Today I was doing my good deed for the lifetime – a friend told me he needed a PC and as I had an old one gathering dust at home, I told him I’d let him have it – so far so good.

However, I didn’t have an OS for it so I thought – why not install a free Open Source OS? Well, I had a copy of Red Hat 9 on 3 CDs so I installed it and the installation completed with no errors. However, when the PC started up and I tried to connect to Red Hat Network to update the PC, it threw up the error “problem registering username”.

A search of Google Groups came up with the solution:
“You need to download and install both up2date-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm and up2date-gnome-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm packages. As root from the console or xterm session type something like;

rpm -Uvh ftp://updates.redhat.com/9/en/os/i386/up2*-3.1.23.2-1.i386.rpm”

I opened a Terminal window – typed in the above, connected to the Red Hat Network and downloaded my updates. So, if you hit the same problem – you know what to do!

Now, I’m going to try Suse Linux 9.1 on the PC as well – just to see if it is any more user-friendly! I’ll let you know how I get on.