Pun Salad

• Possibly I will shut up about vegemite someday. Today is not that day. At Cato's blog, Michael F. Cannon recaps the saga so far, and points out the FDA's shoddy and disgusting record on folic acid. The phrase "5,000 unnecessary cases of spina bifida" appears.

• If you're one of the folks who "act as if choosing whom to vote for is like choosing sides to cheer or boo at a sports event": Dafydd gives you someone to cheer for in the World Series.

• Dean Barnett is on to something, I think, with his observations about use of "absolute moral authority" in political arguments.

  The left's strategy is to have absolute moral authority figures like the Jersey Girls or Cindy Sheehan carry its message. The messengers would also necessarily be victims so if you got down 'n' dirty with them, you would automatically qualify as a cretin.

  The pathos involved appeals to a certain mindset. There's also a certain calculated cynicism involved in pushing selected "victims" into the limelight.

If you're one of those sad addicts that keeps checking Pun Salad every few minutes, you might have noticed an extended service outage yesterday; this was caused by an upgrade of the underlying Linux distribution from Fedora Core 5 (FC5) to Fedora Core 6 (FC6). So the bits you're now reading have been flung onto your computer by FC6. Enjoy.

Basically, things went well. Much better than the FC4→FC5 upgrade (chronicled here) earlier this year.

The bittorrent images of the six FC6 CDs were straightforward to download, although it took pretty much all day Tuesday to do it.

Once the CDs were burned, I took the good advice of reading the release notes first. They suggested that to do the initial media check, you boot with linux ide=nodma instead of just hitting the return key. Once you've verified your CDs, you're supposed to reboot without the ide=nodma option. Kludgy, although I suppose there are good reasons why they can't get it to work without this.

That out of the way, I went for the upgrade option; the alternative is to install from scratch. The release notes recommend a fresh install, but if you do that you need to back up files, then painstakingly restore them post-install. This is assuming you can figure out what a fresh install is likely to wipe out—if you guess wrong, that's just too darn bad, partner. I'd prefer to take my chances with an upgrade. (The Fedora Wiki also has notes on upgrading.)

In this case, the upgrade worked fine, although it was slow. Almost two hours from start to finish (including the media check). Another few minutes to do a yum update and upgrade 40-odd packages that had newer versions from those on the CDs.

I don't want to seem superficial, but what first struck me was a noticebly more legible font in my terminal windows. The release notes call this "DejaVu", and it's nice. (The release notes are obviously the definitive place to go for the official list of new and improved stuff.)

Final upgrade note: I had previously installed a pre-release Fedora Core 6 on my Dell Dimension 4400; upgrading that to the real FC6 only required about 10 minutes, and only the first of the five install CDs. Very smooth and fast.

This is not a professional review, obviously; you shouldn't conclude too much from my experiences. But, given that caveat, Fedora Core 6 gets two big thumbs way up; I'll let you know should anything happen to change that assessment.