[ltp] I Installed Fedora Core 3 on my Thinkpad R32

[morpheus]

Well, I finally broke down and set aside a few hours to upgrade from FC1
to FC3 on my R32.  Mostly, it was painless.

First, here is something I can recommend to everyone whenever upgrading
a distro.  Normally, I download the .iso file and burn it to a boot DVD
then boot off of it.  This time, out of necessity (the CD/DVD drive on
my machine is thrashed) I had to find another way.

As it turns out, it's easy to just leave the .iso on your hard disk and
install directly, without burning CDs or a DVD.  This is much faster,
because it saves you the burning time but also because reading from HDD
makes the install breeze by.  Details can be found here:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~colohan/docs/fedora_upgrade.html

First, the upgrade broke the rpm database, so I had to grab an rpm for
apt (www.pbone.net is a good rpm search site) and install it, then run
apt-get -f dist-upgrade
I had one package with unmet dependencies that wouldn't uninstall
because the uninstall script wouldn't run, so I had to debug a bit, but
finally fixed the RPM directory and did a dist-upgrade.  During the
dist-upgrade kgpg caused package conflicts, so I removed it, ran the
dist-upgrade and re-installed it.  The dist-upgrade removed lots of old
packages that aren't compatible with the new kernel.  I didn't need most
of them anyway.  For some reason, it removed xine and transcode, which I
use often, perhaps the FC3 rpms aren't loaded onto the apt repositories
yet).

The following devices worked pretty much right out of the box:
video
audio
USB keyboard/mouse
network (as a bonus, the prism chipset in my linksys PCMCIA 802.11g card
is now in the kernel, so Fedora automatically configures it as eth1 and
I can set it up via system-config-network)
firewire hard disks

Not working:
IIim (this was always quirky and VERY poorly documented, no man page,
etc.)

So, for the most part it was painless and I'm pretty happy.

Let me know if you have any questions.

-m