To install FC7 or not to install

I just noticed that Fedora is no longer supporting FC5. lately I’ve noticed that support of things is waning: most notably Firefox 2. So now I’m faced with the perilous prospect of beginning another install on an older laptop. I would need to reinstall commercial applications, make a list of things I’ve installed and do the requisite backups. It would be a major time sink.

Oddly enough, last Monday I made significant progress getting started with plone 3. To install FC 7, I would need to start from scratch. Also, there are potential gotchas (I seem to recall my Thinkpad doesn’t allow install from DVD). Also, the wifi chip on my Thinkpad did horrible things when I first installed FC5. It took me a good 2 weeks of persistent troubleshooting Wifi to get it to work. I am not really in a position to waste time on unproductive activities.

So what do I do? At minimum, this is going to take a day and a half, possibly more if something fouls up. Someone suggested running the LiveCD to test hardware, a sensible idea if I ever heard of one. Also, apparently now you can boot the Live CD and then use an iso image from a hard drive. So Fedora people are making it easy. (Here’s an article about Fedora 7).

Still, it looks like Ubuntu has made the problem of forbidden downloads (i.e., java, mp3, adobe, etc) much more palatable to ordinary users. (Fedora doesn’t seem to have changed on its policies).


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2 responses to “To install FC7 or not to install”

  1. Scott Frase Avatar

    Hey Robert,
    FC7 also has some nagging firewire issues that I’ve been reading about on the Cinelerra boards (http://e.kevb.net/lurker/thread/20070720.031335.68aaa38c.en.html)

    Just in case you were thinking about doing video.

    scott

  2. Robert Nagle Avatar

    Wow, I don’t think I’ll be using my thinkpad for video stuff. On the other hand, I will be looking for a laptop soon. (Next 3-6 months?).

    Come to think of it, I was looking around today for firewire hard drives. Firewire problems on fc7 would be an issue probably. (USB just works).

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