Thursday 26 November 2009

Slacking off? Not here

I've been a little busy lately.
I've been looking at replacing Ubuntu Karmic on my ailing laptop.
I've been looking at Slax, Slackware and Fedora.

And I'm looking, to the left of this very screen I'm typing this on, at Fedora 12 installing on my laptop.

Now, considering my laptop has no CD/DVD/Floppy drive, has no working USB, and Karmic taking up all of the Hard drive except for the Swap, this is no mean feat.

The Swap space was taken from Karmic permanently, and changed to an ext3 partition. It was first fed the contents of a custom Slax LiveCD, and (Eventually, with help) booted from.
Slax is not for me.
So I decided to look at the base of Slax, Slackware.
Oh god.
How many different versions? Debian first confused me, until I understood about architectures, but Slackware takes it to another level.

So I gave up, and went looking for Fedora.
Now, my (ex-)Swap partition isn't spacey. It's only just a shade above that required for a LiveCD alone.
So I followed the instructions for a media-less install, and told it where to go to retrieve a file called 'install.img'
And now, thanks to the wonders of a single ethernet cable, my router, and the internet, I have Anaconda, the Fedora installer, sat looking at me as I customize the repositories, and the starting packages - something that Ubuntu doesn't do, and by gods, it needs to do.

Fedora, congratulations. Once you've finished being installed on my laptop, you have a convert in me.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to use yum, RPM packages, and see if I can get good old Synaptic back...

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