Category: Retirement

migrating to fedora 36

whbeebe

Today I finally pulled the trigger and migrated my little development system from Pop!_OS 22.04 to Fedora 36. Up to the final moment of migration I’d been vacillating all over the place about what I would replace Pop!_OS with, until it came time to do the task, at which point I shrugged my shoulders and selected Fedora. Fedora isn’t perfect and I have some issues with having Parental Controls uninstallable, but Fedora has no unpleasant surprises communicating with all my USB-connected embedded developer boards. The only issue that cropped up is forgetting to add the login accounts to the dialout group. Interestingly, that was done automatically in Pop!_OS, but that good deed was overshadowed by the inclusion of brltty in the installation, that could only be stopped by systemctl. I’d lost trust in Pop!_OS.

In order to make this transition as smooth as possible I added a second SATA3 500GB SSD drive to the system (I’d had it for years as an external USB drive for my Raspberry Pi boards), and then copied my entire home directory onto that drive. In order to minimize risk in the transition I pulled the existing SSD with Pop!_OS installed and installed a brand new blank 500GB SSD in its place.

The new drive, a TIMETEC 512GB SATA3 SSD Model MS06

This was the TIMETEC SATA3 SSD Model MS06. I ordered it from Amazon for US$45. That’s not a misprint. As a retired guy I’m on a super-tight budget with no money to waste. If I can find a piece of hardware that is cheap enough and reliable enough, I’ll consider it over the best-of-breed in the same category any day. And so I ordered one of these. When it arrived it took less than five minutes to swap it in place of the existing drive. I’d already copied a Fedora 36 ISO onto an old 8GB thumb drive using Balena Etcher. I then plugged in the thumb drive, powered back up, and installed Fedora. I took all the defaults, nothing unusual.

When the system rebooted I created two accounts, one to mirror the older system named popos, and a second named admin. I logged out of the new popos and into admin, and then sudoed to root. I moved the original popos home directory out of the way and then performed a recursive copy of the older popos home I’d copied while the system was running Pop!_OS into /home on Fedora. Once the copy was complete I performed a recursive change of ownership (chown -R popos:popos /home/popos) on the copied popos home. You have to do that because the copy as root means root owns it all. Log out of admin and back into popos, and check out a few things to make sure it all works. Thankfully it all does.

I had to install Vivaldi onto Fedora. Once that was installed I was able to start it up. All my open tabs were still there, as was all the metadata and passwords from when I was running under Pop!_OS. I also had to reinstall Java (Amazon Corretto 17.0.3) , Gradle, Google Go, and vim. Why is it that every distribution doesn’t come with vim installed by default? I checked out my ESP IDF installation and everything works. I’ve been working with Flutter 3, so I had to install support for it. I installed clang, ninja-build, and gtk3-devel. With those installed flutter doctor gave the installation a clean bill of heath.

Although it’s probably just my imagination, I think the system overall is a little faster. Maybe a little snappier. I’m sure I’ll run into something that I’ll complain about, but so far, I’m totally pleased with how this has turned out. Based on my past experiences it could have gone a whole lot worse. I’ll keep the other drive for a while, just in case. But at some point I’ll probably swap it back in, wipe it clean, install Fedora on it, and transfer back to it. The drive that got replaced is a Western Digital Blue 1TB SSD I paid US$88 for back in December when it was on sale. I could afford that back then. I didn’t buy one this time because the price has risen to $120, which blew the budget. I felt guiltt enough spending $45 on the TIMETEC.

So we’ll see how the TIMETEC works out. Did I just waste $45? Only time will tell. So far I certainly can’t complain.

Update 20 May

You also need to install dnf package python3-tkinter, as it’s not installed automatically with Python 3.

dealing with debilitating pain

whbeebe2 Comments

I missed a day of posting Wednesday due to pain in my left shoulder. For whatever reason the pain in my left shoulder was so great that I can honestly classify it as debilitating. In layman’s terms it hurt like hell. It was strong enough to make me feel sick. It started on Tuesday and grew progressively worse as the day wore on, until it was almost unbearable by the end of the day. I managed to get it under control Tuesday evening, but I spent Wednesday in a weakened state.

Tuesday evening before bed I took some prescription medication I have on hand (leftover from other medical problems) that helped me through Tuesday night. I took a pair of Tylenol PM pills, a muscle relaxant and an anti-inflammatory. The anti-inflammatory is strong enough to knock me on my ass, so it was fine to take it at bedtime. By the time Wednesday morning dawned the pain was back down to a minor ache.

I never lost flexibility in my left shoulder, but moving my arm around gave me all sorts of hell. When I finally got to see my doctor on Wednesday it was normal (or as normal as that joint can get). Range of movement was fine and there was no swelling. My doctor gave me a script to have it Xrayed next Tuesday morning.

I can recount all the times I’ve had pain like that in my life;

  • when I broke my right knee as a college freshman,
  • when I first had left knee pains back in 2011/2012 that led to its partial replacement in 2012,
  • when I was finally driven to have my right knee fully replaced in 2016,
  • my left shoulder this month.

I’ve suffered other physical injuries in life, but nothing that basic medicine couldn’t heal and nothing with accompanying memorable pain. My left shoulder ranks right up to the top.

That doctor’s visit led to an interesting conversation about medications. My doctor always checks to make sure I’m still on my core medications, and if I need a refill. That’s when we got to talking about what I wasn’t taking due to the cost to retirees. Jardiance immediately came up because of my borderline type 2 diabetes. I was prescribed that right before I retired in late 2019, and I had enough to last me into February 2020, or two years ago. When it came time for me to refill the co-pay was $500 for 90 days, compared to the original cost of $45 for 90 days when I was still working. I refused to pay that, deciding to stick with metformin due to its low cost. That was also one of the strong motivations to fully clean up my diet. Weight and diet have a major impact on blood sugar, as I’ve seen in my lowering A1C number as well as overall blood sugar.

I have discovered that a lot of the newest prescription drugs are like that. What aggravates me is that is what the major drug companies want to sell, not the older, much lower cost generics. There’s one drug my wife needs that we can’t drop, so our doctor is working to order it from Canada to bring down the cost to something reasonable (if there are any Canadians reading I apologize for taking advantage of their low cost medications).

I’m not throwing our medical system under the bus per se. It has helped my wife tremendously afford her back surgery and rehabilitation. But prescription drug costs have got to be cleaned up.

I’ve been fortunate not to have suffered from debilitating pain in my life. I’m treating Tuesday’s episode for what it is, as a warning to pay attention and not let issues like this slide. I need to be the best my age will allow me to be for many more years to come.