Colin's Journal

Colin's Journal: A place for thoughts about politics, software, and daily life.

April 27th, 2004

Computer Woes

As I was coming home on Friday evening I had a plan for the weekend. I was going to enjoy the nice weather we’d been forecast, and take lots of photos.

Chilies for sale at a Venetian market.Within half an hour of arriving home my plan was confounded by a dying hard drive. At first I wasn’t sure where the sound was coming from, but the stream of I/O errors to the console confirmed that my hard drive was on its way out.

I decided to take advantage of the new hard drive, which I had to buy, and upgrade from Debian to Fedora. The installation of Fedora went very smoothly, detecting all of my hardware even down the make and model of monitor.

Restoring all of the software services that I run, and recovering my data off the old drive, took most of the weekend. I’m still not finished, but the essentials are working (Subversion, TALAggregator, CUPS, NFS, MySQL, etc).

I’ve since attempted (and so far failed) to upgrade my machine to 100MB ethernet on the internal network, and added a 2nd 120GB to act as backup.

The good side of this upgrade is that my machine now has a new lease of life. Fedora is much faster than Debian, probably due to a combination of kernel tweaks and a newer version of Gnome.

(Photo is of some chilies for sale at a Venetian market.)

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Copyright 2015 Colin Stewart

Email: colin at owlfish.com