Entry #4 | Trials and Tribulations

Hello...from what was a late Tuesday evening and has stretched into a Friday evening. I have been struggling with a new Linux learning experience and it struck me - I should share this in case someone else has the same problem, or may even know the answer. For the class I am enrolled in, I need to utilize Fedora to complete some of the assignments. The students in the class were provided a VMWare workstation player with an old Fedora ISO file. I have always had a problem with resizing the virtual machine window with VMWare on a 4K monitor, it is quite annoying to say the least. Without getting too lost in the technical details, I decided to try to use an old laptop I have which didn't have a use currently. After some searching on the internet, I found that there is a Fedora Workstation that someone put together so that one can essentially "create" a bootable Fedora USB drive. This means you can plug in the USB thumb drive to any computer, boot it up and, if the USB drive is configured as a valid boot image, then choose to boot the Fedora image instead of whatever is on the machine.

I thought this might solve my problem but it turned out to be the first hurdle. I was able to boot the new Fedora image on the laptop and then select the option to install it on the hard drive. Once it was installed I removed the USB thumb drive and rebooted the laptop. The laptop booted up and everything seemed to be working correctly so I could get some of my homework completed for the class. Soon I was prompted for several updates that need to be performed and I thought this would be a good idea to get completed. I was so wrong on that front...as soon as the updates completed and the laptop rebooted, it quickly became obvious that the keyboard and touch pad were not working. Well, another opportunity to learn from experience it seems. With no idea how to get this resolved and no search results that appeared to be relevant, I was once again at an impasse.

At this point, I figured I can just format the hard disk and start over, no big deal. Well, it seems that Windows will not format a drive with another OS installed on it...or at least that is the most reasonable sounding answer I could find on the Internet that made any kind of sense. It seems I need another Linux machine to format the drive from the other Linux machine. So I had to go dig up another laptop from the scrap pile and start all over again. Needless to say, I am not running any updates on the OS currently. With quite a few programs to install for the class, I need it operational in its current state for another four weeks. There seems to be a lot of...bad to poor...information on the Internet about the different versions of Linux and what to do when something needs to be fixed. I am still in search of a beginner oriented site/page that explains more and doesn't rely upon many assumptions so if anyone knows of any, comment below and let us all know, please. I know I would greatly appreciate it.

Anyways, maybe this helps someone else to be aware and perhaps someone who knows some of the answers to my questions (long shot though this may be), both stated and possibly unstated, that would be awesome. Until the next time though, take care and thanks again.