big things! But oh look, the user icons are all cute! (Copy those to my home directory… ) Don’t I have other things to do?

Am I bored wth computers that aren’t broken? Do I somehow actually enjoy this?

What a horrifying thought.