This is a strange one. My 128MB Lexar Thumbdrive gets detected and mounted automatically on my Thinkpad T40 but on my Dell desktop, FC2 isn’t even detecting it.
FC2 on the Dell is detecting my Palm Tungsten T and a USB Bluetooth dongle, and a USB multi-card reader but not the Thumbdrive. Again, odd but it’ll require some poking around on the net.
I just installed gnome-blogger on my FC2 Dell desktop. Looks very simple and powerful with decent editing features. What would be nice is to have a blog plugin for emacs…something to look around for 
I just finished my download of Fedora Core 2 after 4 days of trying and funny enough, using Bittorrent from Europe was faster than using the torrent for the US ( I’m located in the US). Go figure.
I did the following upgrades/installs:
Here are my initial impressions:
More to come as the testing continues…..
There’s a great article on linuxdevcenter on how to create your own bootable Linux CD based on Knoppix.
Using and Customizing Knoppix by Robert Bernier — Several Linux distributions boot directly from CD-ROMs. How many are usable in that state? How many are customizable in that state? Klaus Knopper’s Knoppix is perhaps the best known of these distributions. Robert Bernier explains how to use Knoppix and how to customize your own self-booting distribution CD.
The Linux Journal also has a great article on how to create your own bootable Linux CD based on any distribution of your choice.
I’m going to try creating one based on Fedora Core 2 as soon as I can finish downloading it. I’ll post the details of my endeavor.
Working out of a different office today, I was extremely apprehensive about being forced to use Windows and Outlook. I decided to download the SuSE 9.0 Live-Eval CD and bring it to the office.
Once I got here, I popped in the CD, rebooted the PC and went through the config - very short. It basically asked me the location and language and that’s it.
It took less than 5 minutes for SuSE Linux to be up and running connected to the network via DHCP. I was quickly and easily able to ssh over to my Fedora Core 1 machine at the other office, run emacs, firefox, and evolution. My biggest problem was that no matter what I did, I could not set up a local printer. Turns out that /etc/cups is mounted from the CD and no configs can be changed. Not the end of the world but annoying. Wound up saving the PDF to a thumbdrive, rebooting into Windows, and printing the PDF from there, then rebooting into SuSE.
A few annoyances with this otherwise fantastic OS-on-the-go:
Other than that, I think I’m going to carry a SuSE Live-CD with me everywhere!
Click on the title above to read a case study about how Redhat is being deployed at the Central Bank of India, a bank with over 3000 branches all over India.
Over 1100 branches have already been brought online. The Central Bank of India found a total savings of $1 million over two years in licenses, training and maintenance. Over $500,000 a year in savings…can anyone really argue why NOT to use Linux anymore?
I should get our IT infrastructure folks to read this, especially after the fact that most of them were running around installing patches on those pesky Windoze machines after a Sasser worm attack…
I was doing some poking around the web to look for Linux projects in India and came up with the links below. Some interesting stuff.
Looks like Novell GPL’ed the Ximian Connector for hooking Evolution up to Exchange 2000/2003. Panu Matilainen was nice enough to start working on a spec for building RPMs from the Source. See his posting to the Fedora Test Archives Below.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-May/msg01336.html
I’ve successfully built the RPM but unfortunately, I don’t have an Exchange 2000/2003 Server to test against yet. I’ll let you know when I can get an account on an Exchange 2003 server.
I’m far from being a tech guru. I’m just a tech enthusiast who really likes the freedom, flexibility, and tinkering nature of the *NIX world. I’ve been running Fedora Core 2 Test 2 for about a month and a half on a IBM Thinkpad T40 without any problems. I kept the system updated with all the recent RPMs without any serious breakage.
When Test 3 was released on April 26th, I started my download of the DVD ISO using BitTorrent ( see an article about BitTorrent). It took a few days to get the DVD ISO but once I got it, burnt the image on to a DVD, popped it into the laptop, rebooted and did an upgrade from FCT2 to FC2T3 without any issues. Funny thing was that the upgrade took a whole 3 minutes. Probably because I had very few non-Redhat packages on the system and I had all the Redhat packages updated from the Development YUM repo.
So far, the system has been behaving quite well. SELinux is going to require quite a bit of time ( something I don’t have much of ) to understand but I was even able to have my wireless Netgear WG511 card running using the Prism54 drivers on both T2 and T3 along with the Gigabit Ethernet card.
My next step is going to be to get the Centrino driver working. Intel recently released the driver on SourceForge so I’m going to try getting it running. I’ve been looking for some good wireless tools to run my WG511 with different APs but so far, I’ve found switching APs in Fedora to be quite difficult. I’ve also found that having multiple network “Profiles” doesn’t quite work in Fedora. I haven’t yet filed a bug report b/c I’m not sure if I just have something wacky going on or it is in fact a real bug. I need to do some more testing here.
For the most part, FC2T3 looks pretty good in terms of stability. No major issues anywhere. The only thing I’m not too crazy about is that Fedora requires quite a bit of technical knowledge. Hence, it’s not something I can roll out to my dad on his old Thinkpad 600E and still allow him to use his fairly new iPAQ and hotsync. We’ll see, if he feels brave, maybe I’ll do it.
One last thing to the wonderful Linux gurus out there…to be able to get folks like my non-technical Dad on Linux, we HAVE to be able to get AOL for Linux ( or some kind of AOL clone ) out there.
