Goodbye Mandrake, Hello Fedora Core

[vakkotaur]

Last night I finally got around to installing Fedora Core 4 on belgian. It didn't go perfectly smoothly as there was trouble early in the first attempt, but that didn't become a big hassle. Fedora Core 4 is up and running. I'm not nearly done tweaking things to be just so.

So far it's been mostly a matter of look-and-feel, but I did get Opera and NEdit installed though not nearly set up as I'd like yet. This afternoon (which I'm taking off from work, though not just for this) I'll see what I need to do to get Fedora to see the FireWire drive and then I can restore things from my backup. The trick will be to not restore some things, such as KDE settings. It shouldn't be too difficult to get that right. I also need to learn a bit more about the tool named yum which in my very limited experience so far already has impressed me far more than urpmi ever has.

I don't yet know if the version of xchat (2.4.3) supplied is stable regarding DCC after running for a few hours. I'll find out this afternoon. If it is, I see no reason try to upgrade. If not, there is an xchat 2.6.0 rpm for Fedora Core 4.

Other than the usual need to adjust colors and styles and such, there's only one real weirdness. If I move the pointer to a desktop icon, when it change from an arrow to a hand to indicate a clickable icon, the hand also appears elsewhere on the screen for a moment. That's a concern, but not a big one. I so seldom use desktop icons it might not be a real issue for me.

So far, I'm fairly impressed with Fedora.

Comments

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

You're trading a perfectly good root for a hat with a half-eaten apple inside it? Whatever for?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately the root was not perfectly good, or I'd have kept it. Also, what with Winter coming and all I think it might useful to have a hat. The half-eaten apple is an unfortunate part of the package deal, but at least it's only just a bit of apple and not anything really nasty.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

As you may have already found out, simply plug the Firewire drive in and it should be detected as a SCSI block device. It may also show up on the desktop if you have KDE or GNOME running.

cat /proc/scsi/scsi to see if the drive is there and mount to see if it's automagically mounted up. dmesg will also be helpful in diagnostics.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Not so automatic, but at least a look at fstab revealed how to get it manually. I'm not sure I have things right yet, but I can use the firewire drive, at least.

The video glitch is more annoying than I like as it seems to hit every time the pointer changes, such when clicking on links in a web browser.

And I need to figure how to get Fedora's stuff to play mp3 files. And how to get it to encode them, but one thing at a time.