The exciting adventures in Unix Administration II class continued after I had to abort the installation of Red Hat 7.3 Linux last week, as the two-disc textbook version wanted a third disc that I didn’t have and the hard drive partition table got scrambled after I rebooted the system. I was planning to install Ubuntu but decided to go with the three-disc Red Hat offshoot, Fedora, for consistency with the rest of the class. The full install went on for two hours before the installer declared that the third disc was no good. This computer did not like having a third disc for some reason.

Since Plan B got trashed, it was time for Plan C with a minimal install.

As the computer was rebooting, I pressed the button on the disc drive to replace disc three with disc one to start the minimal installation. The drive tray opened with disc three still spinning at high speed and it flew out with a loud zoom to the back of the classroom. The entire class was watching me as I was the only student having problems getting the operating system installed. The instructor told me to try not to destroy the computer.

The minimal install took 25 minutes and I finally had the operating system installed to do my class work on. If I need additional software, I’ll download it off the internet. I hope next week’s class will be less exciting than this.