John Lindal’s Blog

RedHat Fedora Core 4

January 8, 2006 on 6:00 pm | In Computers | No Comments

After years of putting it off, I finally upgraded my ancient system from RedHat 7.3. Now, I’m running Fedora Core 4 plus about half of the updates reported by yum. I guess putting it off didn’t actually save me any time. I just had to put it all in this weekend!

It takes forever to install, of course, both because my machine is ancient and because I like to install pretty much everything — for testing purposes, if nothing else.

After taking most of Saturday to grind through the four CD’s, I tried building JX 2.5.0. Imagine my surprise when it failed to link dynamic libraries via -l. When I deleted the .so, it accepted the .a, but then makemake promptly core dumped because a statically declared variable in the same file was not initialized!

A bit of research yielded yum as the solution. gcc 4.0.0 surely needed updating. My OS X laptop is running 4.0.1, and that works.

Being the naive fool that I am, I ran yum update. Now, for people with 1TB hard drives, this might actually work. Unfortunately, with my measly 5GB root partition — I have 10GB in /home — yum used up all the available space for the downloaded updates, so when it tried to install them, it couldn’t. Unfortunately, it got just far enough to trash some core system libraries…

So, I started all over again bright and early Sunday morning. Thankfully, it managed to chew through the CD’s before we left for Church. But when I got home and begin configuring it, I noticed that the swap partition was not mounted. Thankfully, fsck helped me find it so I could fix /etc/fstab.

This time, I ran yum check-update and then selectively updated the packages that I cared about. Even so, I had to update /etc/yum.conf to move the cache to my /home partition because OpenOffice is just too darn big

Finally, I applied the same patches as for RedHat Enterprise Linux 4: install fvwm2, load the pcspkr module, etc.

After all this, the linking problem was fixed, but I discovered that the core dump from makemake was my fault after all. My for loop was wandering right off the end of my statically allocated array. I am horrified that this works without complaint on OS X Tiger but very happy that Fedora complained!

But my troubles are not yet over. The Fedora installer discovered my aging ZIP drive, but nothing I have tried so far can convince mount to actually mount one of my ZIP disks. I may need to find a new method of backing up my data — not that off-site backup wouldn’t be a good idea…