Fedora files bad

[Kelson Vibber]

Chris Sparks <mrada at catalina-inter.net> wrote:
>Well I was able to get to some state of installation, however, I still 
>don't have the booting working out yet.  I wanted to relay that I found 
>the following files off of the CD or ISO image, whatever where bad:

OK, this should be obvious, but if the MD5 sum on the RPM is bad, *don't 
install it!*  It means something got corrupted in the 
download/burn/copy/etc. and you have a damaged file which, in all 
likelihood, will *not* work!  It's practically impossible to build an RPM 
with an invalid md5sum, since it's calculated as part of the build process.

I see from the earlier threads that you have verified the MD5sums of the 
ISOs and used the installer to verify the CDs.  Assuming your CDs are 
identical to mine (burned from verified ISOs), the RPMs should be good, 
which means they somehow got damaged before they reached your Linux 
partition.  This could have been at any stage: read from CD, write to first 
disk, transfer over LAN, or write to final disk.

At this point I'd suggest looking at your hardware.  Marginally bad RAM or 
a flaky CPU or motherboard can cause inconsistent problems where a file can 
get corrupted as it is processed - I had a situation a while back where I 
thought some files were corrupted, until I noticed I was getting a 
different md5sum each time.  Once I replaced the processor and motherboard, 
the files were fine.

As for booting, you'll want to install the grub package, then look at the 
docs for grub-install.  If grub is already present, you should have an 
entry for your kernel in /etc/grub.conf (which should be a symlink to 
/boot/grub/grub.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst).

>The question I have is what version of RedHat seems to be stable?  I don't 
>need the bleeding edge of technology, just something that works.

Fedora has been working fine for me, but if you'd prefer something less 
bleeding-edge, I'd recommend Red Hat 9.


Kelson Vibber
SpeedGate Communications <www.speed.net>