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 2.5 passes with memtest86+ this morning, without the side fans on, so its not CPU/RAM/heat issues.

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.net and got 1.21Mbps download/330Kbps upload from various servers in France/Ireland (ping was 160-200ms!)

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 0.7.45 and rebuilt them, it looks like the last version F13 could support as it doesn’t have Python 2.7 or SIP 4.12. However it seems pretty unstable – if you try to update metadata or convert an epub to mobi format it just sits there using 100% CPU doing nothing!

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. I guess a lot of those packages are now in the standard Fedora install, and the rest I’ve made my own RPM’s for (john, gip, gstm, knockd etc.) or can be got from the RPMFusion, Google and Adobe repositories.