Day: 3 July 2006

Apologies for the previous rant, your normal blog service is now resumed. So, what have I been up to this weekend? Not much really. Unfortunately at the moment, the heat seems to be affecting my memory! On Friday evening, we went round to Alex and Chris’ new place in Wivenhoe, and then went down with Alex to the Bengal Spice to have a (really nice) curry. I can heartily recommend the Bengal Chicken Tikka Masala from there 🙂 And afterwards we went down to the Rose & Crown for a drink.

I watched the England game on Saturday – bit of a disappointment, although I can’t say I’m surprised. Andy Murray though – that game was fantastic! I saw bits of it and then watched the end… I definitely think Britain has a future champion there — if Federer moves over (at the moment, Federer is an absolutely unstoppable, unflinching tennis machine whose sole objective is to destroy all those who would play against him. Not literally, of course). In the evening, we watched Doctor Who (it was a great episode – I think the next episode, last of the series, is going to be a great finale!).

Yesterday morning we went to church as per usual. In the afternoon I did some preparation for a home group study I’m leading this Thursday (we’re working our way through a book called “Growth Groups”, which is basically leader training for home groups. Most people have to lead a 20 minute short study during a session as practice). In the evening I had my woes installing Fedora Core (read about it below), and afterwards we rented a movie:

It was called “Flightplan” and was pretty good. It’s about a mother who ‘loses’ her daughter onboard a flight, and finds that no-one else believes she actually had her daughter onboard in the first place. It was very well written, and quite clever. I would recommend it if you like thrillers / suspense kind of films. (Not sure if that’s how it should be categorised, but oh well).

Anyway, um, I think that’s just about it.

TTFN!

A few weeks ago, I downloaded Fedora Core 5 and burnt it to a DVD. I finally got round to (trying to) install it yesterday evening.

All I can say is, what a freakin’ disappointment.

Why oh WHY does Anaconda always seem to crash on me? This has happened now for the past two versions they’ve released (four and five). For version four, I just assumed that it was a dodgy CD (corruption can sometimes happen if you download a large file), but two times in a row? This has got to be more than a coincidence.

What basically happened is that around 96% of the way through copying the files, it came up with a message saying that a particular package was corrupted – the only options given to me were to retry or reboot. This in itself is stupid – it should at least give the option to “ignore”, so that it can just ignore any packages which might have been corrupted, and then you can maybe download the proper versions from the net once it’s all there. It should at least fail gracefully! What actually happened is (after I’d selected the option to ‘retry’), it then waited for about ten minutes, before coming up with a message saying “An unhandled exception has occured. This is probably a bug”. And then made me reboot.

Needless to say, the system was NOT in a consistent state when I rebooted, the installation was only partially completed… I managed to back up my files, but couldn’t start the GUI and had to do it all from the commandline.

What I don’t get is why this happened two times in a row on my installations of Fedora Core, but has never happened on any of my other Linux installations (and I’ve tried about four *nix distros – Gentoo, CentOS, Ubuntu and FreeBSD).

Needless to say, I am now switching away from Fedora Core. If the upgrades between versions are going to be this painful, I don’t want to use it anymore — I’m going to stick with something like Ubuntu — you can upgrade automatically and it downloads all the required packages from the net, rather than having to download a whole CD (or four CDs in the case of Fedora) or a DVD.

Grrr.