Fedora 8 (Cont)

Well, the quickest thing to say is that I am back using Linux Mint. Fedora kept hanging on install, so I decided to go back. The big plus in Fedora was the increased range in my wireless card. I think this was due to installing the Windows driver through ndiswrapper, so instead of using the extremely easy restricted drivers function in Linux Mint, I installed the driver using ndiswrapper. It seems to be working well.

A couple of thoughts. Fedora did install quickly and easily. The install program took care of most everything. By default, Linux Mint wanted to reformat my hard drive which would delete my Windows partition. I had to know a little (not much) about what I was doing to keep the Windows partition using Linux Mint.

Now after being installed, Linux Mint is great. I was mainly using this link to install items in Fedora. Most of the items are installed from the command line while I cut and pasted commands. Linux Mint rules because many of the items such as flash, java, codecs, etc come pre-installed in Linux Mint.

A guy in London who goes by Dangermouse wrote some install scripts that look great, but I did not use them. If you are installing Fedora, you might consider them to save time.

I have nothing against Fedora, I just found Linux Mint works better for me. It installed quickly again, updated faster than Fedora, has OpenOffice, codecs, java, flash and other things installed by default. Its based on Ubuntu so I can use the Ubuntu forums if I want help.

Also, if you are going to use Ndiswrapper to install you wireless card, you might consider visiting the ndiswrapper site at sourceforge.net. Under the documents/wiki section they have instructions on using ndiswrapper as well as a list of cards. The list of cards had some useful advice to me on where to get the driver for my card and why not to use the driver I used in previous versions of Ubuntu. I used this informative guide to install my Dell 1390 wireless mini card (which is based on the broadcom chipset). I used the R140747.exe file from Dell to get my wireless driver rather than R151517.exe file suggested by the above tutorial based on comments from the Ndiswrapper site.

Of course, I could have used the restricted drivers instillation guide that shows up in Ubuntu and Linux Mint. That worked last time, but I'm hoping this gives me better range for my wireless needs.