Sick Babies!

Aaugh, the trials and tribulations.  So, I had ordered the guts of SPARCL12.  When they got here, I realized the mainboard and CPU were better than what I had in my Windoze desktop machine.  So - I transplanted the new board, CPU, and 8GB of memory into my 64-bit Win7 machine.
After re-activating Windoze & Office, everything was great.  And it still is.  More speed, more RAM, other than a quad-core system, what more could you ask?
Then I put together L12 with my old mainboard.  Now, mind you, the "old" mainboard is an Asus, with an AMD dual-core CPU, and 4GB of memory.  So this system is no slouch.  It's running a WD 500GB SATA hard drive for storage.
I then proceeded to install the 64-bit version of Fedora 18.
You know all the disparaging reviews around the 'Net about Fedora 18?  They're true.  They should have kept this version off the street for another month to straighten out the Anaconda installer.  A lot of the negative press is about the appearance of the thing, but in my humble opinion, that's the least of the problems.  The software selection part has been changed.  So, instead of getting to choose exactly what packages you want to have installed, you have to select from several scenarios, and settle for whatever was included, then go back after install, and install the stuff you wanted in the first place manually.  Now if it just worked - I wouldn't be so unhappy.  But, trying to install all of the desired packages, even with the great new APPER application, eventually, the system wasn't doing very well.  Then I found out about a Yum bug that broke Packagemanager.  I found the bug report, but no fix.  Argh.
So....we drop back to Fedora 17.  Now remember, I am running a name-brand mainboard, a dual-core, 2.6GHZ CPU, and 4GB of memory.  For some reason, at install time, Fedora 17 64-bit installed some 32-bit libraries (WHY???).  I did not realize that until I went to install some packages, and I got a "library conflict" message - Yum could not install a 64-bit library over the 32-bit library that was already there (WHY??)!  So, apparently, Fedora 17's 64-bit version was not ready for prime time.
So, now we drop back to Fedora 17, 32-bit version.  So far, it is running so-so.  The EasyLife package helps you put in the Nvidia video drivers easily - the Neauvou driver was having trouble.  The jury is still out on Fedora 17...more on this next time.
So, today, I notice that SPARCL10 does not greet me when I enter the lab.  Poor L10 had shut itself down at 0500 this morning, because the CPU fan failed, and it overheated.  So - pull L10 out of the rack, set it on the bench, replace the fan & fire it up in setup mode for a while to make sure the CPU temperature is OK.  Turns out the heat sink grease got fried; had to pull the heatsink & re-do the grease.  But L10 is back on the air, so it's back to L12.  Maybe I need to fall back to Fedora 15; it's working great on L10 and L12.
More later.