I've stuck with Ubuntu for a long time, because it has simply worked, it felt like a perfect distribution, until it suddenly started to lock up on me at seemingly random intervals, Only happens on my laptop though, and I have googled around, and apparantly it has something to do with Intel video driver kernel module, but there was seemingly no fix out yet...
It was getting rather annoying to have lockups all the time, so I figured I might give another distro a try, to see if it could avoid locking up. My first test subject (and which I am currently running while writing this) was Fedora 11. My experience with Fedora is not the happiest one, as I tried to get Folding@Home working on Fedora, I just couldn't, although it was most likely due to my inexperience with RedHat rather than a fault in the operating system.
As I said, I now have Fedora 11 installed on my Gateway M275 laptop, it wasn't all fun and games though. I downloaded the LiveCD, burned it and booted it up without any problems whatsoever. Before I installed, my hard drive was partitioned as such:
/dev/sda
- /dev/sda1 - Ubuntu 9.04 :: EXT4
- /dev/sda2 - Extended Partition
- - /dev/sda5 - Backtrack 4 Pre Final :: EXT3
- - /dev/sda7 - SWAP
- /dev/sda3 - Windows 7 Boot :: NTFS
- /dev/sda4 - Windows 7 :: NTFS
Now, this is where I hit the first roadblock, I choose to manually edit my partitions as usual, so I decide to simply format /dev/sda1 and overwrite Ubuntu with Fedora. Sounds simple enough, right? No it isn't, apparently fedora LiveCD only allows to install the system on a EXT4 partition, but it doesn't allow the /boot/ to be on EXT4, therefore the install failed. And while trying to create separate /boot and / partitions the installer also failed. After about an hour of trying to set up the partitioner in a way that the installer would accept, I thought: "Why did I feel too pro to simply use the overwrite existing Linux install". Well, I just fetched gparted and simply deleted every partition except for the two Windows 7 ones, and just chose to install it automatically on the free space of the hard drive.
That went smooth enough, I even had the option to encrypt my hard drive, which I haven't seen in any Ubuntu installer, as well as the option to password protect GRUB (ergo: you can't simply edit the command line in GRUB to boot off an external drive).
After installing, and a neat splash screen later, I had booted up Fedora 11! It all felt extremely familiar to Ubuntu, having chosen gnome as the desktop manager over KDE, only a few subtle changes in the menu. Oh, and apparently, "sudo" doesn't work by default, so y haouve to either register your user account with sudo access, or just type "su" in the terminal, followed by the root password to be in a permanent superuser terminal (no need to type sudo in front of every command). You can also type "su -c 'yourcommandhere'" (with the single apostrophe) which does exactly the same as sudo except you can't autocomplete (pressing tab to complete a half written command) between the apostrophes.
Talking about autocomplete, what I disliked most with Fedora when I tried it out before was the fact that the package manager, yum (as opposed to apt on Debian/Ubuntu) doesn't support autocomplete. That means, that to install a package via terminal (which I prefer over using the GUI installer) requires you to find the exact package name and then typing it in yourself. I googled around a bit, and apparently it's because the distribution of repositories is too broad and would make it very slow. Oh well, apparently I can just type "yum list name*" and get a list of every file that starts with "name", so it's not that big of a deal.
Apparently, installing the flash plugin for your browser isn't as simple as just downloading the "flashplugin-nonfree" file as it is in Ubuntu, I had to download the .rpm from Adobe.com, set it up, allow the GPG keyring, then install it and make sure I installed it correctly with respect to my sound drivers. This was just a bunch of copy paste on the Fedora wiki, so again, no big deal.
So, I opened youtube, and the flash applet loaded and started playing, but my screen went all crazy, and the video was artifacting. Once again, I googled around for the answer, and turns out I had to append a line to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that disables tiling, and now it's fine.
A few minor annoyances, but all worth having a lockup-free computing experience...well it hasn't locked up on me yet *crosses fingers*
So anyway, I'll keep this thread updated with my experience of Fedora and later on I'll add some info on other Linux distros, such as Gentoo, Slackware, CentOS and OpenSUSE.
It was getting rather annoying to have lockups all the time, so I figured I might give another distro a try, to see if it could avoid locking up. My first test subject (and which I am currently running while writing this) was Fedora 11. My experience with Fedora is not the happiest one, as I tried to get Folding@Home working on Fedora, I just couldn't, although it was most likely due to my inexperience with RedHat rather than a fault in the operating system.
As I said, I now have Fedora 11 installed on my Gateway M275 laptop, it wasn't all fun and games though. I downloaded the LiveCD, burned it and booted it up without any problems whatsoever. Before I installed, my hard drive was partitioned as such:
/dev/sda
- /dev/sda1 - Ubuntu 9.04 :: EXT4
- /dev/sda2 - Extended Partition
- - /dev/sda5 - Backtrack 4 Pre Final :: EXT3
- - /dev/sda7 - SWAP
- /dev/sda3 - Windows 7 Boot :: NTFS
- /dev/sda4 - Windows 7 :: NTFS
Now, this is where I hit the first roadblock, I choose to manually edit my partitions as usual, so I decide to simply format /dev/sda1 and overwrite Ubuntu with Fedora. Sounds simple enough, right? No it isn't, apparently fedora LiveCD only allows to install the system on a EXT4 partition, but it doesn't allow the /boot/ to be on EXT4, therefore the install failed. And while trying to create separate /boot and / partitions the installer also failed. After about an hour of trying to set up the partitioner in a way that the installer would accept, I thought: "Why did I feel too pro to simply use the overwrite existing Linux install". Well, I just fetched gparted and simply deleted every partition except for the two Windows 7 ones, and just chose to install it automatically on the free space of the hard drive.
That went smooth enough, I even had the option to encrypt my hard drive, which I haven't seen in any Ubuntu installer, as well as the option to password protect GRUB (ergo: you can't simply edit the command line in GRUB to boot off an external drive).
After installing, and a neat splash screen later, I had booted up Fedora 11! It all felt extremely familiar to Ubuntu, having chosen gnome as the desktop manager over KDE, only a few subtle changes in the menu. Oh, and apparently, "sudo" doesn't work by default, so y haouve to either register your user account with sudo access, or just type "su" in the terminal, followed by the root password to be in a permanent superuser terminal (no need to type sudo in front of every command). You can also type "su -c 'yourcommandhere'" (with the single apostrophe) which does exactly the same as sudo except you can't autocomplete (pressing tab to complete a half written command) between the apostrophes.
Talking about autocomplete, what I disliked most with Fedora when I tried it out before was the fact that the package manager, yum (as opposed to apt on Debian/Ubuntu) doesn't support autocomplete. That means, that to install a package via terminal (which I prefer over using the GUI installer) requires you to find the exact package name and then typing it in yourself. I googled around a bit, and apparently it's because the distribution of repositories is too broad and would make it very slow. Oh well, apparently I can just type "yum list name*" and get a list of every file that starts with "name", so it's not that big of a deal.
Apparently, installing the flash plugin for your browser isn't as simple as just downloading the "flashplugin-nonfree" file as it is in Ubuntu, I had to download the .rpm from Adobe.com, set it up, allow the GPG keyring, then install it and make sure I installed it correctly with respect to my sound drivers. This was just a bunch of copy paste on the Fedora wiki, so again, no big deal.
So, I opened youtube, and the flash applet loaded and started playing, but my screen went all crazy, and the video was artifacting. Once again, I googled around for the answer, and turns out I had to append a line to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that disables tiling, and now it's fine.
A few minor annoyances, but all worth having a lockup-free computing experience...well it hasn't locked up on me yet *crosses fingers*
So anyway, I'll keep this thread updated with my experience of Fedora and later on I'll add some info on other Linux distros, such as Gentoo, Slackware, CentOS and OpenSUSE.
