Hats off to Fedora!
Well I've been a bit of a geek lately, like I'm not already... I decided to put Fedora Core 5 on my PowerBook G4. It actually went quite smoothly once I figured out that I had incorrectly formatted my Mac OS X partition as MS-DOS. I downloaded the DVD .iso from my nearest university (high bandwidth because I'm impatient) and burned it.
Once I had the drive partitioned into two volumes it was a snap. I think it was about an hour of installation of all the goodies that I wanted by the time it finally finished. I hit the restart button, held down the option key and was presented with a boot loader to pick which partition to boot from. So I chose the HD icon with Tux on it and went through the Fedora configuration setup. Pretty damn easy all in all. I was surprised by the options available for my video card. I skimped on the PowerBook and went with the 64MB video card. Over here in Mac OS X land I'm limited to 1280x854. But in FC5 I could choose a display size of over 2500 pixels wide. Sounds like I need a 30" Cinema display!
The first thing I noticed was a distinct lack of SOUND. Then I noticed that my Airport Extreme card is not recognized by FC5. Oh here's a kicker for you laptop users that like to put your PowerBooks to sleep. You can't... There's not "sleep" or "hibernate" mode. It's either on with the lid closed or it's off. Well so much for doing "enough" research... At any rate, I'm not real familiar with the Gnome environment. I'm a bit more familiar with KDE, but I like both of them. Working in Gnome is definitely a departure from Mac OS X. You are definitely not in Kansas any more. Yes, it is a GUI. Yes, it is friendly. No, it's not as easy as Mac OS X where you're spoon fed everything. It's a bit more Windows like. But that's not such a bad thing considering the cost of FC 5 was that of a DVD or 6 CD's plus my time.
I've really come to love the idea of virtual desktops. Man, it is so cool and so handy. I know there are virtual desktop software for Mac OS X, but I haven't really spent much time with them. Here in FC it sure is handy. I've got everything organized by keeping functions grouped together. Meaning that when I'm downloading an RPMS and installing it I've got one virtual desktop setup to hold those windows. In another I've got my email and calendaring. Yet another is running all my web surfing. And the last one is running a terminal services client into a Terminal server session. That's just slicker than snot!
Working in FC5 is sure nice. All the open source developers really have done a great job with the interface. There are some "iffy" things that they have done with drop down menus, some are more like OS 9 or early Windows in their blocky style. But all in all, Open Office, K Office, Mozilla Suite and the built in email client (Evolution) are great. I'm really impressed with Evolution. But I so love Microsoft Office 2004 for two reasons. One, total integration with calendar, email, tasks, projects, contacts, etc. The second is Projects. I can't get enough of Projects in Office 2004. I store all the files together. The emails, tasks, calendar events, contacts, note (even MSN Messenger chat logs) and files are all kept organized together. Plus, from within Word, Excel and PowerPoint you can add things to existing projects or start new ones. The only thing that I really HATE about Gnome is that damn "feature" that when you hoover over something you select it. Got that just drives me frickin' insane! And there's no way to turn it off...
Setting up the services in FC5 is pretty darn easy too. It took 2 minutes to setup users for SMB sharing and a couple of shares. Web services were a snap. FTP was a bit more difficult because I had to choose WHICH ftp server I wanted to use. I finally settled on PureFTPd (which I also use on my Mac) which uses local user accounts for access rather than a separate list of users and parameters. Okay, it's not a big deal, it's just a pain in the arse for "me" because I'm used to virtual users rather than real users. I installed NFS, BIND, DHCP and several other services that I have not yet played with. But it's all pretty straight forward really.
On a similar note of the same vein I installed Red Hat 9 on a couple of old Dell PowerEdge 1300 and 1400SC servers. The PowerEdge 1300 has 256MB of RAM, 10GB Ultra2 SCSI disk, and a 450 MHz PII. Pretty damn modest hardware when you look at it. But damn is it fast serving web pages, FTP transfers and SMB traffic. I was really surprised at just how fast it served up pages. A heck of a lot faster than my P2 450 with 384MB of RAM and Apache 2.x. I did some load testing and the old Dell PowerEdge smoked the Compaq PII/450. I then tried it on a Dell PowerEdge 1400SC PIII/933 with 128MB of RAM with Red Hat 9 (same as the PE1300) and it was was almost as fast as the PE1300. I heard a lot of thrashing going on. The poor old SCSI drive in the 1400SC was getting the snot kicked out of it. I almost felt bad tossing such a load onto it. One of the spare drives I was testing on literally smoked and sparked while doing this. Yes folks, I did smell smoke, burning silicon to be specific and yes I did see fire. I swapped it out with another one and went about the testing again. This next drive is starting to give the aroma of burning silicon too. So time to swap it out in lieu of my last spare SCSi drive.
At any rate, beyond all of this testing and such I have really come to appreciate how effective Linux is as a desktop operating system as well as a server operating system. I'm going to convert my sons Dell Optiplex to Red Hat 9. It's not enough of a machine to run any of his games, but it has everything on it that he needs. And quite frankly, Windows 2000 Professional is a resource hog. Red Hat has everything on it that he needs. And it's FREE.
I also now better understand why some of my peers have switched their front office workers to Linux. Almost ZERO maintenance, very little training because it is a very familiar environment to Windows, and it's FREE!
Now to try Unbutu ans Suse on the PowerBook. But next time I'm going to create a third partition that's about a gigabyte in size for file transfers between OS'es since I can't have them both live. I'm not doing this to run a emulator...
Once I had the drive partitioned into two volumes it was a snap. I think it was about an hour of installation of all the goodies that I wanted by the time it finally finished. I hit the restart button, held down the option key and was presented with a boot loader to pick which partition to boot from. So I chose the HD icon with Tux on it and went through the Fedora configuration setup. Pretty damn easy all in all. I was surprised by the options available for my video card. I skimped on the PowerBook and went with the 64MB video card. Over here in Mac OS X land I'm limited to 1280x854. But in FC5 I could choose a display size of over 2500 pixels wide. Sounds like I need a 30" Cinema display!
The first thing I noticed was a distinct lack of SOUND. Then I noticed that my Airport Extreme card is not recognized by FC5. Oh here's a kicker for you laptop users that like to put your PowerBooks to sleep. You can't... There's not "sleep" or "hibernate" mode. It's either on with the lid closed or it's off. Well so much for doing "enough" research... At any rate, I'm not real familiar with the Gnome environment. I'm a bit more familiar with KDE, but I like both of them. Working in Gnome is definitely a departure from Mac OS X. You are definitely not in Kansas any more. Yes, it is a GUI. Yes, it is friendly. No, it's not as easy as Mac OS X where you're spoon fed everything. It's a bit more Windows like. But that's not such a bad thing considering the cost of FC 5 was that of a DVD or 6 CD's plus my time.
I've really come to love the idea of virtual desktops. Man, it is so cool and so handy. I know there are virtual desktop software for Mac OS X, but I haven't really spent much time with them. Here in FC it sure is handy. I've got everything organized by keeping functions grouped together. Meaning that when I'm downloading an RPMS and installing it I've got one virtual desktop setup to hold those windows. In another I've got my email and calendaring. Yet another is running all my web surfing. And the last one is running a terminal services client into a Terminal server session. That's just slicker than snot!
Working in FC5 is sure nice. All the open source developers really have done a great job with the interface. There are some "iffy" things that they have done with drop down menus, some are more like OS 9 or early Windows in their blocky style. But all in all, Open Office, K Office, Mozilla Suite and the built in email client (Evolution) are great. I'm really impressed with Evolution. But I so love Microsoft Office 2004 for two reasons. One, total integration with calendar, email, tasks, projects, contacts, etc. The second is Projects. I can't get enough of Projects in Office 2004. I store all the files together. The emails, tasks, calendar events, contacts, note (even MSN Messenger chat logs) and files are all kept organized together. Plus, from within Word, Excel and PowerPoint you can add things to existing projects or start new ones. The only thing that I really HATE about Gnome is that damn "feature" that when you hoover over something you select it. Got that just drives me frickin' insane! And there's no way to turn it off...
Setting up the services in FC5 is pretty darn easy too. It took 2 minutes to setup users for SMB sharing and a couple of shares. Web services were a snap. FTP was a bit more difficult because I had to choose WHICH ftp server I wanted to use. I finally settled on PureFTPd (which I also use on my Mac) which uses local user accounts for access rather than a separate list of users and parameters. Okay, it's not a big deal, it's just a pain in the arse for "me" because I'm used to virtual users rather than real users. I installed NFS, BIND, DHCP and several other services that I have not yet played with. But it's all pretty straight forward really.
On a similar note of the same vein I installed Red Hat 9 on a couple of old Dell PowerEdge 1300 and 1400SC servers. The PowerEdge 1300 has 256MB of RAM, 10GB Ultra2 SCSI disk, and a 450 MHz PII. Pretty damn modest hardware when you look at it. But damn is it fast serving web pages, FTP transfers and SMB traffic. I was really surprised at just how fast it served up pages. A heck of a lot faster than my P2 450 with 384MB of RAM and Apache 2.x. I did some load testing and the old Dell PowerEdge smoked the Compaq PII/450. I then tried it on a Dell PowerEdge 1400SC PIII/933 with 128MB of RAM with Red Hat 9 (same as the PE1300) and it was was almost as fast as the PE1300. I heard a lot of thrashing going on. The poor old SCSI drive in the 1400SC was getting the snot kicked out of it. I almost felt bad tossing such a load onto it. One of the spare drives I was testing on literally smoked and sparked while doing this. Yes folks, I did smell smoke, burning silicon to be specific and yes I did see fire. I swapped it out with another one and went about the testing again. This next drive is starting to give the aroma of burning silicon too. So time to swap it out in lieu of my last spare SCSi drive.
At any rate, beyond all of this testing and such I have really come to appreciate how effective Linux is as a desktop operating system as well as a server operating system. I'm going to convert my sons Dell Optiplex to Red Hat 9. It's not enough of a machine to run any of his games, but it has everything on it that he needs. And quite frankly, Windows 2000 Professional is a resource hog. Red Hat has everything on it that he needs. And it's FREE.
I also now better understand why some of my peers have switched their front office workers to Linux. Almost ZERO maintenance, very little training because it is a very familiar environment to Windows, and it's FREE!
Now to try Unbutu ans Suse on the PowerBook. But next time I'm going to create a third partition that's about a gigabyte in size for file transfers between OS'es since I can't have them both live. I'm not doing this to run a emulator...
posted by Matt Beals at Wednesday, July 12, 2006
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