Personal Computing Joy

It started innocently enough. My abused RedHat 7.0 installation was beginning to show signs of age, and it seems to be dropping off Ximian's Red Carpet in terms of support. An upgrade to 7.3 seemed like a good idea.

The pain.

What I forgot was that every time I've upgraded RedHat, I've done so via a clean install. Still, what could possibly go wrong? I burn the release CDs, reboot, start the upgrade process, and sit back.

Then comes the error. The program dies trying to install twm. It gives a wonderful message saying that basically any number of things could have gone wrong, but it wasn't going to tell me. Oh, and it was going to abort and reboot if that was okay with me.

The reboot leads to all kinds of interesting errors, from refusing to mount my LVM /mp3 partition, doing strange things with my ext3 partitions, before finally giving up with a kernel panic. After wiping the entertaining thoughts of smashing my machine into pieces with a sledgehammer, I start again. With a clean install. It works. With no errors. Obviously, there was a reason that I never did upgrades.

After that, it was a matter of completely junking the RH kernel, and grabbing 2.4.18 from kernel.org, as my VIA chipset wasn't detected with the RH 2.4.18, but was with the standard one. And then slowly rebuilding the applications that I'd lost.

Just for balance - my sister upgraded from IE 4.0 to IE 6.0 yesterday, and lost all of her mail in the process. To sum up - Computers Are Evil.