biglig2's Journal: Been a while...

But, now I'm back on a laptop for mainstream production, and now I have some OSS running as one of my key production apps (Firefox, natch) then time for another go.

Since my laptop goes with me, I need a machine permanently at my desk. Obvious answer is to put WinXP on the desktop, because then Outlook can clean out my spam, and my remote control software can connect to my servers. But, I have a bad feeling I might need Samba in a few months, so I'm going to run it on Linux for a while, increase my skill set.

What Distribution? Well, RHEL is what we would probably buy if we were going into production (PHB has gotta be able to sue someone), so I'm going for Fedora. Not the same thing, but free as in beer, and I expect that things like the location of config files etc. will be close to what RHEL uses.

So, Bittorrent down the CDs, burn them, move my data off, boot from Fedora Core 3 CD1. Hardware, BTW, is a P4 Dell Optiplex, pretty modern, with a XVGA LCD panel (so I have room on my desk for it). It will have a USB keyboard later (I have a crap but tiny one at home that will save more space).

Start a graphical install. I'm manly, so skip the media check. X loads after a bit of probing. English, English, UK.
The fonts look rather good, I must say.

I'll begin with Workstation - a good basic start. I'll maybe need to add Samba later. Allow automatic partitioning - what the hell are LVM volume groups? Ah, interesting, swap and / go in a volume group, so I can add to them via another disk. Nice. /boot seperate. Fair enough.

Grub, DHCP on eth0, enable firewall, allow ssh and SMTP inbound (might want to play with mail serving later, I am a mail admin after all). SELinux is extra security, enable it. English UK, GMT, root password of "hello" (yeah, right!).

Customize the packages. Gnome or KDE, Gnome or KDE.... KDE. Also XFCE, as an alternative. Add Thunderbird (Evolution always a bit top heavy, although it seems to come with an Exchange connector now, so it stays), Lynx, Samba, Terminal Server, TN5250, lots of admin tools.

Off we go, formatting the file system. Time for some coffee and a bun.