A pox on Fedora and in their hat too

[Kevin O'Gorman]

The fall term just ended, and it was time to do something about the RH9
system sitting on my office desk, so I got the FC3 disks the department
was using to burn all the lab machines.  The short version: nothing FC
worked.

A bit longer:
1) I got a spare IDE drive, made it HDB, and installed on that.  Everything
    went well until the post-install reboot, when grub simply said "GRUB" and
    nothing else happened at all.

2) I recabled so the space drive was HDA and there was no HDB.  I installed
    3 times:
    a) graphical install.  Did weird things with the monitor and I was unable
        to properly interact with it much past selection of my timezone.
    b) text install.  It appeared better, but I had such difficulty
navigating the
        controls, I missed some options.  It would all have been fixable except
        that the display kept getting mangled, and each time eventually got the
        entire system wedged.  Hard reset time.
    c) graphical install.  The install went better this time, took forever, and
        ended up not much different from (b) above.  Only the details were
        different.
3) gave up on this idea.  Got one of the lab staff to install FC3 the same
         way the lab machines were, by mounting a remote partition with a tar
         of a good FC3 install.  Results: like (b) and (c).

For reference, the desktop in question is a stock Dell GX-110.  FC3 correctly
identified all hardware.  The lab machines are also Dells, a bit more recent.

Ubuntu to the rescue.  The lab person, as baffled as I, lent me his Ubuntu
disk.  No problems.  Everything works, and I'm back in business.  It runs Gnome,
and I need at least the kdelibs, but I can manage that.  I guess I'll
be learning
apt and friends.

The other likely candidate was Gentoo, but the compile times were going to
be a killer.  I don't need to tweak this machine, so a binary distro makes more
sense.  I use and like Gentoo at home.

++ kevin

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD