Update 3.0, newly-installed by a subtechnoid??

[Beartooth]

	This is a retry, hoping to ask in a better way.

	I run mostly RH 8.0 & 9 on a PC desktop -- when I'm home -- and
borrow my wife Jo's laptop (which I gave her as a retirement present)
when we visit her family. 

	It's a G3 iBook purchased 8/02 from Terrasoft with 25GB of YDL
(originally 2.3, in place of which I have installed 3.0), 9GB of OSX
(1.0, since upgraded to 1.0.5), and 1GB of OS9 (never booted). It's the
whole subject of this post, and I'll be concerned almost entirely with
the 3.0.

	She uses it (and I'm elected to shoot troubles and do
maintenance) at home on DSL with a Linksys BEFW11S4 ver. 2 router,
sometimes with an ethernet cable and sometimes wirelessly; but in the
Great Smokies, where her family lives, all we can get is a flaky dialup
account. 

	I need to know how best to bring it up to date. And then also 
how to make it connect to the dialup; I never did succeed with 2.3.

	The situation at present is this. 

	I can boot to 3.0 or OSX, both of which seem to run OK, though 
OSX, oddly, no longer wants to connect.

	In what follows, I am trying to make heavy use of the lucid and 
helpful advice offered on this list to my original query, particularly 
that of Nathan R Hruby and Gavin Hemphill, without both of whom by now I 
would doubtless have crawled in a hole and pulled the hole in after me. 
I thank them and all of you.

	(NB: I tried doing pdisk -l, as GavinH suggested; and, to no
one's surprise I'm sure, got an odd result. But I pass over that for the
rest of this post, in hope of not needing it.)

	Doing "yum list installed" got me a long list. I went through it
and removed all I thought safe -- presuming that it is *not* safe to
remove anything beginning with glib*, gnu*, lib*, redhat-config*, or
other familiar names. (I assume it's better to purge before updating -- 
an uncertain assumption, in the light of my experience with RedHat.)

	Being cautious, I got this remove list: ethereal, evolution (we
do all our mail in pine through ssh to a remote machine -- and don't use
electronic calendars), gnuchess (we do not play computer games; there
must be more I can remove!), httpd (my one, very ephemeral, website is
hosted elsewhere), joystick, telnet (we stick to ssh), tuxracer. (We
don't own a single DVD, nor expect to soon; but I didn't spot the apps
for that. Btw, taper is not installed.)

	I ran "yum info <package_name>" against each of the above, and
saw no dangers. So I ran "yum remove" against each -- separately, just
in case. Only gnuchess and httpd produced warnings, gnuchess about
xboard and httpd about mod_perl.ppc.

	I let yum erase xboard along with gnuchess -- and kept Apache,
for fear that anything with "perl" in it might be crucial somewhere and
called by some app, not apparent to me, which is itself called by one I
see.

	"df -h" now shows that I am using 2.0G and have 21G available,
all mounted on /dev/hda12; I don't see /home, /etc, /usr, /var, or
anything else on that display. (pwd shows me to be at /root; cd /
followed by ls does show all those and others such as bin, boot, initrd,
misc, and so on, but without of course any indications of size -- and 
apparently all on the one huge partition.)

	SO: QUERY: am I now ready to command "yum update" as root, in
order to get whatever goodies have come into existence since my CDs were
burned?

	I have not touched my yum.conf, since reports on this seem to
diverge;  but I have printed Rick Thomas's and Geoff Mendelson's configs
to use if/when I find out whether to.

	 If so, given that 3.0 boots, comes up, and seems to run OK, how
long ought the download to take?

	NB: To re-emphasize, my main reason for upgrading to 3.0 in the
first place is to be able to connect different ways in different places
-- to DSL through ethernet cable directly to a DSL modem, to DSL
sometimes wirelessly through the router and sometimes through an
ethernet cable through the router; and at need in the mountains through
the flaky dialup -- things I've had to use OSX for, part or all of the
time, till now. 

	If 3.0 can do them all, I'll be happy to do a new install
devoting all 35GB to YDL, update all over again, and never bother with
the vaunted Apple Interface again; that other 9GB might come in handy 
for GPSDrive, which I hope to learn to use in real time once I get it.

-- 
Beartooth Implacable <karhunhammas (at) lserv.com> 
FREE at last: Retired to the Mountains, No Mortgage! 
Keep in mind that I know barely enough of this stuff to ask about it.