Having just installed Fedora Core 2 last night, I thought I would write
a short note on how it all went.
MACHINE
AMD k6 with 512MB RAM, NVidia GForce 2 GTS graphics card, Sound
card with a FM801 chipset, a cheep (genius) network card, and
USB keyboard and mouse.
INSTALL
The install was smooth, with nothing serious issues. The install
was very similar to the install for RedHat 9 (the previous OS)
with similar options at each step.
As normal I went for a full install â rather than upgrade,
because I wanted to see all the options â and I used Disk Druid
to set the partitions. My only concern with the installer is
that it did not tell me that I had selected too many packages to
be installed. The "/usr" partition had been set in an earlier,
so the installer knew how big it was, and it keeping a running
total of the size of the requested packages so a little alert
would not be hard to add.
I had no hardware issues during the install. As per usual the
proprietary NVidia video-card drivers are not included, but this
is par for the course for many distributions.
USING FC2: The Good
I thought the graphical boot-sequence was very nice. It provides
a progress bar, a throbber, a summary of the current task, and
an option to see the textual output from the daemons as they
start.
The new GNOME is very nice; I am a fan of the new spatial
Nautilus file-manager. Overall, the programs seem to work well
together without any major problems so far.
USING FC2: The Bad
I wish that I had the ability to tell the system that I did not
have a printer. The CUPS printer-daemon is started
automatically, and it is frustrating having to explicitly
disable it each time I upgrade.
Hopefully the DBus/HAL/gnome-volume-manager triad will be
complete next time I upgrade so my USB disk will "just work"
when I plug it in, without me having to alter /etc/fstab. This
is not really a problem with FC2, I just wish it worked. One
dayâ
I am also having issues installing the close-source NVidia
drivers, but that is probably due to me not reading the README!
--
Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/
