Archive for 2007-02-03

At the middle of rpm upgrade, X Window is suddenly killed, and indeed the yum update running inside gnome-terminal is also killed. With a shiver down my spine, it is time to check for rpm database corruption:

[root@localhost ~]$ rpm -qa | sed 's/\(.*\)-.*-.*/\1/' | sort | uniq -c | awk '$1 != 1 {print $ALL}' | wc -l
400
[root@localhost ~]$ 

In plain word this means 400 packages have BOTH new version and old version inside rpm database.

I’m writing this blog in a freshly installed Fedora 6, though it is still updating — the crappy yum is doing its work slowly, as I really need to move to Fedora devel instead of staying with stable release. Let me recall what has happened after burning installation DVD and booting it:

1. On the first time, anaconda gives me python code trace because it failed to retrieve repository info from internet. What then? Reboot. Shit.
2. Second time the installation is fine. BUT…
3. Since I don’t want to have grub overwriting my machine’s MBR, fedora is not bootable. Expected.
4. What I didn’t expect is, after booting DVD into rescuing mode and refresh boot sector, it simply gives me kernel panic after finished loading kernel. Seems to be pivot_root problem or initrd failed to hand over the booting process to the real partition.
5. This leads to 3^rd installation. OK, I found the option about writing grub into boot sector instead of MBR. BUT…
6. It simply overwrites MBR. Damn it.
7. Now running yum update, probably it will finish after a whole night, in contrast of apt-get update which finishes within a few minutes. Yawn…… zzzz……

Why going through the pain while there are better distributions out there? Because I need a vanilla GNOME beta version for doing my translation work. The only viable options are Fedora and Mandriva here, though I don’t know if OpenSuSE has good enough GNOME testing package. If people says it’s OK I’ll give it a try. Anyway, I don’t want to go back to Mandriva in near future, so Fedora is my only short-term option.

• Ubuntu? I can’t even distinguish which translation is done by official team and which isn’t. Need to do translation? Throw it away.
• Debian? It might have GNOME testing package after 10 years. A server-only distribution.