FEDORA AND YUM ARE PAINS IN MY BUM

Piss me off!  

In the last week, I've tried compiling nine different applications on 
this Zareason machine, running Fedora 12.  No go.  All I'm getting is a 
big fat zero, despite the fact that I've successfully compiled nearly 
all of them before on Debian/Debian derivative boxes.  And every single 
one of these were dependency issues.  Hell, I've had yum crap out on me 
several times because of dependency issues -- with .rpm's pulled from 
the repos!  In two years of Debian, I've had that happen exactly twice.  
On my first-ever Fedora install, it's happened FOUR times in the first 
week!  A friend who is a bigtime Fedora fan says I'm doing it wrong.  I 
say that something wrong is doing me.

I mean, I don't think I'm asking too much here, but the plain fact is, 
that I've been having issues with my computing experience since Day-1 
with this machine, and I'm thinking that there just simply has to be 
something better than Mint or Fedora to run on it.  Which means I'm 
thinking it might be Debian after all.  Yes, I do want to try out 
Slackware, but I need my machine to actually work when I turn it on.  On 
Slackware, I'd be fighting and fixing it all the way, since I'm 
Slackdumb.  That would be the whole point of doing it, of course, but I 
wouldn't be productive right away, even if I was having fun.  So, 
probably, a dual boot is the best solution here: separate Debian and 
Slackware partitions, with a shared /home.  I need to think on it some 
more, but it's looking like a nice combination to me.

In other news, the transition to a private VPS (well, a 
shared-with-friends VPS) has gone smooth as silk, thanks to the efforts 
of one of them (remaining nameless for the moment, thank you).  He knows 
who he is, and he gets major friggin' kudos, even in anynimoty.  I'm 
having some niggling issues here and there, but, hey, it's only been, 
what...about 48 hours?  I'm telling you, it's been an amazing piece of 
admining on his part.  I'd hire the guy in a heartbeat, if I were in a 
position to hire a sysadmin -- or if I was able to hire anyone for 
anything, when it goes to that.

Still, I got my older phlog entries brought over from SDF, and I'm 
enjoying using mkgopherentry on pygopherd.  Smooth and easy.  Like me.  
Before I was married.  Now I'm reformed.