Installing Fedora Core 5 (or is it FC4)

I was getting sick and tired of not being able to install new stuff on my computer (mainly due to package dependencies relating to my glibc being too outdated!) so I decided to upgrade my redhat 9 to FC5.

I’ve probably installed (or upgraded) operating systems over 100+ times but I guess I’ll never learn. Always backup and plan for the unexpected because the unexpected will ALWAYS happen! So once again, I ignored this and I’m now on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

I first tried upgrading RH9 to FC5. Bad idea. The installation (upgrade) went fine but boot hung while starting udev. I checked online and it seems that the problem relates to pcmcia (and mostly laptops). But mine is a desktop and I don’t even have/use PCMCIA! Check online again and found out that upgrading the pcmciautils package may solve the problem. I can’t upgrade it for some reason. Another few hours of searching the web could probably enable me to find a solution to this, but I can’t be bothered so I get an unsed (old) 40G disk and decide to install a fresh copy of FC5 on it. OK, this must/should work but the formatting process hangs near the end. Hmm.. what’s going on here?

So I get frustrated and decide to go “all in”. Stupid idea. I reconnect the original HDD and install a fresh copy of FC5. Installation goes fine, but the same problem with udev hanging persists! Well the systems doesn’t really hang, it just fails at udev and continues to boot but painfully slowly. I try to disable acpi with acpi=off in the grub config but nothing seems to help. The system now boots in about 15 minutes (slower than any windows system I ever had!) and after booting the system is still extremely slow. It takes about 30 seconds to get a terminal opened. Yikes!

So I download FC4 knowing that others around me have successfully installed this version and start installing.

After about an hour of installing the defaults I run into the same problem — system seems to hang while “Starting udev” and the boot process is really slow.

Perhaps there is a H/W problem. Hopefully not, but just in case. So I go to HP.com and download insight diagnostics. It’s extremely slow and about 10 hours later, it tells me that my system is fine. Thank god, but what on earth is wrong then???

The only thing I can suspect is the memory which I recently upgraded. Perhaps there is such a thing as too much memory!! And some websites seem to say that this might be a problem. So I trick my grub bootloader into thinking my system only has 1G of memory and everything works fine!!

So I get rid of some RAM and reinstall FC5. It seems to be working now.

Updates: back from AoM and start of a new academic year

Just got back from the Academy of Management conference in Atlanta and it’s already the start of the new 2006-07 academic year.

The conference was great. Got to catch up with some colleagues/co-authors and discuss on-going projects, made new and interesting people, attended some interesting (and some very boring) talks, and got some new ideas for new research areas, yay!. OCIS seemed to have grown quite a bit since I last attended the conference in 1999.

Fall 2006 starts next week. Luckily, I only start teaching in the second half of the semester, so I have some time to prepare.

Another (major) thing to note. Claire started her first week of formal education (i.e., kindergarten) last week. And she is enjoying it a lot! I anticipated that this would be much more stressful for both her and me and mijin, but everything went surprisingly uneventfully.

On a related note, Jodi will be starting a new semester at her pre-school this week. Let’s hope she enjoys this as much as her sister.

Hello world (again)!

I had some issues with my old server and had to find another solution.  WordPress.com seemed like a great solution.  I’m going to test it for a while.  But it’s not like I post very regularly.