Patrick's Rants

In my last installment, A Christmas Review I was upgrading Fedora Core. The upgrade process went something like: install the base system, run yum upgrade, then install the next fedora-release, or redhat-release file depending upon version and then running yum upgrade again. I did this for three or four upgrade levels. The whole time I couldn’t get Fedora to recognize the soundcard – and I wasn’t the only one. It seems this sound card is a pain to anyone running the 600e IBM laptop. I was supposed to be able to run alsaconf and have the sound card configured. And I tried for each version that I upgraded through. Fedora/RedHat seems to have replaced alsaconf with their own script(s) system-config-soundcard. That script didn’t work at all… in at least three versions.

I recently saw that an even more up-to-date version of Fedora Core was out; number 6. One more run on the upgrada-go-round. Download and install fedora-release, then run yum upgrade. This time I got a “Floating Point Error” in RPM, the base libraries that yum uses. It only took a week and a half to install this laptop to the point where it failed.

Time to start over, this time with Slackware. The funny burn issue on the office cd-writer caused me to not be able to install the most up-to-date Slackware. I’m beginning to get a little frustrated at this cd-writer issue. I was able to get enough of an install that I could boot the computer, and then it was on to the upgrade cycle. There is a piece of software named “Swaret” that handles the updates for Slackware – and it works pretty well. In few days I had the laptop up-to-date. And alsaconf worked! I have sound. Next I had to cdda2wav installed and working (it was without any extra work) and then get a little piece of software called lame (Lame Aint an MP3 Encoder) installed and working. I downloaded it and ran the configuration and make commands and… it works.

And now… I have to write some little scripts that will write the cd contents to the hard drive, create the directory structure that matches the SanDisk players and encode the MP3s. Oh, and recognize the SanDisk player when it’s plugged in and automatically set it up – either that or I have to teach the kids how to run some *nix commands. Oh, it looks like I will be using MP3 Sugar for new MP3s, since it doesn’t force me to run newer *doze Operating Systems or have Digital Restrictions Management.