Journal Alioth's Journal: Fedora core 6 1
I have an old laptop (a cast-off from work) which is - all in all, a perfectly good laptop really. It's a circa 2001 1GHz Pentium 3 machine, with 256MB of RAM.
I did have Ubuntu in it, but the upgrade to Edgy didn't go very well, so I thought I'd go for FC6 instead - I generally prefer RedHattish distros for desktop machines anyway - my workstation runs FC5.
The noteworthy thing about installing FC6 was there was nothing noteworthy about it. It just installed, detected all my hardware and
As to be expected, it's an incremental improvement on FC5 - the artwork is nicer, a few things seem to be a bit snappier (although this machine really is crying out for 512MB RAM). Of course, the first thing I did was add the Livna software repository (which just takes a single click on a link at rpm.livna.org). Livna is a must for Fedora Core - it includes all the packages RedHat won't (mostly because of patent issues or closed source issues - it includes the nvidia binary drivers - but this laptop fortunately has open source 3D drivers for its old ATi graphics chipset anyway). Livna makes installing a DVD player, MP3/AAC player just a couple of clicks away; all the Livna packages show up in the GUI software installer.
Also, I installed the whole gEDA suite - since it'll be handy to have on there since I need to learn gPCB so I can make a printed circuit board for the Z80 project (which I'll need to laser print at work). Which reminds me - I need to make another shopping list for my next visit to the RS website, since I'm stopped again, waiting on parts! And it's just trivial stuff - I'm short of a single 4081 quad OR gate IC! (I'll probaby get a small collection of quad OR and NOR gates, they come in really handy for memory chip select circuits).
fc6 (Score:2)
I installed Fedora Core 6/i386 on my AMD 1900+ last night. It took a long time, not sure why though, the hard drives in it should still be fine. I used the default Logical Volume setup which spanned across two drives, so I'll learn more as I use the system. The Radeon 9200 card had 3d acceleration on by default which used to require massive hand tuning to the config file. The system seemed very responsive with 1 gig of ram. Maybe I'll have to install Quake3 or Enemy Territory. Anyways, this was a grea