LeeNukes

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/06/26/giant.penguin/

So it turns out that some time ago (within the previous 65 Million years) there were giant Penguins that roamed the earth.

So, will Tux be able to follow his ancestors? I certainly hope so.

Well its gotten to be about the point where my ageing PC is starting to look quite long in the tooth. And to be honest, its lasted a long time. Several years in fact and it wasn’t cutting edge when I built it.

My PC spec at the moment is this, which was built back in about 2003/2004 so its lasted ok:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2400+
RAM: 2x 512 sticks
HD: 200GB

I don’t know the specifics of what it is, memory speed etc. I think its DDR at about 2100.

Now, the new PC I am going to be building is roughly this:

I wasn’t entirely sure on the motherboard support for Linux, so I sent XFX an email:

Hello,

I am interested in your MB-N650-IUL9 motherboard but I cannot find any mention of its suitability under Linux.

I understand and respect that your products are geared towards Microsofts operating system but I am a potential customer and would appreciate any help you can in assisting me with the suitability of your product to run my chosen Operating system.

Thank you

I wasn’t expecting much, maybe them telling me they don’t support Linux, why not try Windows instead, but I got this, which is better then nothing:

Hi there, currently XFX do not supply any Linux drivers, but as our board is is designed around Nvidias reference, the Nvidia drivers should work ok, the link is http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.21.html you can download the latest open source drivers from there, kind regards, XFX

Thanks XFX, you’ve just got yourself a customer :D

Checking over the latest articles etc I came across this one:

http://www.howtoforge.com/the_perfect_desktop_fedora7

“I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!”

On the 31st of May the Fedora Project released Fedora 7 aka Moonshine.

This is a release I have been waiting for for a while now. I have been running Fedora Core the old name for Fedora on my desktop for about 2-3 years now and I’ve been happy with its progress.

I know a lot of people run Ubuntu, and I’ve not got a problem with that. I run Ubuntu on my laptop but I like a nice rpm based distro on my desktop. I don’t know how to explain why but that is my choice.

I went for the live CD download “Fedora-7-Live-i686.iso” as opposed to the DVD, mainly because my DVD drive seems to have given up the ghost since I tried to get it to install FarCry. I’m not going to point any fingers but I think it broke it.

As with Fedora Core 6 the free Ati drivers included provide me with some 3D effects for my desktop. Wobbly Windows, 3D Cube etc. I can also run games such as ppracer quite well.

Its only when delving into more powerful games like PlaneShift do I run into issues with the free drivers, things not rendering correctly for example.

I checked out the support for the latest ATI-AMD offical driver and it didn’t look good, so they didn’t get installed. I’m not sure who is to blame but to be honest the lack of support from ATI and AMD on releasing worked ATI drivers for Linux has always been appalling.

If they don’t get it right by 8.38 then they’ve lost another customer to NVidia.

The most noticeable improvements I’ve seen so far is the speed at which yum now seems to work. Yum is the equivalent of apt in Ubuntu and Debian. In Fedora Core 6 I might run the command say “yum search openoffice” and it would take about 2 minutes to come back to me.

I run the same command now and its back with results in seconds. Now either they’ve made improvements or its just because its SO new the repositories don’t have much to report back.

I have found one little quirk, its happened to me twice now so maybe if someone else is running Fedora 7 they can confirm this but when you play the game Chess that is pre-installed, once you close the application, it logs you out and closes down your applications.

Added: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=443073

One other thing that I noted is that the Home Directory gets some sub directories. I would say these are mainly for new users but it does make keeping your Home folder tidy.

Well, so far so good with this latest release. Its a doddle to install, took very little time and I was also able to use Pidgin (aka Gaim) and browse the web from the live CD whilst doing the install.

If I find anything more out I’ll put it here.