Back on April 4th and 8th, I commented to my own post "Linux (Fedora 10) Sucks!" that I had ordered and installed CentOS 5.2 on two computers. All went well once I added memory to the old IBM E series 580. Both the Micron and IBM installed CentOS quickly and they both run fine. Last weekend, over the long Memorial Day weekend, I thought I would run Package Updater. The updater appeared to run just fine on the IBM, but the Micron came up an error while resolving dependencies. The error message reads, "Unable to resolve dependencies for some packages selected for installation." Under details it says, "Missing Dependency: /usr/share/magic.mime is needed by package httpd-2.2.3-22.el5.centos.i386 (updates)". Of course when I go to the /usr/share directory, there sits the magic.mime file. Today I Google the "Missing Dependency..." and sure enough a guru has trouble shot the problem and found all you have to do is clean out the Yum database with the command "yum clean all". This seems to have fixed the problem this weekend, but why did the problem exist in the first place?
After I ran the Linux software updater, the Micron wanted to reboot and I told it to go ahead. It came up in a screen resolution of 800x600. You would think no problem, I'll just set the resolution back to 1280x1024 that I had been using before and take advantage of my 19 inch monitor. As I should have expected when I tried resetting the screen resolution, my choices are now 800x600 and 640x480. Now what's up with that? I give up, Linux is never going to mature and will always be nothing more than a playground for the people who want to play there.
This new episode reminds me of the "good old days" back in 1997-98 while running Redhat 5.0 and needing to setup my video card. I had time back then, wanted a Unix box at home and wanted to learn this new thing called Linux. Back in those days if your video card didn't come supported out of the box, you did some rather bizarre calculations and then put the results in one of the configuration files in a very specific order. Then came the Xconfigurator or some such. Been there, done that, grew tired of that. Finally, when the computer I was running Linux on back in 2002 or 2003 burned out the IDE controller trying to load Redhat 9, I decided the heck with it and didn't run Linux until I ran across Fedora Core 6 in a magazine in late 2006. That's when I bought the Micron at a garage sale. This is how I got back in the Linux playground. I was hoping that Linux had matured and all the esoteric mechanization to do the simplest tasks was gone and Linux was maturing. Obviously, it was not to be true.
Looks like the next time Linux costs me money, in either software or hardware, I'll just let it die. Until then these two machines will limp along updating when they can and falling behind when they can't. When they die for whatever reason they will end up in a re-cycling center somewhere.
Just to make it perfectly clear, I am no fan of Microsoft Windows either. Microsoft's careless disregard for how much the hardware you must buy to support their software and not to mention the ridiculous software prices drives me nuts. I've got this XP Pro machine that has managed to corrupt it's NTFS file system. Not sure if this problem is Windows or the Symantec/Norton System Works and their virus called GoBack. Oh well, that's a story for another post.
Then there's this Gateway, Vista 64-bit stuff.
Sounds to me like I am just getting older and less tolerant of the things that don't work like they should, or maybe I am expecting too much. I don't want to keep complaining about Linux, I just want it to work without jumping through hoops and clicking my heels together the right number of times.
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