I fail at Linux

I destroyed my Windows Vista Installation. I failed the WGA check, and I didn't want to activate. For some reason none of my recent media for my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora, was available, so I pulled out my 64-bit Fedora 8 DVD, and installed.

Then I printed on my Live CD of openSUSE 11.0 RC1 with a snazy label, generated with the help of The GIMP/Gutenprint and my Epson Stylus Photo R320. The images I got were pretty cool.

Why did I go back to 8? Not sure, but I know 9 wasn't working well. I wanted to grab some files from my backup drive, which was formatted in NTFS, and there's some bug, I think that requires root access for mounting NTFS drives, whereas that worked fine in Fedora 8.

But, I figured that would give me a chance to try the preupgrade feature...

"yum install preupgrade"... man that was slow. I think I'd rather have downloaded a DVD of Fedora 9 and installed. Oh well. It went okay. I think it upgraded the third party Livna Repo as well. Too bad the Fedora 8 kmod-nvidia driver was still running when I rebooted to start in Fedora 9.

"Out of Range"... bah... CTRL+ALT+F2 to get a terminal, and "yum remove kmod-nvidia"...

"Out of Range"... um... crap... I'm not a linux sysadmin. If I weren't persistent, I'd have canned this and just went back to Windows XP. "Bulletproof X" is starting to sound really good...

"system-config-display"... set the autodetected monitor to a generic 1280x1024 CRT... reboot...

whoo-hoo! X starts... ugh... I'm celebrating a totally crappy experience. At least I'm upgraded... anyone else feel that PackageKit could really use some more love... I mean, it is better than Pirut was, but crud.

"yum install kmod-nvidia"... make a blog post with logjam... wait for installation... then install 211 updates. Or should I reboot first, hoping I can get something other than 800x600? I'll update. There goes a baby crying... must be the epic failure of my Linux-fu.

Oh, it was just Julie... so here she is on my lap... and I have... a dependency failure with Network Manager. Updates fail.

"yum remove NetworkManager"? Maybe not. It might be time to fire up that OpenSUSE though... removing NetworkManager wants to remove a bunch of stuff... the edge is bleeding all over me, and now the family will be up soon... No time for this, and OpenSUSE 11 comes out "real soon now".