A taste of Linux.

Well, I've installed Debian 'sarge' and I like their new installer .... except I found it was almost impossible to exit from it gracefully whilst it was part-way through, thats my only complaint about the installer. Its a different story when I rebooted, I couldn't get past the grub prompt i.e. grub didn't/wouldn't load the distro. And in the end, I just felt that I was wasting too much time trying to get it working, so I'm back on the Fedora Core treadmill.

I've also tried to load Ubuntu, except it fell over part way through the hardware discovery phase, and just locked up and froze. I did consider trying kubuntu (the KDE variant of Ubuntu), but after more thought about it I decided against it. After all, if Ubuntu wouldn't load, and kubuntu is based on Ubuntu, then, logically, kubuntu will also freeze.

All I want is a linux distro that works with my hardware setup, Mandriva 10.2 didn't recognise my internet connection via a realtek ethernet card and also didn't recognise my PCI card for two other hard drives. SuSE 9.2 couldn't access the internet, but Fedora Core 2 and 3 have both worked straight out of the box, so here I am for the forseeable future. We'll see how FC4 does when it finally is released.

During last night's update a mistake crept in which affected the layout of this blog, if you didn't see it, then you're lucky ....... but this is just to correct the problem.

I can't believe how long it is since I last posted here! One month! But, a lot has happened in that time, so ........ here goes with a quick resume of the last month.

The power supply unit that started playing up at the end of last year, and reported here at length, has now been replaced after one fan totally failed and the second one was beginning to fail. When I replaced it the average temperature that it was working at was 68' Centigrade! Made a nice radiator, but I didn't really like it. Now, with exactly the same load on the new power supply unit, its working at 55' centigrade.

At the beginning of this month I rebuilt my computer and swapped hard drives around, it was a dual boot machine with MS Windows 2000, now its just Fedora Core 3. The reason why I swapped things around was because windows was just taking up needed space, and I haven't used it at all this year .... so now I'm totally and completely Linux only. And when Fedora Core 4 comes out and I upgrade to that, then I'm going to rebuild this box again and replace some of the hard drives. One is currently failing, its the oldest one too, and I've managed to get some bigger drives so I'll have more storage space available to me.

But, the FC4 upgrade/install may not happen, because I'm considering moving over to Debian with the impending arrival of Debian 'Sarge'.

I've also learnt/am learning how to use latex and emacs, refining my daily backup schedule, and otherwise keeping myself busy. :)