Ive finally gotten round to installing Fedora Core 4 over the weekend. I used my partitions as the reason for my procrastinations. I needed to free up some space to properly assign a /home partition so that it can be shared with my other installations.
I 'optimized' my 25GB FAT32 partition so that the files packed towards the beginning of the partition and then using Ultimate Boot CD, I ran Ranish Partition Manager to modify the parameters to shrink the size of the partition. It wasnt particularly obvious because there were two entries to modify, one the cylinders and the other the reported accessible size. Strange. But it worked.
FC4 installation was rather painless after that, I installed most of the stuff available. Heres what worked 'out-of-the-box' and what needed tweaking...
Synaptic Touch Pad.
Not to be confused with the synaptic apt package manager, this driver worked immediately. It feels even better than the implementation on WinXP. Reason is that when I use the 'scroll-up/down' feature, the mouse doesnt dart to the scrollbar like mad. So its alot more polished.
ipw2100 for Wifi.
This Intel® PRO/Wireless 2100 Driver for Linux comes built into the kernel nowadays, so that was a plus. However the firmwares need to be downloaded and installed into /lib/firmware
Winbond SD Card Reader.
As previously blogged, this is now also built into the kernel. I could not get my script to work immediately. I guess Ill have to figure it out later when I have some time to burn.
Sound: Mute, Volume Up and Down
Somehow my root account binds these buttons properly. But my user account doesnt. Will have to investigate. I think its gotta be something to do with the way X and GNOME handles these bindings. At least I know it can be done.
Crossover Office/Wine
Works well. Lotus Notes and Internet Explorer 6.0 are OK.
Nautilus
Tree view and the new windows are killing me. At least when you open Nautilus in Applications/System Tools/File Browser, the saner version works.
nautilus --no-desktop --browser %U
I dont know how to make this the default behaviour, but at least I have docked this shortcut on my Panel.
OpenOffice 2.0 (beta)
Works better than the Windows version, a whole lot more stable and faster. I cant wait for the release version to be out.
Automount
Portable harddisk plugged ito USB was automatically detected and mounted as a USB Media device. Very nice. Unmounts works well too.
NTFS
I have one partition in NTFS for my WinXP Pro. Got this to work by installing the kernel-module for ntfs. Works for read only.
Applets on the Panel:
Battery Charge Monitor - wonderful detailed info on Battery and Charging status
Weather Report - Ive noticed now KL is finally included!
Network Monitor - Shows the 'flashing monitors' to indicate network activity...
Sticky Notes - No vertical scrollbars. So sticky notes get very large. quite primitive.
Applates on the Bottom Panel:
CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor - It shows how fast the processor is running at and dynamically changes as more stress is applied.
System Monitor - CPU Utilization, etc...
Software Suspend 2
I havent got Hibernate to work yet.
Synaptic (apt-get UI)
I just did a 'yum install synaptic' and now using synaptic to manage my packages. I really like this app. It works very well.
MP3 Support
I guess licensing issues means that FC cannot include MP3 support. But since I have synaptic installed, it was quite easy to make sure that rhythmbox could play my mp3s. Just check most of the gstreamer related packages like plugins, and mp3s will be playable.
A good reference I picked up along the way:
FC4 Installation Notes
yk.
