Mare's Nest: part 2 of 2 (long -- sorry!)

[Beartooth]

	My original 3.0 query/report summarized the results of my
attempt to do a home/office a/o desktop install (the plainest vanilla
offered)  of 3.0 on a G3 iBook purchased 8/02 from Terrasoft with 25GB
of 2.3, 9GB of OSX (1.0, since upgraded to 1.5), and 1GB of OS9 (never
booted), which I use at home on DSL with a Linksys BEFW11S4 ver. 2
router, sometimes with an ethernet cable and sometimes wirelessly; but
in the Great Smokies I have to use it with a flaky dialup account. I
then asked how best to bring it up to date. This post tries to clarify
and add to both the report and the query.

	The situation at present is this. When I turn the machine on, I
get a *very* briefly displayed message in unreadably tiny print, much
like the one I got with 2.3, offering options. These now seem, reading
fast with a big magnifying glass, to be L for YDL, M for MacOS, X for
MacOSX, and C for CDROM. (I capitalize for legibility; the illegible
boot message uses lower case.)

	************************************************

	Now (up to the next line of asterisks) comes an oddity that may
not matter unless it tells the rest of you something -- see note at end
of this post. If I hit X, it repeats the question without the list of
options -- several times -- and then goes to a blank white screen which
sits there for hours, and cannot be gotten rid of, in any way I've tried
(including Ctrl-Alt-Delete and all combinations of Ctrl, Shift, and Alt
with Esc), except by pulling the power plug.

	If I hit M, I get OSX (*not* OS9), with my users defined as
before -- but the default connection to the wireless router does not
work. (It did before.)

	I can turn the airport off & on, but when I click on Internet 
Connect, I get a signal level just short of full, and "Status: Status 
not available" -- which stays that way indefititely. It neither connects 
to the Net, nor asks me for the router's password to a wireless 
connection. (The router is supposed to be requiring that -- and did, and 
worked once it got it, before the 3.0 install.)

	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, as I'll explain at the end.

	**********************************************

	If I hit L or do nothing, the machine boots to 3.0 and connects
wirelessly to the same router, just as it used to. IOW, 3.0 seems to be
installed, to work, and to connect. Nary a complaint so far!

	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.

	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 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, and never bother with the vaunted
Apple Interface again; so the boot and connect problems, which 3.0 seems
to've caused with OSX, may mean little unless they indicate something.

-- 
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.