Progress and advice so far

[Alan Cox]

> 1) As soon as you get to a command prompt run updatedb. Evidently linux does
> not have which and apropos is not extremely helpful.  An example of why you
> need locate: apparently the console fonts are in a (sub)directory called
> kbd. You'd pass over that a hundred times before you would think of looking
> for fonts in there.

"which" is a shell alias in bash rather than a binary somewhere. Anyway
you can always use "find" but yes locate is a good tool.

> a) Yum wouldn't install from /usr/repo even with --enablerepo=/usr/repo, but
> the reason turns out to be that it hates the repomd.xml files from the
> origianal fedora install.  You also have to disable them, then yum works
> like a charm.

That seems strange - may be worth digging into it further and filing a
bug.

> Still have not got to the modem, but I have change the LANG variable,
> console font, and text mode resolution before I go blind.  Unicode is of the
> devil.

Fedora's defaults are really oriented around using a graphical
framebuffer. You can get ye olde vga text mode if you want to force it
that way, but it's probably not going to be even present in new hardware
at some point.

> I'm used to using lynx with all the options compiled in as a file manager,
> and in the distance is the problem of getting source code and compiling lynx
> again to replace the packaged version.

If you are building your own copy to drop into /usr/local then the usual
tar ball/configure/make/make install ritual applies as with BSD. It is
possible to use the source package and adjust then rebuild but that is
more of an adventure.

PS: I feel for your situation - I spent some of last weekend installing
NetBSD on a vax emulator and it's just different enough to cause head
scratching.

Alan