Fedora Core 6 on it. There’s a bug in the installer where if you select everything you want right off the bat, the install freezes halfway through. It really sucks. Anyway, I installed the default packages and went back later to add/remove packages. I wondered why it was dragging along until I saw that the poor box only had 512mb of RAM. I left it to run overnight and came in early this morning. I did check last nite about 1:00am but it was still chugging along. <sigh>
So, early to rise, early to work… or so they say. Not to mention tired as hell, too.
When I got here this morning, I got to configure the dual head setup. It’s not hard since I have a xorg.conf file on my machine here at work that I use. But I did have to install the NVidia drivers. This usually isn’t too tough – I just DL the installer and watch as the drivers are automagically installed. I took a look at fedorafaq.org and to my dismay, it’s still showing information for FC5. I ended up finding this howto on Softpedia which worked very well. Got the drivers installed, used the config and hey-presto! everything worked. I did use the instructions at fedorafaq to get the corefonts to work though.
So I deployed the new machine where the VP of Tech told me to, only to have several people look at me funny. I started the yum-upgrade and was told 15 minutes into the update that this new person was being deployed downstairs. <sigh> Fortunately, the yum-upgrade only took about 25 minutes and I was then able to move the machine into its new home.
All-in-all, RH is doing a good job with the Fedora distro, I think. When FC1 came out, using yum was very painful. You’d run a yum update and it would download header information for each installed package every time. Even if you just wanted to update just one package, it would download all the headers. They finally fixed this around the FC3 release. FC4 the system on a whole got more usable, and FC5 was actually fairly painless. Yes, YUM still sucks, but it’s a whole lot more usable. FC6 comes with a lot of bells and whistles, but has a hiccup or two in the installer. Granted, I’m using the DVD ISO image from the day after release, so there may be an updated installer released since.
I have got to say that desktop linux has come a long way since I did my first RH 5.1 install back in 1998. You can’t really do a 5-minute install of RedHat Linux anymore, but the system is a whole lot more usable. MUCH more hardware is supported right out of the box these days, and the configurators that RedHat has published have made life SO much easier for those of us who have long since gotten tired of editing config files by hand. Were my folks to ask me to install linux on their desktop computer at home, I’d consider FC6 or Ubuntu. (Actually, I’d most likely install Ubuntu just for the reason that it being a debian-based distro, it’s easier to maintain via the command line, and I could do that from the comfort of my own home.)
Anyway, I think I’ve geeked out long enough. Thanks for visiting and Keep Coming Back!!!]]>