Fedora Core 6 on my laptop

Last week I bought a new laptop. It's a Toshiba Satellite A205-S4577. This is an Intel Core 2 Duo system with 1GB ram and a 160GB SATA hard disk. It has almost all the other bells and whistles and is running Windows Vista Home Premium. Since I'm a Linux fanatic I wanted to install Fedora Core 6. but I hesitated to do it because I didn't want to hose the new computer. Installing Linux can be tricky at times. My love for Linux got the better of me though. The first thing I needed to do was to take a portion of the disk for my new Linux partition. This turned out to be extremely simple. Vista has a nice partitioning tool called Disk Manager. I ran Disk Manager and grabbed 30GB of the free space for the new partition and told Disk Manager to go to work. This took only a few minutes, much to my surprise. After that all I needed to do was to start the install, booting the computer off of my Fedora Core 6 DVD. I'm not going into the details of the install here. My main point here is that the installation was easy and fast. More importantly, most everything worked. Rebooting after the install was finished I was greeted with a nice graphical user interface, in the correct display resolution. That in itself was a gift. Often times, Linux users find that they need to reconfigure their graphical server before they ever see a nice desktop. It seems to be one of the quirks of running Linux. Not me though, not this time. Everything was there. The only two sticking points were, and still are, sound and wireless networking. I haven't tried too hard to get the wireless fixed as I can just plug a network cable in while I'm home. The sound is a slight sticking point though. I'd like to be able to listen to streaming media or my mp3's if I feel the need. I'll get around to trying to fix sound, but for now I'm just thrilled at the ease of the installation. I'm amazed actually. I thought I was in for a battle. Nice work Fedora.

Back to blogging

Time to start using my blog again. I've gotten away from this blog for three months. I was running a server of sorts, at home. It was used for file backup, as a print server for the computers here and I hosted my Wiki on it. Since I spent so much time on the wiki I neglected this blog. That's all changed. The box was running Fedora Core 6 Linux. All in all it worked very well, but I had problems with the Windows client being able to access the Linux box all the time. Seems that access was random at best. The main source of my frustration was when my wife would try to backup Quicken. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. I tried many many times to make sure that access was there but the computer just fought back. Today I gave in and retired the computer and my thoughts of hosting services on a Linux box. I'm currently configuring another computer to run Windows XP and it will be the new server for the household. Along with the loss of the Linux box is the loss of my Wiki. That's the main reason that I'm returning to my blog. It's always here and I don't need to play with much in the way of configuration. So, what will I post next?