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Where’s my hat?

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June 10th, 2009 at 19:08 by Eseell in Networking and Too Much Time On My Hands

I know I said I’d do this during the weekend, but the release of Fedora 11 got pushed back a week to this Tuesday. I’m a big fan of the Red Hat Linux OSs, so even though there’s a distro just for EeePCs, I decided to be difficult and go with Fedora. Over the next few days I’ll probably spend some time tweaking it to run properly on the Eee hardware but today I just want to get the base OS installed. I tried to get it running yesterday, but apparently the Fedora LiveUSB creator for Windows doesn’t like my 32GB Kingston stick that I keep my random crap on, so I stopped at Best Buy today[1] to pick up a more basic 4GB stick that it wouldn’t choke on. Commence mostly-liveblogging:

  • 6:05PM – Got the LiveUSB created on the new stick. Rebooted the PC and. . . Windows XP. Wonderful. Verified in the BIOS that “removable media” is the preferred boot device and turned off “fast boot.” Still booting into Windows. Apparently with the Eee1000HE you sometimes have to hit ESC during POST to choose your boot media manually. After doing so, am now in KDE (running live off the stick). Chose “Install to hard drive” and away we go. KDE looks slicker than the GNOME desktop environment I’m used to.
  • 6:10PM – The Anaconda installer looks much the same as ever. Since this Eee came pre-partitioned with two logical drives, I jumped back into Windows and deleted the as-yet-unused D: drive. It will be replaced with ext4 partitions.
  • 6:17PM – And. . . done. Base Fedora Install complete. Rebooting Eee to verify Grub bootloader function. . . And it works.
  • 6:18PM – Completing setup of NTP and other such.
  • 6:20PM – First login to Fedora on the EeePC. Further blogging from the Eee.
  • 6:53PM – Up and running on Fedora 11. Ran into some issues with KDE. . . it’s really very different from GNOME. I’m not sure if I like it yet, it’s a little too Windows-like for me. The browser that comes with KDE, Konquerer, is complete crap. I spent a few minutes trying to install Firefox via the GUI and then said “Fuck it” and just ran “yum install firefox” from the terminal. Have I mentioned that I love Red Hat? It’s odd to me that in F11 w/ KDE the graphical interface is on tty1 instead of tty7.

Initial impressions:

  • Fedora 11 runs quite well on the EeePC. Issues from Fedora 10 such as a lack of native wireless and power-management support seem to have been resolved in the base Fedora 11 install.
  • KDE’s pre-packaged apps are a little too good-looking and gimmicky for me. I use mIRC in Windows, I don’t need my Linux IRC client to be any fancier than that. Gonna have to find another one. I might switch back to GNOME, it was a simpler interface.
  • Seriously, Konquerer sucks. It wouldn’t display the WYSIWYG editor for WordPress. I’d almost rather browse with wget and lynx.
  • Overall I’m very happy with Fedora so far. I’ll have to screw with it between labs tomorrow.
  1. There’s a Fry’s Electronics and a Best Buy on my way home from work. Fry’s has large “No Guns Allowed” signs posted, so I don’t shop there anymore. [↩]

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