First, I bought a 320 GB disk and a Rosewill enclosure for the old drive — I prefer to do fresh installs rather than in-place upgrades. It’s interesting to note that as I’ve increased the capacity (100 -> 200 -> 320 GB), the power requirements have gone down: 1100 mA -> 800 mA -> 550 mA. These are all 7200 RPM SATA drives, by the way.

Next I tried installing from a Fedora DVD I’d burned, but it kept failing randomly early on in the process, even though it passed the initial media check. Fortunately I also had the 6-CD install media I’d burned for some older boxes, and they worked fine. Because I love the punishment, I did a kitchen-sink (everything) installation.

Then it was time to install updates. Because so many packages had been re-signed (why, how) in addition to the typical package updates and the additional packages I wanted, this took quite a while — well over a gigabyte of packages.

The only issue I encountered was ldconfig complaining about libmodbc.so not being a softlink — rather than the usual softlinks from short names to the base library, all three were individual files. That was easy to fix:

# cd /usr/lib
# ln -fs libmodbc.so.0.0.0 libmodbc.so.0
# ln -fs libmodbc.so.0.0.0 libmodbc.so
# ls -l libmodbc*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2008-10-25 21:16 libmodbc.so -> libmodbc.so.0.0.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2008-10-25 21:16 libmodbc.so.0 -> libmodbc.so.0.0.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 170916 2008-05-21 14:09 libmodbc.so.0.0.0


After the installation and massive Fedora repository updates, I installed the livna Fedora 9 repository RPM so I could get the nvidia drivers, the VideoLAN VLC media player, and the libdvdcss library. I also installed the Adobe repository definition (select “YUM for Linux” from the pulldown) to get the flash plugin (you can also get AdobeReader via the repository).

Finally I rebuilt VMware server for the new kernel.

Unlike my Fedora 8 installation, everything seems to be working smoothly with no performance issues. Later today, once I’m in the office, I’ll see about configuring dual monitors and setting up wireless.