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.
I was surprised at how lost I was when I had to do some things on the server. I thought I would be alright due to the “Quickening” I experienced with X/K/Ubuntu, but I was like a stunned deer staring at a pair of headlights of a semi-trailer truck fast approaching toward me. I mean sure, I could move stuff around and do other things, but the directory structure was somewhat different.
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.
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