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Sat, 26 Sep 2009

redx

Posted to Technology category

I was running Fedora 10 for a long time on my laptop, for the most part trouble free. Connecting to a projector was always a challenge. I usually got it working, one time at a user group meeting, it stopped working after the screen saver kicked in and I couldn't get it working again. Had to switch laptops with my sales woman to start the meeting.

So a few weeks back I decided to upgrade to fedora 11. I've always wanted to get an upgrade to work flawless via yum. I almost got the upgrade from fedora 9 to 10 to work via yum, but it had multiple problems, so I wiped the system clean and put a fresh copy of fedora 10 on it, which solved most of the problems.

The yum upgrade seemed to work this time, but knocked out a lot of things that were previously working. The Audio, VMWare server, wireless, most of the video apps all stopped working. Also yum broke itself, so fixing all the stuff was a nightmare. Yum was complaining about missing Python packages. I installed them manually but yum wasn't happy. I fought with yum for two evenings, before giving up, backing up the files I wanted to save and doing a clean install of fedora 11.

That worked, it did seem like it took longer than usual, many hours in fact, to download all the updates and additional packages I wanted. I spent two days tweaking the laptop to be exactly how I wanted it. I was getting ready to fly out to CA for a week, and this laptop is my lifeline to my company. I rebooted after adjusting the 3d driver for the graphics card... and it died. The laptop refused to boot up. At first I suspected the graphic settings, but it wasn't even loading that far into Linux. After rebooting several times I saw that it was randomly failing on different packages after loading the kernel.

I was flying out the next day and hadn't gotten anything else ready yet. I grabbed my Windows 7 DVD and installed that. In a little over an hour I had a working laptop again. It seemed sluggish, but I wrote that off to running Windows instead of Linux. After downloading Firefox, Thunderbird and openoffice, I had something I could use while traveling. I wasn't happy but I could get by.

While I was in CA, my laptop crash and froze up a number of times. Turns out my hard drive was failing. I had a clue, when I had fedora 11 running, for all of two days, it did warn of a hard drive failing, but didn't really give me any other details, like which one, or why it thought it was failing. I ordered a new hard drive from NewEgg, 500G for just under $100. My old hard drive was only 120G. I figured I would now have decent space for multiple virtual machines.

Last week the hard drive arrived, and instead of saving anything from the Windows 7 configuration, I just swapped out the hard drives and installed fedora 11 fresh. I left the laptop running in my new home office.. um.. I mean my son's room. It's been running about a week and seems fine.

I'm running VirtualBox from Sun instead of VMWare server. It seems to tax the system less. I created a Windows 7 virtual machine, I need it to watch my slingbox as they don't have a Linux viewer yet. I also play Starcraft on it when I'm bored. VMWare needed to be recompiled each time I had a new kernel, which was too often, and always seemed to happen when I was on the road. Not sure VirtualBox will load my old VM images, if not I'll probably setup VMWare server again.

I'm installing minor stuff on RedX tonight while updating some GSA docs I should have done yesterday, I'm happy I'm back with a Linux laptop, and hope I get another year out of this one, it's 3 1/2 years old now. I'd like to set a company precedent of making a laptop last 4 years. The company is 10 years old next month, and I've had 3 laptops, a Sony, a dell and currently a lenovo. Of all of them, I've kept the lenovo the longest. I still have the dell, it still works, running Windows XP, but it's very temperamental. If you move it, it might take hours to get it running again. It's like Fonzie's jukebox, if I bang on it just right while pushing the power button, it might start. If I get it to boot, then getting it to load windows is the next challenge. I leave it running in my kitchen, mainly to check email in the morning and to IM employees before I head out to work. Can't really do much more with it. I'm mainly waiting for my wife to yell at me to get it off the kitchen table, she hasn't yet and it's been there about 2 years.

Posted at: 9:24 pm

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Re: redx
Shane wrote on Sun, 27 Sep 2009 08:51

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