It seems that 64-bit Heron has some trouble recognizing RAID arrays. The machine booted and the RAID controller's configuration screen came up. After tweaking the necessary settings, we bounced the box and prayed that Heron would see it - which it didn't.
When we got to the installation section where we were going to do the partitioning, we were given prompted to choose between the twin 250GB Western Digital drives. Thinking that perhaps, somehow, someway the installed OS would see it we continued through the installation only to hit repeated checksum verification errors during the base system install.
Desperately hoping that this was a fluke, we shut off the machine, coated ourselves in honey, and sacrificed our entire apartment complex to the gods of data integrity and MD5 hashing. No luck (which means the install disk was probably corrupt - I'm having a chat with my LightScribe drive once I finish here). Once the honey had been removed and the police had left, we decided that we'd give Fedora a shot instead - the RAID controller specifically says that it plays nicely with it.
So that's where we stand now - even though Fedora 9 is coming out in about two weeks, we can't wait that long. If there are any hardware issues, we have less than two weeks to find them and get the equipment returned. At least for the time being, a Fedora machine is being added to the rack. I used Fedora at the last place I worked and while I didn't have anything specific against it, I didn't feel particularly attached to it.
As long as we're at it, we might as well trade bash in for tcsh - it's about time I learned some C and from what I understand The C SHell is a good place to learn as a lot of the syntax is similar. I don't have any first had experience though so we'll see.
Switching gears, I've found that a good way to gain some basic day-to-day experience with a language is to use it for any shell scripting needs I have. Erlang being my most recent language of study, that's what I'm going to do. If you'd like to give it a shot, Erlang programs can be run outside of the erl VM by typing:
pratzsch@carbon:/home/pratzsch/shell$erl -compile timely_message.erl
pratzsch@carbon:/home/pratzsch/shell$erl -noshell -s timely_message message -s init stop
Excuse me, your forehead's on fire
pratzsch@carbon:/home/pratzsch/shell$
...while it works, I'll probably end up aliasing that set of commands minus the program name to a bash script (oh, the irony) so I don't have to type that novella every time I want to run an Erlang program from the command line.
