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.

No, not the cowboy series, but the Fedora development repository. As part of my investigation into why large transfers are hard locking my PC, I was advised to install the kernel from Rawhide, which also meant enabling the RPMFusion Rawhide repository to pull in the Nvidia modules. So first we install the repo: yum install fedora-release-rawhide.noarch Then we edit the repo files to enable them but limit them to kernel/nvidia RPM’s (we don’t want to upgrade to Fedora 15 Alpha!