I just felt like noting that I installed Fedora Core 1 on my linux server in order to deal with the whole want-photos-but-can’t-have-it thing. This, in the hopes of getting the latest, shiniest version of PHP running without recompiling the kernel or Apache or something.

So, like, I burn the CDs and install the OS and do all the configuration–which sounds like it’s not a big deal, but it doing it all in my spare time means that I get it done in weekly hour-long increments. That ends up looking like this:

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Week 1

Backup choice config files on the server

Week 2

Download images

Week 3

Ask a friend to burn images to CDs

Week 4

Install the OS

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So, starting around Week 4 is when I have to deal without some amenities–like a print server or family intranet box or home file server. Mild irritations, all of them. What compounds the issue, though, is that the OS was not as easy an install as previous versions of RedHat Linux. I finish the install, start up the box and let it sit while I go to sleep.

A couple of nights later, I try to SSH into the box while I’m doing other stuff. It doesn’t work. Hm.

A couple of nights after that, I log in locally and try to do a sanity check: /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart. Ah. The NIC card is crapping out. Must have fried it or something.

A few more days go by. I pop a network card from an old NAT box I had lying around and see if that works. It should–it’s a 3Com card, only the most ubiquitous brand of personal networking hardware in the 1990s. Restart the server. Same error–only for both cards this time. Hm.

Dig, dig, dig. Okay, there’s a Fedora bug with 3Com cards. Like, all of them. I try to work a suggested workaround, only to discover–sorry!–my preferred text editor isn’t available in Fedora. Not knowing any better, I tried using the echo command to recreate my modules.conf file. Copy the file to /etc and shutdown -r now. The server starts up, and the NIC cards are still bolloxed.

The other day Sarah got me talking about what it’s like to create information technology. I told her that the best analogy I could come up with is that it’s like dragging these Platonic ideals out of the atmosphere of my mind and into a grittier, substantial reality. Inevitably, compromises are made along the way and the product of these efforts often never quite as beautiful or perfect as they were in their abstraction.

This, though, is getting ridiculous. At this point, I have no love for an open source OS that neither recognizes the vast majority of desktop networking hardware, nor includes one of the most commonly-used text editors in the Unix world. Any distro suggestions would be helpful. Of utmost importance to me right now is the ability to navigate the command line quickly and easily, simple-to-use upgrading (like apt-get perhaps?), and all the file-serving, intranet hosting, print-sharing stuff I mentioned before.