Comments on: Fedora 9 seems very fine.

By: JanieBelle

JanieBelle — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:07:53 +0000

Thank you Greg. I’m really going to have to do some more reading on it.I get partitions, it’s just all the other stuff after that. The Swahili makes just as much sense to me. I won’t understand the sentences until I understand all the words.I’m still wondering about the 9 farting FAT ladies in the Red Hats, though.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:41:19 +0000

Well, the first operating system I used interactively was Unix before there even was a Linux. So there….And we didn’t have very many CRT screens. Mostly paper TTY’s. With punch cards and punch paper readers (and if you played your cards right, you could get the people behind the window to put your data on a tape or, egads, a drum!!!! Drums were fast. )(

By: Nomen Nescio

Nomen Nescio — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:02:33 +0000

i’ve been using linux since before there was a Red Hat. phhhbbt, got y’all beat.i’ll have to take a look into Fedora 9; i skipped 8, spent most of my time on Ubuntu, but i deal with Fedora servers that might stand an OS upgrade eventually.

By: Virgil Samms

Virgil Samms — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:24:02 +0000

Wups, I meant F9, not F8.

By: Virgil Samms

Virgil Samms — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:22:51 +0000

Just did my first installation of F8. No problems. It recognized the VIA chipset and set up the openchrome driver. Also, XFCE is now available as part of the distribution (optional)

By: clinteas

clinteas — Wed, 14 May 2008 06:53:43 +0000

I used Red Hat Linux 4 and 5 back in the olden days when you had to write your PPP scripts yourself,and it was ok,didnt mind it.Have tried Fedora 6 and 8 and it was just not comparable with Ubuntu(and btw Greg,Gentoo is really,really hardcore,its good if you do not have a job or family or life in general,because all that compiling from source takes time mate ! ). Forget about wireless,be prepared for a struggle with Samba shares etc,and get ready for dependency hell whenever you try to install any additional software….If you want to use Linux,stay with the Debian derivates…..

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:24:59 +0000

By the way, I could do that in Swahili if you like.Unalazimakugowana hardisk yako kukua na kipondi tatu. Kwa moya, ya kwisha, unatia swapdisk yako. Kwa ingine, katikati na kibombi kupita yote, unatia nyumba yako, /home. Kwa yakwanza, unatia asili (‘/’). Basi.Wow, Somehow it seems easier in Kiswahili.

By: patrick

patrick — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:10:27 +0000

Greetings,I have been using fedora8, previous versions and red hat since v5. Also since I provide support I have some systems running winxp. The simplest way to test and run linux is to have a test system, hence no risk to your primary system.If you are comfortable with internals you can swap out the hard drive. Otherwise get an older model pc for 50 bucks and install linux on it. Another possibility is the live cd but those do run somewhat slowly.Now regarding linux vs. windows. I do not play games so cannot comment on that topic. Even on windows I mostly use open source so there are only a very few programs that are not portable cross platform.The biggest problem with any computer is recovering from a hard crash, usually with linux the computer user is a bit more knowledgeable and has backups available so the recovery is perhaps a bit less painful but it really is a crap shoot overall.Even though I am a firm advocate of linux, my clients all use windows so it is a necessary part of my skill set and I have to stay current with the product. If it wasnt for cygwin and open source in general on windows, I would go nuts.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:33:46 +0000

Understanding disk partitions is hard, but running a computer without understanding this is like using mechanical transport (cars, busses, etc.) without knowing how to start the vehicle, steer, use the breaks, etc. You can take a bus but you can’t really drive. Which is fine.I strongly recommend, though, getting a basic understanding of this stuff. Simple explanations can be found on the internet. Maybe I’ll do a blog post about it.There are physical disks and there are ‘partitions’ … which are sort of like virtual disks (though I don’t really want to use the word virtual there because it has special meaning). Your “c drive” etc. … those are ‘virtual’ disks that often happen to coincide with physical disks, but they need not.The idea linux installation has three disks (all partitions on a single real disk, usually). One is your home directory and it is “mounted” at “/home” … the other is the rest of the file system, and it is mounted at “/” (right, just the slash … that is the root of the directory system). The third is the swap file. When you use qparted or gparted, you create these three partitions … which destroys everything on the disk. The first partition is /, the secon partition in line is /home, and the third (typically) is a swap file.The swap file is at least as large as the total ram installed in your computer (not too much larger). The / directory is a bunch of gigabytes. Does not have to be large. /home is the biggest. That is where all your stuff goes.If you make these three partitions, then in stalling a new system … probably even switching from Debian/Ubuntu to Fedora (though I cannot guarantee that) but certainly upgrading from Fedora 5 to 9, for instance, can be done without touching /home . Also, to back up your stuff, just back up /home. All your stuff is there. Once you get past the partition part, it makes the rest of life so much easier…

By: JanieBelle

JanieBelle — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:42:11 +0000

I’ve been wanting to ditch Windows for some time, but every time I start to consider actually doing it, stuff like this comes up that I totally don’t understand and it scares the Hell out of me.Y’know in Rush Hour when Jackie Chan is mocking Chris Tucker and goes, “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth”?No.Y’all are like speaking Japanese using Greek words and Swahili grammar, as far as I can tell. I have no idea what 9 farting FAT ladies in red hats have to do with ditching Windows.But “OOOPs” I understand. I still have Windows.