Couple of updates to earlier posts. #1 my PC is still crashing, so it wasn’t the hard disk (although that did need replacing anyway). My DVD burner is pretty shit these days – it never seems to be able to read the DVD’s it burns, so I’ve unplugged that for now, also I’ve unplugged my webcam, reseated the RAM and a general wiggling of cables etc. It survived 8.5 hours of mprime torture last night, and 2.

I finally got my SFR 3G SIM to work with a little help from PP and SFR rebooting their shitty webserver. Essentially you have to ask for your password to be reset a few times (do it via SMS with the SIM in your phone, not by email) and eventually it will work. Then in NetworkManager use the following: Number: *99# (not *99***1#) Username: the SIM card’s phone number (as sent to you via SMS, or ‘slsfr’ seems to work) Password: your password (as sent to you via SMS, that you login to the website with, or ‘slsfr’ seems to work) APN: slsfr (not websfr) Pin: empty I tested it at the newly blinged-out speedtest.

I came back tonight after leaving Calibre fetching metadata/covers for 4,000 ebooks to find my PC was frozen – even after reinstalling with Fedora 13 not 14. It passed memtest86 (RAM), it passed mprime (CPU), it didn’t pass smartctl (HDD) ……… SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Completed: read failure 90% 3121 231943665 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 2 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 2 So 2 uncorrectable sectors and the self-test couldn’t even get past 10% before failing to read the disk!

Due to Mum’s recent purchase of a Kindle, I downloaded the Calibre ebook reader/converter software. Its very good and the only way you could possibly catalogue 4,000 ebooks. Unfortunately the version supported by Ubuntu Lucid (Dad’s PC) is very old – 0.6.x, so I found this PPA which installs the latest version. The version suppported by Fedora 13 (my PC) is also pretty old – 0.7.38, so I found some SRPM’s for 0.

I finally gave up fighting with the crashing kernel issue in F14 so went back to F13. For some reason when I booted my restored Clonezilla image the PC would just reset, so I did a fresh F13 install from DVD. I was suprised actually that I had 90% of my settings and software setup and installed within about 3 hours. It used to take a whole day to customise the desktop and install all those weird packages.