Installing Fedora would have been a straight forward excercise however because I needed more diskspace on Friday I took the CDRW out of my PC, and put in another 60GB drive. Which meant I only have my DVD-RW in the external firewire enclosure and the installer does not support installing or upgrading from firewire based devices. Since I have Redhat 9 on the box I thought I can do it by hand, which is possible, it’s just takes while. Took me around 2 hours dinking around with the 3 cds to get the right combination of core packages so I could pull the rest using yum. (apt is not there by default, has to be installed seperately.).
Well I got it working nicely, had a few issues with X which seemed to effect MPlayer and Zapping (TV Viewer), however it seems I’m not alone on this. Firewire worked once I got the modules aliases right, (Don’t know why they changed from my previous 2.4.21 kernel, hmm.). However it would seem I need to recompile the kernel to get PPP and VPN support to work correctly getting symbol errors, probably wait till PPTP Linux guys get a install FAQ together. Don’t really want to waste too much time dicking about the kernel, patching it like crazy.
Fedora definately seems like a step in the right direction, however I won’t be recommending it to new Linux users yet unless they are willing to fiddle a little and learn a lot in a short time. Redhat now look like they are saying that debian has had it right from the start, Debian could really use a nice gui installer but then who is going to support an installer on 15 architectures, which is an horrendous task. Redhat sight that as being one of the reasons for dropping support for other architectures in the past.
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