Living on the Linux Edge: Fun New Toys

Message ID: 242094
Posted By: bill_beebe
Posted On: 2005-03-02 23:15:00
Subject: Living on the Linux Edge: Fun New Toys

I run a number of systems at my home. The operating systems running on the various boxes are Windows 2K, Windows XP, SuSE 9.1, and Fedora Core 3. This is about the new toys I've got running on FC3.

First off, I downloaded and built KDE 3.4 RC1. The build failed the first time until I downloaded all the core KDE tarballs locally before re-running konstruct unstable. Konstruct unstable still insisted on downloading other supporting tarballs, but the second time was the charm. Everything built and installed. I'm now running with the latest KDE and enjoying the experience very much. KDE 3.4 is cleaner and faster than KDE 3.3.x. On the down side it took 18 hours to build everything. This is on an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton, with 512MB of ram. There was one part of the build where the build process hit swap pretty hard and that's where everything seemed to slow to a crawl. I may have solved that, however. See below. Once installed and running, I like everything except Konquerer as a web browser. Give me FireFox for that.

The second goody I installed this evening: kernel 2.6.11. Everything built cleanly and quickly, and I was up and running with the latest in about 10 minutes. I built KDE 3.4 using kernel 2.6.10. When the next/final release comes out, I want to try this again and see how long it takes to build a complete KDE installation.

There is a lot to like about FC. What I like the best, however, is that I can pull a kernel off kernel.org, build it, and have it work. I have yet to successfully build a kernel on SuSE and have it successfully boot. Because of my positive experiences with FC going back to 1, I am about ready to switch my Big Machine with SuSE to RHWL 4 and pay for a license. I'm seriously looking at scrubbing all my Windows installations since Microsoft has decided to block Windows use on Wine and to drop on-line registration to stop all those bad pirates who resell activation codes on eBay. All of this activity has helped me build considerable trust in the platform and the tools, especially specific distributions. Not to badmouth SuSE; many love it and it is of considerable quality. But FC just happens to fit the way I do things. I like choice.

Long Live Linux.

The text of this Yahoo Message Board post has been licensed for copying and distribution by the Yahoo Message Board user "bill_beebe" under the following license: License: CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.