Red Hat 9 -> Fedora Core Part II

Yesterday when I finally managed to boot up after migrating from Redhat 9.0 to Fedora Core 3, it was with a minimalistic installation. An installation without gnome, KDE or any of the office or developer tools. Adding these packages turned out to be a wrist spraining affair.

The package manager at first refused to recognize CD changes, this was tracked down to the fact that the cd was mounted at /media/cdrecorder and not /mnt/cdrom creating a new folder in /mnt seemed to take care of that but I had to change CDs at least 30-40 times to get all the packages in.

Firefox and thunderbird when they were installed did not detect the old settings properly so I decided to browse with konqueror and download the latest versions of these software. The download manager for kde, Kget seemed to work fine for a while but then it just disappeared and nothing would coerce it to show up on the desktop again so I had to go back to the versions found on the CD. (yikes it does not recognize the java console extension)

Thunderbird no longer appeared to choke with the Segmentation fault I reported earlier but it had the same problem all previous versions of mozilla mail had; it chokes when copying a message to the outbox

Having lost a full day thanks to the installation/upgrade process, I was desperately keen to get back to work and decided to take a risk and install apache and PHP from RPMs, I should have known better. It was a big mistake. The news installation refused to execute cgi scripts outside the cgi-bin folder. The log file says Permission denied: /home/raditha/websites/raditha/mt/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

There was a lot of bull in various mailing lists about this having to do with file system permissions. That's most unlikely, after working with apache for around 8 years i am sure i would know how to set the correct permissions. Rather than wasting time trying to figure this out (you are not supposed to use RPM installations of apache anyway). So apache was compiled from source along with a minimalistic php engine. Hopefully I will be able to get back to work quickly and have something good to say about fedora tomorrow.