nizo's Journal: Adios Fedora

I have been using redhat since the prehistoric redhat 7 days, mostly on servers but more recently at home since fedora core 1, which got installed a few computers ago. While yum is cool, it was never all the way there, often meaning that if I wanted to make something work it was time to start compiling. Yesterday I upgraded my last fedora holdout from FC4 to FC7 (yeah I have been lazy, and everything was more or less working) and of course things broke. Well lets face it, pretty much every single thing broke: X broke, vmware broke, vlc broke. I expected some breakage, but there was way more than I have ever seen before. Granted I have never made this much of a leap before, but still it doesn't bode well for fedora; to fix everything easily I might just as well wipe fedora and install ubuntu, because I can pretty much guarantee that everything I want to make work on my desktop (with the exception of vmware) will work right out of the box with ubuntu. Vmware can be made to work too (with a little effort) but that is the case every time with every distro I have used. Plus at some point I want to install ubuntu server on something, so I might as well have matching distros. The apt-get stuff is where yum should have been 4 years ago, but at least I have a choice when running distros. Choice is good.

Never upgrade ...

[tomhudson]

Fortunately, there's an easy way - keep /home on a separate partition, and install a fresh copy on a new partition; then change /etc/fstab so that /home no longer points to the new home, but to the old one.

This way I can boot into either the fresh install or the old one. The only thing I have to remember is to import any databases to the new partitions (though what I usually do is just copy the raw data files - so far, its worked all the time :-)

With 500 gig hard drives at $100, there's no real reason n

Re:

[nizo]

Oh hell I have /home on its own separate disk :-) Usually I have the OS setup so I can wipe it at will, but I am kinda dumb and put vmware images and some music files and such on the disk used by the OS (long story; basically ran out of space before I added a new disk). I am about to buy a huge horkin' new disk so I can put all my files in one place and sort them out; right now everything is scattered across a wide range of disks on a few different machines. I am getting kind of tired of installing disks in

Re:

[plover]

I'm seriously thinking of this: http://www.drobo.com/ [drobo.com]

It's a USB2 attached drive array that backs its data up (like RAID, but it looks like it's using its own proprietary format.) The magic is that it presents itself as a single 2TB USB Mass Storage device to the OS (2TB is the USB limit.) It manages everything else for you. Want to add storage? Slap a 500GB drive into an empty slot! Want to update that 60GB disk with a 750GB disk? Hot swap the 60GB for a 750GB. It rebuilds the missing 60GB data on

Re:

[tomhudson]

"Of course after working on computers all day, it is hard to get super motivated to work on them at home :-|"

... and that's a huge problem. I know what you mean - there's tons of code I want to write, but who has the time and the inclination after spending all day fixing other people's code, etc?

Just keep 1 thing in mind: RAID (even raid5 and raid6) is not a backup system - its there to give you better uptime, but it fails, sometimes catastrophically.

Re:

[nizo]

Yeah I have seen mirrored raids fail (i.e. both disks died due to heat at the same time) which sucks. This is why I have a removable tray and several external usb disks :-) The problem is I have files/backups scattered around across several smaller disks, so I need to get a golden disk where everything resides, and then figure out how to back it up on the assorted smaller disks.

Re:

[tomhudson]

Of course, once that golden disk gets filled up (which never takes that long), you'll need an even BIGGER "golden disk."

This is part of a recent conversation:

Them: I have a failed raid5 across 6 disks. One of the disks is unreadable.
Me: Pull it out, insert another drive the same size or bigger, and rebuild.
Them: No, you don't understand - one of the 6 disks failed.
Me: So pull it out, insert another drive the same size or bigger, and rebuild.
Them: No, you don't understand - one of the 6 disks fai

FC7

[Alioth]

I found Fedora Core 7 a little disappointing (I really liked 6). Although the installation is very slick, and most of the packages are good, it seems to have regressed in small but important ways. Some of this isn't the fault of RedHat though.

For example, mixer settings are no longer saved - I had to add some commands to /etc/rc.local so I wouldn't have to turn the volume up each time I started it up. Also, X settings for my nvidia card got reverted on every reboot to a broken state (not an X won't start st

Boo hoo

[BigTimOBrien]

OK, so this is a Slashdot story? Some dude has a tough time with a totally unsupported FC4->FC7 upgrade and gets frustrated. ...why read Slashdot when we have reddit?

Re:

[nizo]

I noticed FC7 is using XllR7; the impact of that is unknown to me, and I dunno when the switchover happened, though all I know now is X is borked (I have to start it manually on each reboot after clearing out temp files) and my wacom tablet no longer works (which is a big deal). And interestingly there still isn't support for my Hanns-G lcd monitor :-( I would bet that most (and possibly all) of these problems will go away once I install ubuntu (possibly after a few apt-gets). The monitor works as a generic

Fedora upgrades

[Tet]

Odd. I found the update to Fedora 7 (in my case, from FC5) was as smooth as any of the other upgrades have been. Everything just worked, seamlessly. But then again (as a deliberate policy) I don't use anything from Livna or any of the other non-Fedora repos. Perhaps that's the difference.

The apt-get stuff is where yum should have been 4 years ago

How so? I've been building a couple of Debian and Ubuntu boxen recently, and have been getting frustrated by the package management. Yes, apt-get can be faster

Re:

[nizo]

Well, so far every time I have done an apt-get install, it does. Sometimes it is a pain to figure out WHAT to apt-get install (I will post my notes later) but I have yet to compile anything. I have never had this happen with Fedora; it has gotten better, but eventually I always end up compiling something by hand. The last time I had to compile something by hand, it broke my camera support :-( I have never used the yum provides feature (possibly due to my poor yum foo skills :-D ) but I am sure something lik

I'm thinking just Ubuntu it

[WillAffleckUW]

and just laugh at how much your original IPO Red Hat shares are worth now.

That's what I do.