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!) and not debuginfo/source:

/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-rawhide.repo

[rawhide]
name=Fedora - Rawhide - Developmental packages for the next Fedora release
failovermethod=priority
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/development/$basearch/os/
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=rawhide&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch
includepkgs=kernel*

/etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-nonfree-rawhide.repo

[rpmfusion-nonfree-rawhide]
name=RPM Fusion for Fedora Rawhide - Nonfree
#baseurl=http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/development/$basearch/os/
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mirrorlist?repo=nonfree-fedora-rawhide&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-latest-$basearch file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-rawhide-$basearch
includepkgs=*nvidia*

Then running “yum update” pulled in the 2.6.38-0.rc7.git2.3.fc16.x86_64 kernel from Fedora 16 (and Nvidia modules) and it does seem to have fixed the issue – I did a full rsync backup and a couple of 1.3Gb NFS transfers to test.

VirtualBox works fine too thankfully – dkms/akmod rebuilt the kernel modules upon reboot and my CentOS 5.5/Ubuntu 9.10/OEL6 guest VM’s work fine.

Mum’s thinking of getting an Amazon Kindle3 for her birthday, and it seems they now allow reading of regular PDF/epub files not just Amazon’s DRM-protected Mobi format, and there’s a Linux program called Calibre that enables you to convert between the ebook formats, including .cbz comic books.

Update: the new kernel doesn’t seem to have fixed the issue, I’ve had several crashes today without much network traffic. Starting to wonder if its an Nvidia driver issue or a hardware issue like HDD/PSU/RAM. I ordered a new PCIe NIC with Via Velocity VT6130 chipset instead of Realtek RTL8111D but doubt its going to fix anything now 🙁

I’ve also been playing with the Kindle and Kobo Android apps and downloading a shedload of free ebooks from Amazon to read on my phone – even got Calibre to convert useless PDF’s to more portable epub files. The Kobo website is useless as its throws DRM-protected PDF’s at you (for free books!) but the Android app just downloads unencrypted epubs.