It's finally happened

After a number of failiures over previous months that I have recovered from, my RAID-0 setup failed once too often for me to tolerate. Given that every time it happens I have to dig about for a floppy drive in order to get the windows installer to recognise the SATA drives. So I figured next time it got into that situation I'd get a new disc and rather than install WinXP, take the full plunge to Linux.

I have been experimenting with Linux for quite a few years, lately it seems much more
likely to suit my needs as a main system. I have been using Fedora Core 6 for a few years now on my laptop, but with WinXP on the main PC.

So, which distro to use?
As most of my trials have been with versions of Redhat or Fedora since RH6, I figured that was the way to go. So my PC is now running on FC8.

I've heard some people whining about Fedora recently, so thought I'd share my experiences, trials and tribulations with anyone that is interested. Not that I expect many!

Installation went well on my system, I guess for comparisons sake and to put comments of speed into perspective, I ought to outline my system:

ABit NF7-s board (athlon 3200+ barton)
2x512Mb 400MHz dual channel paired corsair RAM
SATA 160Gb drive that houses the OS and working data
IDE 120Gb drive - was the backup drive for my windows installation and will continue in this function
Radeon 9600 256 (or might be 512)Mb graphics card with standard d-sub and DVI outputs
PCI wireless card D-Link DWL G520

Only problem, the wireless card wasn't understood by the installer. It didn't error, just no driver present so will have to install that separately in due course.

With the exception of the WiFi card, all hardware was detected and worked out of the box.

Next step, ask yum to do it's magical updaty goodness.... half a Gb of download later and I'm bang up to date. Though I was forced to use the command line to use yum (su to root), for some reason the button on the panel didn't work. Possibly a permissions thing as logged in as user not root?

I'll try the update button when logged in as root another time.

OpenOffice 2.3 came with the OS so no need to find/install an Office suite later.
Picasa (Googles image management software) installed flawlessly.

Tried playing a couple of videos, the player (Totem) realised it didn't have the correct codecs and told me where to get them, I haven't yet done. Some vids played out of the box without requiring codecs.

Certainly better behaviour than the effort of Windows Media Player which just fails with a message about needing a codec but no info about what codec it is that's needed.