Jellybob's Journal: Fedora

I realised I havn't done a geek entry recently... mainly because I havn't been particularly geeky :P

Anyway, after getting bored of jumping through hoops to make things work under Debian (it'll still be my OS of choice on servers though), I bit the bullet and installed Fedora Core 1 on my laptop last night, which went off completely without a hitch other than having to turn down the resolution for the installer, because my laptop panel couldn't cope with it.

So, after a success there, I decided to kill off my bodged together Debian install on my main workstation (it was running 2.6.0-test4 or something like that, and would slow to a crawl if I asked it to do anything more than sit around and lounge in the sun).

Reference specs:

• AMD AthlonXP 1400
• 256mb DDR RAM (soon to be upgraded)
• 1 60gb Seagate hard disk
• 1 20gb Maxtor hard disk
• DVD-ROM
• CD-RW
• GeForce2 MX400 graphics card (AGP)
• S3 Savage 4 graphics card (PCI)
• BT848 Video capture card
• 3com 3c590 network card
• Onboard 6 channel sound
• The usual gubbins

The install went fairly smoothly, with no problems while installing... from what I could see, it was much like a Red Hat install, but with Fedora Core written on it.

The first problem hit when I tried to boot the first time... grub would crash complaining that the boot partition didn't exist. Turns out that I was booting from the second hard disk in the bios, so it had flipped round the controller numbers when installing grub... a quick change of boot device sorted that one out.

It then proceeded to boot (not displaying the new X based graphical boot sequence), but couldn't get the network card to work... I ignored that for now, and let it finish booting, at which point I was uncerimoniously dumped to the "X couldn't start, what do you want to do" screen that the Gnome login screen throws up if it can't start X. No surprise there really though... I don't think I've ever seen a distro that can handle a dual-head display on different graphics cards right. Turns out that this time it was trying to use the nvidia driver (the unaccelerated one before everything thinks "oooooo") to run my S3 card. For some reason the S3 took offense to that.

Changed around my XF86Config a bit, and rebooted, and graphics worked fine... in fact, better than fine - it's fabulous having anti-aliased fonts installed from the begining. I'd never got round to doing them on Debian, but I'm loving them now I have them.

So I moved onto the issue of networking... tried the usuals, and whatever I did, I couldn't get it to throw out any packets to the network... eventually I bit the bullet and (shock! horror!) tried Red Hat's bug tracker. Turns out the kudzu hardware detection software has issues with the 3c59x driver which powers my network card... disabling it gave me back my internet connection. I also thought for a bit that it had messed up my second display. I then proceeded to plug the monitor back into the display, after remembering that I'd knocked it out trying a different network cable.

Sound was auto-detected, as was my TV card, USB 2, and Logitech webcam. I might try slapping the PCI holder I have for an Intel wireless network card later and see if it can do anything with that as well, although my hopes aren't too high, since I spent a while trying to get it working a few weeks ago, and it seemed that no one could the things to work.

Overall, I'm very impressed... just need to find a source which lets me install MP3 support, and everything should be working, after a single evening's work.

Edit, 02:56, 13/12 - Realised I hadn't added the obligatory screenshot, taken just now, with the accelerated Nvidia drivers installed, and a nice wallpaper from Deviantart.