Fedora 8

I'm on to my next linux distro. I've installed Fedora 8 over the Linux Mint instillation. My initial reaction so far has been much less than favorable. Right now I am waiting for the system to finish installing OpenOffice. The installer keeps fading out (crashing) and coming back so it is taking a long time.

Let's start from the beginning. I downloaded the live CD and used it for a few minutes. It is a nice CD that downloaded easily. When I ran the live CD it did not recognize my wireless card, but I did not expect it to. I noticed there was no OpenOffice, but it had abiword and I was wondering if that was just the live version or if OpenOffice would install on the hard drive with the OS.

I told the system to go ahead and install on the hard drive. After a few minutes and a few easy questions later, I was up and running in Fedora 8. Install was easy. Fedora recognized my MS Windows partition and left it in tact. During instillation, Fedora asked if I wanted to erase all of my linux partitions and I told it to go ahead. I had two linux partitions (plus swap) before, but they were erased into one linux partition and one swap. Not a bit deal.

Again, the initial instillation was fast. I connected to the internet via a wired connection and Fedora said it has about 17 updates. That was a bit misleading as those seven updates took over an hour to download and install. If might have been only 17, but they must have been large. Fedora did the download and install with little input from me. Still going good.

The boot loader (Grub) is interesting. It says that it will boot into Fedora and counts down for about 5 seconds. I can push any key for a menu. It then gives me the option of booting into Fedora or Other. If I choose Other, I can boot into Windows. Its like Fedora does not want to speak the name of MS Windows.

Now I was on to install the wireless drivers. I have a broadcom wireless chipset (Dell 1390 mini wireless card using the Broadcom chipset). Under Linux Mint I was not getting the range I wanted so I decided to use ndiswrapper to install the drivers. This ended up being much more trouble than I thought it would be. More on my next post.