My excellent fiancee came back from her dad's bowling trip with a nice new Intel Core 2 Duo laptop for little ole' me, ain't she great.
Anyway I decided to put two fingers to Vista, install Fedora 8 and see how things went. Well I can tell you, things are pretty damn good.
Here's how,
Install Fedora
First download your 64-bit image from the fedora site at...
Click [get fedora] and select the 64-bit build because the new Intel core 2 duo chip is a 64-bit chip (the previous 'core duo' chip wasn't).
Burn the 4gb image to DVD and boot from it, install, check Office / Web / etc. so you get everything and give it 30 minutes to install and you to go thru the install process.
After Installing
First off you'll notice the touchpad is a bit over-reactive and the WIFI doesn't work, this we'll fix.
For this you'll need a network cable to hook up directly to your router, a standard CAT5 network cable will do, nothing too posh.
Getting Wifi and everything else
Once hooked up, boot up with the ROOT account so you've got admin rights OR boot in normally, open Terminal (Applications / System / Terminal) and type...
sudo wget http://dnmouse.webs.com/scripts/dangermouse
sh dangermouse
A dialog will popup, this is the best bit and will hopefully fix all your problems, choose...
- flash plugin
- dvd-playback
- madwifi
- webcam drivers
- java
- touchpad
- lightscribe
and any others you want and hit OK, after the lengthly install and a reboot you should have wifi working and drivers for your touchpad, webcam, java, etc.
For this I really have to thank DangerMouse and his work at http://dnmouse.webs.com/, really well done!
Touchpad
Now lets fix that over-reactive touchpad, click System / Preferences / Hardware / Touchpad. Select [Tapping] tab and untick tapping, bingo, that's done.
DVD Playback Slow
Uh-oh, you're video might be slow when playing DVD's (which the DangerMouse script just enabled!). Select System / Desktop Effects, and disable Desktop Effects, ok it's not the best of fixes but should sort it out.
Otherwise try re-installing your ffmpeg drivers and other builds, in Terminal...
sudo yum remove ffmpeg
sudo yum install ffmpeg mjpegtools libquicktime
The others are just incase.
System Beep
Really easy to get rid of, System / Preferences / Hardware / Sound. Select the [System Beep] tab and untick [Enable System Beep].
Rails ?
Real easy,
sudo yum install ruby ruby-devel rubygem-rails rubygem-mongrel lighttpd lighttpd-fastcgi
Then,
sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rails
sudo gem install rake
Interrogate Hardware
To see what USB devices you have on your system...
su root
lsusb -v | less
Good for finding what model of webcam you've got.
Tweaks
You might agree, but I didn't much like the big lettering in the default view, so i changed the font size down to 8 (system / preferences / appearance / look & feel / fonts).
Knocking the font sizes down a bit made it look a bit more professional, along with inverting the colours to green-on-black is much easier on the eyes.
The default editor in Fedora 8 is gEdit (listed as Text Editor), in this it has many plugins to make your life eaiser (edit / preferences / plugins), with some tweaking you can quickly turn it from a basic tool to something very powerful.
Afterwards
Get yourself a coffee or cocoa, you now have a very fast, very powerful 64-bit O/S with firewall and wifi to keep you going for many years to come.
Enjoy, you're sitting on the future ;-)
