Fedora 8 and the T43 paperweight
It's major upgrade season again. As usual, I used yum to upgrade to the next major release (8, ever so tastefully codenamed "Werewolf") of Fedora. As usual, things went mostly smoothly, with a few glitches:
- During the upgrade process, yum stalled. After I killed it, the next iteration would fail during the "transaction check": My system had both the fc7 and fc8 versions of certain packages installed, and yum somehow was not able to figure out how to deal with the obvious conflicts between these. So I had to go through things by hand, throwing out all versions of the packages in question (rpm -e --nodeps), and then using yum to explicitly install them. That should have been automatic.
- Of course, the UI theme has changed a bit again. Fortunately not too much.
- My Thinkpad's hotkeys (Fn-F4 for suspend, Fn-F5 to turn bluetooth on or off) are suddenly routed through ACPI, so I had to make sure Fn-F4 is treated like a lid closure, and I had to drop in a trivial script to toggle bluetooth when Fn-F5 is detected. That, too, should just work out of the box, without me having to mess around with scripts. (Then again, being in full control of my ACPI setup also means that my machine doesn't suspend when the plug is pulled...)
Most remarkably, it appears as though the ever-flaky Suspend/Resume survived the upgrade. We'll see how reliably.
Later: The fun didn't last long. For whatever reason, the T43 decided to become a rather expensive paperweight shortly after it was all done, by not showing any useful signs of life after a reboot. I ripped out the power cord and the battery, I removed the hard drive, I removed the memory extension -- no change; I couldn't even get the startup message to display. I'm now back to my more than 4 years old R40 and Fedora Core 4 (which happened to still sit around on that machine, in an abandoned version of my home directory). Meanwhile, I'm contemplating the quality of IBM's warranty services (which I'll exercise again this Monday), and possible successors to the T43. Top candidates right now: T61, X61t (or X60t), or the black MacBook.
(I'm fortunate enough to have made a full backup of my home directory earlier today, so at least that's no reason for worries.)
