Downloaded and burned installation DVDs for Fedora core 3 (heidelberg) and Fedora core 4 test1. The Fedora core 3 installation started, then started getting disk read errors. The Fedora core 4 installation offered to scan the DVD for errors, and promptly complained about errors on the disk.
Could be the DVD reader in this box is a little old, and perhaps is the source of the Fedora and Solaris installation DVD errors. Either that or my DVD writer is writing bad DVDs…
Perhaps influenced by Jonathan, downloaded and burned a Solaris 10 x86 installation DVD. Hit reboot (what should have marked the end of the just-prior Debian installation) and got…
Cannot find boot.bin
Not an encouraging start…
This box has fairly recent/generic hardware — ECS K7S5A Pro motherboard, 2.4Ghz Athlon, 1GB RAM, 200GB in 2 disks, an DVD-reader (primary) and a CD-writer (secondary) — nothing exotic. The box has played host to Redhat, Gentoo, Fedora, and Debian installations without trouble.
Seems this symptom is not unknown, but not really explained. Popped the DVD into another machine and found two instances of “boot.bin”, so I’m thinking the problem is not with the disk.
Oh well – guess I will not be playing with Solaris any time soon.
Installed Debian 3.0r4 on a spare machine, mostly out of curiousity. There are a enough folks fond of Debian thought it might be worth another try.
First, I made a horrible mistake. Downloaded, burned and installed from 9 ISO images (7 installation, 2 updates). Trying to be a good bandwidth-citizen by downloading via bittorrent, and leaving the client up long enough to contribute back as much as I had pulled down. After burning the CDs it (belatedly) occurred to me that with 9 CDs I might be in for a lot of disk swapping. Turns out, that is exactly what happened.
To be fair, I do believe the Debian installer is much improved over the last version I tried. Still – getting two disks partitioned and formatted as ext3 took an awful lot of trial and error. In addition for some reason the video driver used during the installation painted characters on the screen about as fast as a 9600 baud terminal.
The installation (or perhaps more accurately the packages in the installation) ask a lot of questions at random times during the installation.
Ideally you would like to answer an initial set of questions up front, then go do something else while all the download/unpack/whatever batch operations run. At the end you could do configuration on all the newly installed software. This is not what you get with Debian. Add random install-stopping questions to a lot of CD-swapping and the whole procedure was rather tedious.
In the end Debian booted to a character-mode 80×25 login (giant letters on a 21″ panel) — and at this point I had lost interest.
Found a couple of interesting weblogs from the log of visitors to this weblog (pardon the recursion).
WebWord Usability Weblog :: Usability and Human Factors for the Internet
Usability In The News
Nice effect here – checking the “latest visitors” to your weblog acts like a sort of very-selective search engine 
.
Seems that some of the visitors to this entry are coming from military sites, from obvious search queries. Good to know I am contributing to military, er, readiness .
Too bad I don’t have any pictures, for which I suspect they are hoping…
Guess it must be spring…
Went to the ACP Swap Meet this morning for no obvious reason. Looks like this institution is pretty much on it’s last legs. The number of vendors is perhaps a third or less from the peak, and the number of customers probably even less. No real surprise, as the prices at the swap are no longer dramatically better than elsewhere. Shopping over the Internet has much to do with this. Bought a SD Memory card (512MB for $40) to replace the lost card for my sons digital camera.
Went north to bother my dad, and check out the changes to his house. He is preparing – in increments – to sell. The back patio cover and shed are gone – both of which I helped my dad build when I was a teenager in high school, and were rather deteriorated. Oddly enough without the two structures, somehow the backyard appears smaller. My parents bought this house when I was 5 years old.
Took the long way home – east through Santa Ana Canyon, south on the 15 to Temecula. Ate lunch at “Farmer Boy’s” (a decent hamburger joint), then wound west on Ortega Highway (#74).
Somewhere in there we started to see increasing numbers of butterflies – after some had unfortunate encounters with the windshield. By the time we reached RSM (Rancho Santa Margarita) the numbers were remarkable – not so dense to appear as a swarm, but when driving I would say we passed close to one or more butterflies every 10 yards, for perhaps the last 10-15 miles home. Looking out the window at home I see one to several fly by every few seconds – with all heading generally northwest. I am sure this indicates something .
Norman Borlaug: Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity — Center for Global Food Issues
… the green parties of Europe have been frightened by the sudden wave of migrants entering their traditionally low-immigration nations, and now think that improving conditions in Africa isn’t such a bad idea after all.
Another sign of things passing…. Monaco Prince Rainier’s Health Deteriorating
Watched To Catch a Thief on DVD a few nights ago – one of my favorite old movies. The beautiful young woman in the film, shortly after became the bride of Prince Rainier. She died a few years back.
Aside from the cars passing on the road, I wonder if you visited the Villa in the movie – if very much has changed.