It’s 09:50 in the morning and I’m at home, enjoying the 3rd day of the Eid holidays. Had a couple of cups of coffee so far, and the sun is no longer so bright, winter is in the air.
So, time to get the blood pressure up a bit and see who I can curse for the next few hours.
Therefore, I have decided to shut down my desktop computer, fit in another drive, and go ahead and install Fedora on it.
I am not sure if it will work, and that’s why the warning, I might disappear for a few hours or days off this site. If It goes on for more than 3 days however, come looking for me in the local mental hospital, or jail, or both!
See ya in a while! 🙂
Comments
Almost there…
had enough for now. the two main things remaining to do are (1) the screen and (2) the audio.
The screen I have at home is an SGI FPD1600SW whose native resolution is 1600 x 1024 (16:10 aspect ratio) The screen is no longer manufactured.
It works somewhat with the Modeline I have for the old Nvidia card I used to have on my old computer (see here) but it doesn’t give me the full resolution of 1600×1024 with the crappy Intl 845 on the Dell Dimention 2400 piece of shit I have at home! It tops out at 1280×1024 and it stretches the 1280 part into 1600 which doesn’t look all that great. I can force it to use standard 1280×1024 and it displays it well enough, but what’s the point? So I would either have to get a decent graphic card, or dig deaper in the modelines and other settings to get it to display at full resolution. Having only 8MB shared graphic memory doesn’t cut it.
(2) Fedora doesn’t recognise the audio card on the Dimention 2400 and I don’t blame it! I haven’t spent much time with this yet as I have concentrated on the display issue. I’ll tackle this off and on to see how I can get it fixed.
It is very ironic that it worked right out of the box on my Dell Latitude D400 laptop, and crapped out on the desktop. It should be the other way around… to be fair though, the 1600sw is not a standard piece of kit and I suspect there aren’t that many floating around the world, so it (practically) could be ignored.
Still, it pisses me off that Windows XP sees and uses it right out of the box, while Linux doesn’t! I know I know, not a fair comparison.
One thing that I can tell you impressed me no end is the display of Arabic fonts in FireFox 1.0 in Fedora. Extremely SEXY. VERY crisp and nice, almost like a printed page and MUCH better than IE OR FF displays Arabic fonts in Windows.
More to come….
WARNING
No not Fedora!
From what i have read and heard, the core is huge compared to other versions of Linux “needs more system resources” and it has allot of compatibility issues with non standard hardware and “designed for XP” hardware.
The kernal is the same as any other version of linux obviously but i used Mandrake Linux and its one of the best when it comes to handling and recognising hardware and its so easy to intall even computer noobs can do it!! Oh and its partially based on redhat so you can run red-hat compiled programs in it with no probs. HIGHLY recommended but since you already installed fedora, good luck! with a little bit of internet research you’ll find allot of help. There is a forum i can’t remember but google linux help and you should find it. That one covers almost every issue you might incounter with linux.
Re: WARNING
I hear you man, thanks for the warning!
To be fair, I had no problem whatsoever installing it on my laptop, which is my main machine, but because I was bored and needed a headache (I know I know sadistic) I installed it on my desktop at home and I *knew* that I will face problems as it’s only a Dell Demintion 2400 crap.
If I had a “normal” monitor it wouldn’t have been a problem at all, but because the SGI 1600SW is obsolete, it’s funky trying to force a system to recognise and treat it with the respect it deserves!
Now I’ve got another idea… oh oh, here it comes! I’ve head a lot about Gentoo linux and I know a couple of friends who use it and they seem to be happy enough with it, maybe I’ll just wipe out Fedora and install Gentoo to just see how it looks and feels! Even more sadistic huh? Well, the night is young, lemme see what I can destroy between now and bedtime! 🙂
Gentoo too much hastle
it looks like anyway, reading just the first chapter of the installation docs scared me off! I’ll stick with Fedora for now, I’ve always been a RedHat man so Fedora isn’t that bad and I can find my way around it easily.
I was thrown this afternoon though as I couldn’t find the XF86Config file, it’s now called xorg.conf for some reason.
Fedora Forums
oh yeah, I did find the Fedora Forums while I was searching for answers earlier this afternoon, they are at http://fedoraforum.org
Up and Running!
Installed and happy, just need a bit more tweaking with the modelines and display settings and I shall be happy! Bummer having a non-standard 16:10 LCD display, but hey, why complain? Just fix it! 🙂