Saturday, September 22nd, 2007
Trying out the Fedora 7 Linux Distro
Having recently converted my office and home workstations to Xubuntu, I’ve decided to dive in a little deeper and see what the Red Hat backed Fedora 7 is like.
There are a few reasons for my decision to give Fedora a try.
The first is just genuine interest - I like the thought of trying new things and just wanted to see what a non-debian-based distro is link.
The second - which is probably the primary reason for me doing this is because the Dedicated Servers we are leasing in the States are all running Red Hat Enterprise.
The blasted server didn’t even have vim installed on it, it only had vi. I wanted to install it, but I did not have apt-get/aptitude to hold my hand and so I read up on “yum”.
I start messing around with yum and did a “yum update” - it presented me with an option to install some things… prompted me if this is what I really wanted to do. … I cancelled the operation and quit the ssh connection. It was foreign to me. So in an effort to familiarise myself with a Red Hat based distro, I decided to install Fedora 7 an announcement I made at the Development room with my team members asking “wtf would you want to do that?”
As I started typing this post, I’m currently upgrading my newly installed Fedora 7. It uses Gnome as it’s default desktop manager and came pre-installed with some recent software. As with all Linux distros I’ve used (all flavours of Ubuntu some RHEL and now, the not-so-enterprise Fedora), it is very responsive - something which I’ve become accustom to, so now when I need to do anything with my laptop which has Windows XP on it, I find myself clicking away at a restless pace when I launch an app on hardware laggy Windows.
Installation came at a price tho’. I thought installing Fedora would do the Ubuntu thing and try to incorporate other operating systems I have previously installed on my system. I had two hard drives, so I thought I’ll install Fedora to play with on sdb while keeping Xubuntu my primary OS on sda.
After backing up my home directory, I smack the DVD disc I burnt the Fedora 7 iso onto and rebooted. Installation went well checked the disc and it said that the disc was corrupt. I thought that it was peculiar as I burnt the cd without any hitches with brasero.
At 2am in the morning, fighting the images of my comfortable bed in my head, I thought it was a glitch and continued anyway. - bad idea! - The installer halted midway and the frustration woke me up.
The disc was indeed corrupt! Gah! I did not think it was a problem, I’ll just whip out an old Fedora Core 4 disc that came with a “Fedora Core 4 Unleashed” textbook that I purchased a year or two ago. I run the install and after configuring my hard drive partitions in setup I decided that it was pointless in doing this. I could just download the iso again and burn a new DVD. I cancelled out of the Fedora Core 4 installation wizard and reboot so that I can go and log onto my primary OS Xubuntu Feisty Fawn.
I glare at the screen as it tells me that there is a grub error 15. “F**********************CCKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!”
Somehow that last attempt at installing FC4 managed to format my drives! I don’t know how this happened, I guess I may have probably selected format all my hard drives instead of applying the advanced drive configuration I thought I did. It’s 3am. I’m not thinking straight and I felt like ripping my monitor up with it’s smug black screen and what seemed like a dancing blinking cursor.
Last thing I did before going to bed was running the Fedora Core 4 install at 3:30am before finally going to bed. Either the Fedora Core 4 install had some issues, or I was too distracted by my sidequest of staying awake. Either way… lesson learnt I suppose.
I spent a day or two using Fedora Core 4, I spent about 2 days with Fedora Core 4 at my home workstation and found it to be pretty standard. Playing around with some settings and yum.
I liked it enough to want to see what the newer shinier version was going to be like. I updated the repository to use Fedora 7’s and ran “yum upgrade” - after reading that this approach was highly discouraged - I did not see too much trouble with it, if it didn’t work, it’s a fresh install anyway - I could just get Fedora 7 again. As they had warned there were problems - broken dependencies all over the place! I guess this is the RPM Hell that I’ve read about.
On to plan B - The next day I asked Neil, my work colleague to burn the ISO on a DVD for me on his Windows laptop. That afternoon I installed FC7 - which brings us back here. A brand new installation, no Xubuntu at my home workstation, Linux as my primary OS and Fedora 7 as my primary distro. :)
Overall it was relatively painless. Hardware detection was a pretty standard aside from the my problematic Belkin F5d6001 Wireless Card which I anticipate I’d have to use ndiswrapper to get running, along with nvidia drivers that I haven’t tried to set up just yet.
I still need to figure out what to do with adding repositories and all that and find a replacement for other things, but it looks promising so far. Looking forward to the familiarisation process which shouldn’t be too steep now that I am familiar with the linux way of doing things.