I’m here at the Robotics Research Laboratory in IIIT Hyderabad and the computer which I have been assigned to has fc4. It’s quite an old computer with an average configuration. And there’s nothing installed in it except the basic software that come during the installation! The first week of my project work, I was quite busy with the work that was given to me and did not even think about installing any media players or linuxdcpp or anything of that sort. Well, actually the comp did not even have flash player for me to see videos in youtube or any other site.
That was when I realized I had to install a few things if I had to survive in the lab! And as there is no computer in the room also, I had to rely on the computer that was alloted to me in the lab. Then I installed flash player. Well, it took me quite some time to figure out that the comp required x86_64 files itself, for installation.
Then I downloaded the required files from adobe’s site and did it all manually, as Yum was not configured and I was quite restless to configure it. Then I felt the need of watching movies, listening to songs, etc and started looking for dc++. That was when I really appreciated the install managers like Yast (is the best!!!) and Yum.
I then started to think that the installation is so easy in our college due to the repository on LAN itself. The download process was taking a lot of time and I thought I was wasting my time in doing all this stuff, rather than concentrating on my project. Then I recalled that the idea of our LUG’s repository, which Debayan had given, was taken from IIIT itself! That, I thought was the turning point.
But No! I went to their webpage which was really well documented and had many shell scripts which configured yum and other things automatically (This is an area of improvement for NIT DGP LUG). I did all those things which were mentioned in the webpage. I successfully changed the repository details, to point to the IIIT’s repository. And even after this, I got many errors when I gave commands to install vlc, mplayer, to update firefox, etc. These were the list of error I got….
Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: updates-released
Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository
Another process in transaction (well, this one was easy to rectify, just went to /var/run and deleted the file with filename yum.pid)
and a lot more!
All these days, i.e. for 3 weeks, I was alloted a room, which is more like a chamber for 2 people, the other one being an MS student, my guide for the project. Yesterday, I was asked to shift to the lab, the new robotics lab, as a PhD student wanted to take the place that I was using. So we just had to shift the CPU.
As soon as I brought the CPU to the new lab and booted, fedora refused to boot! The booting stopped after Enabling Swap Space…..[OK]. Then I started googling for the solution and found many, most of them included booting fedora from the cd. One of the solution was to remove the network cable and reboot! I tried that as it was the easiest. The result was the error was being shown this time! It looked something like write error !#@@crap#%*(^(*. That was when I got really pissed off. Then I thought that I will implement the other solution, and I thought I can network boot fedora. I again went to the repository and found that they do not have the network boot option that we do! (This is one place where our repository scores over theirs, thanks to Debayan’s efforts!). So I asked some people for fedora core 4 cd, as expected none of them had it and they said that they could burn it in a cd if I brought one. It was 11 in the night, so there was no chance of me getting a cd at that time!
Feeling dejected, I went back to the hostel. When I came back today morning, nobody was there in the lab and I thought that I will set up a repository in a computer in the lab itself which can be used for network boot! Then people started coming to the lab, and I kept asking each one for the cd again. One of the MS students here, Shivudu, then told me that cd is not required and he booted the PC again.
[Solution to the booting problem]
He just deleted the first command in the kernel options and entered Single.
Then when the boot was continuing, the terminal started, and we deleted all the unwanted stuff. Then after rebooting, it got stuck again! He told me to just unplug the mouse, and to my astonishment, fedora booted successfully!
Here I am again blogging in the same old comp and still figuring out how to install stuff in this comp!
[That's why in my opinion, Opensuse rocks!!!]
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