Something posted by Tyler B
By default this distro does not support non-free codecs. After a quick google search I found this quick and easy solution to add audio and video codecs to my Fedora install.
Tyler B tries to install Fedora, get his ATi graphics card to work correctly, patches the kernel, enables Synaptics touchpad tap-click support and finally has everything working!
My laptop has arrived and just in time for the start of the experiment! Now if only Sasha’s would ship…
After reading this article on Slashdot I did some digging and found LessWatts.org a website designed to help you get the most out of your battery. Just thought I’d take a moment to point it out.
For a Windows or Mac user the filesystem is something they will probably never think about in their daily computing adventures. That is mostly because there really isn’t a choice in the matter. As a Windows user the only time I actually have to worry about the filesystem is when I’m formatting a USB drive. For my hard drives the choices are NTFS, NTFS, and.. oh yeah NTFS. My earliest recollection of what a filesystem is happened when my Windows 98 machine had crashed and I had to wait while the machine forced a filesystem check on the next start up. More recently FAT32 has gotten in my way with it’s 4GB file size limitation.
I awoke to an email this morning saying my laptop has shipped! Hopefully this means the end of my troubles and that the laptop will show up on time! I’ll keep you posted.
The experiment is set to begin in less than 10 days and now is the time to settle on all of those little decisions that still need to be made.
If you have been following my posts on here you’ll know that the hardware I am running this experiment on is relatively new. In fact it’s so new it hasn’t even been shipped to me yet!
Without getting into a GNOME vs KDE debate which of these do you think I should get? I’m leaning toward the DVD because as I see it the Live CD is worthless – I’m going to be installing it one way or another. Then again I’m going to have an internet connection during install, is downloading the extra 3.5GB of DVD really worth it when compared to the CD based ones?
The Final Contenders
Well here we are. After a couple of weeks of research I have finally narrowed down my choice to either Fedora 11 or Mandriva 2009.1 to use during the course of this experiment. The two distros are both very mature and feature rich which makes this choice extraordinarily difficult. To help alleviate some of this I have decided to square them off head to head in a series of different areas. So without further ado let’s start this.
Mandriva vs Linux Mint: who will win?
Debian, you are dead to me
Why its just not making the cut: As I am somewhat familiar with Ubuntu and have read about its relation to Debian, I feel as though Debian is just simply not that different.
I am learning quite a bit in my continued research of which Linux distro will be right for me. So far I think I have knocked out a lot of the more… exotic Linux distros and have come up with a bit of a short list with a few pros and cons to go along with them.
I have finally settled on some hardware that I will be using for this experiment.
Picking a flavour of Linux is like picking what you want to eat for dinner; sure some items may taste better than others but in the end you’re still full.