FC4 almost makes itself an enemy!

Installed Fedora Core 4, and it made my system unbootable. Turns out it's an issue that's been around since at least FC2 where the CD does some funky stuff on drives 120+ Gigs. It seems the installer doesn't understand LBA and it writes the partition table with the wrong geometry screwing everything up. Unfortunately, the only way to fix it was to wipe the MBR and remove grub. Even more unfortunately, the old way of fixing the MBR (fdisk /mbr) has been removed in XP and you have to boot to the recovery console. Since I was too stupid to install it on this one machine (as opposed to EVERY OTHER XP/2003 MACHINE I'VE EVER BUILT), I had to scramble to dig up a bootable one. Hint: this is really the only way to fix it. I tried numerous utils I found that claimed to repair MBRs, but they all required you to have backed them up in the past...

After getting my system working again, I repartitioned it, but I used XP's Disk Management to do so. I created blank partitions, and then let FC4 format and install onto them. This time it worked right. I also installed Grub into the MBR of the FC4 partition, rather than the root of the drive (I wasn't going through THAT again!). I used bootpart to add it to the XP boot menu. This is a lot cleaner solution than it was in the past with Lilo. Lilo wrote a new sector with each kernel change, Grub writes it once. Booting is now perfect.

The next step was to start following the Fedora Core-Myth Howto, which included updating the system to the latest. The first time I ran yum update, I had about 1700 packages that needed updating, but it kept failing transaction tests due to some weird conflict with KDE's Polish translations (I'll leave the jokes to others). Finally, I got around my issues by doing yum --exclude=kde-il8n* update. Everything necessary updated, and when I ran it again, it updated any remainders. Yay.

My goal from that point was to get this system up to the point that it was doing everything that I used it for on a daily basis. It only had to operate, for now, at the same level of functionality at least. New features could be added later.

So, to that end, I needed at least:

VMWare to install my Windows 2003/Exchange 2003 environment into.
Apache acting as a reverse proxy. This is so I can use OWA and a few other web-based apps from work.
HomeSeer, my home automation system. This has to go into the VM with Exchange, as it's Windows-based.
Some kind of TV-viewing app. I never got around to doing the PVR thing on the Windows side, so I just need something that can show the output of my cable box. I setup MythTV, and got it mostly working, but I'm having some issues with audio sync. For the time being, I just use XawTV. Close enough.

Aside from HomeSeer, I'm good to go. I setup VNC as a second session on the server, so I can do my work an not disturb LMC while she watches TV. Last night, I was using her laptop to work while sitting on the couch. She looked over and saw the VNC session I had running full screen and says, "WHAT DID YOU DO?!" hehehe, it's not your screen, Babe. :)