I’m trying to upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to Core 5. Unfortunately, my installation of Firefox seems to have a bug in it, in that I can’t download a file without crashing it. This means that I also can’t download Opera, or anything else. I’ve attempted getting the *.iso files via Bittorrent on my Windows machine, then dragging them over on the network, but I can’t get the sha1sum to match on them. The most shocking thing is that I don’t even have lynx installed, so I have no way to download files at all from the web.

I don’t know what to do at this point, except try FTP.

[Update a few minutes later]

Weirder and weirder. Every time I do a sha1sum on the disk1 iso, I get a different result. What is that all about?

[Update about 10:30 AM EDT]

OK, I seem to have wget. But what is the explanation for my sha1sum problem? If sha1sum isn’t giving reliable results, how can I know if I got a clean download?

[Update about 11:16]

Well, I’m wgetting the first two discs, and I’ll see if they work. Sha1sum is now giving consistent results (have no idea what was going on earlier), but consistently wrong, so I know the one I got yesterday is fubar (I burned a disk with it, and it failed testing). I’ll see what happens with these new versions I get via wget.

[Update about quarter till twelve noon]

OK, the wget downloads for discs 1 and 2 seemed to work, and I’m getting consistent sha1sums now (don’t match on yesterday’s, do match on today’s). I guess I’ll chance burning the disks with these. What concerns me is that I originally downloaded them a couple months ago, when Core 5 came out, and they checked out fine at that time (I just hadn’t gotten around to burning the disks). I am afraid that I’m having hard disk problems that corrupted them in the interim.

[Update at 2:30]

Uh oh.

When I checked the downloads they were all fine, and consistently showed the right sha1sum. I burned the disks, and rebooted. Once again, they all had errors on them. When I rebooted, and rechecked the sha1sums in today’s downloads, they’re coming up inconsistent–no same result twice.

I guess I’d better take the machine down and check all the drive connections. I’m also backing it up to another drive that I keep in the machine, but is usually unmounted. I may have to switch over to that one, and do a clean install.