Monday I took a fresh look at my Linux box. Three drives. 80, 320 and 500Gb. OS installed on the large one. Intent? to free up the space taken on the 320 and make it into a backup drive. Something went wrong. When I formatted and partitioned it, it refused to boot. For whatever reason, Fedora seemed to have linked the two drives in some weird fashion. Eventually I gave up, removed the 500 (with all my data on it), installed FC10 on the 320 and updated it. No problem. Then the fun begins. I've been using Linux long enough now to have built up quite a few applications. They were all missing. I'm now documenting these missing items as I go along. So far (just over 24 hours), the list is about 30 items. Nothing exotic, just stuff I can remember being on the desktop, stuff I use and find missing etc. It's a pig to do, but a lesson well worth learning. It also leaves me with a clean system. Or will do if I ever finish.

When I used Windows, I tried to keep the OS on one disk, my data on another. I want to do that now, except that all the paths have changed, so my 101 bash convenience scripts need updating. Given time, I'll do a planned move to such a system where I can use some form of indirection to get at all this stuff. Couple of things have helped. I've used two partitions on the big disk for commonly used locations. I missed taking that far enough, so now my /sgml directory is /d/sgml, as is all my java stuff. I need to rethink that somehow.

I came to write this blog, and oops, Ft.MarkupWriter is missing. Oops, FC10 is using Python 2.5.2, from 2006! 3.0 has been out for a while now.

Standard install, the problem reported here is back. I'd have thought.... Ah well. Anyway, I'm glad to be back up and running.

$ yum remove pulseaudio

again, and Beethoven is belting out as I write.

I think perhaps the worst moment was when emacs came up without the font I'd selected in my .emacs file! I'd no idea where I got it from, but it seems to be missing. Not long to find the available fonts (unsure if I've done that before!), bit of picking and choosing and I'm back with a moderate sized clear font.

I've still got to pick through those hundred or so bash scripts. Not looking forward to that, although skimming them, I'm sure they aren't all needed! Convenience scripts, clearly some were very short lived, since their names mean nothing to me now.