My first ever WordPress blog entry… goodbye cherry!
Starting off with a few notes and observations of Fedora Core 7 seems appropriate as it (used to, I moved to WordPress.com) powers this site and some supporting elements for my home network.
Someone looking in might think I’m crazy, but my job and interests keep my stables quite full of computers. My wife and I each have our desktops, as well as one older HP NetServer 2U server as a firewall/ LAMP install and finally a PIII-800 with about 200GB of disk space that serves as my file dumpster and SAMBA NT domain controller.
Eco-concerns being what they are, it makes sense on a few fronts to combine the best of left over parts and build something to replace the HP and the PIII clone.
The target machine is my old desktop: (only the hydro company would reboot it)
- an AMD XP Athlon 3200+,
- 512 MB RAM and
- 140GB of IDE disks on an Adaptec 2400 RAID controller
- 8x DVD Burner
- Nvidia GeForce2 TI 64MB AGP
- Intel E1000 NIC
The obvious challenge in this configuration is an install kernel thats aware of the Adaptec 2400. Trustix 3.1.x supports this and if it was a lesser machine I’d certainly have gone with it; however I found it wasteful to dedicate such hardware to the menial task of packet forwarding. This naturally lead me down the path of an X based distro and my previous experiences with Fedora Core 6 being quite good I opted to try FC version 7.
The ISO was downloaded from ibiblio in record time and committed it to DVD.
The installation was seamless. It detected all the hardware! A Web Server configuration with a GNOME desktop was selected and the install was invoked. The format took a little while, but the disk array had not fully synced; not that it hurts anything, it just slows things down. The installer went about its business and rebooted.
The GUI came up in an optimal 1600×1200 resolution and I logged in as root.
Strangely, eth0 (e1000) would not get an IP address from my current DHCP server. After reviewing the message log, I discovered that the onboard 1394 controller was being aliased as eth0 during boot up. You’d have to own a 1394 device in order to need a 1394 adapter, so I took the coward’s way out and disabled it in the BIOS. Surprise, surprise, eth0 came right up and got an IP.
Once the YUM update manager did its thing and if memory serves me correctly, there were a 104 updates. The server was left to update the software and the installation continued the next day.
Next article we’ll look at FC7’s OpenPBX package and why it should be avoided.
All in all, this is a good distribution. It hasn’t given me much grief and I’ve been able to accomplish everything I needed it to do. Nothing new really seems to jump up at you, and everything is where you’d expect it to be found.
I just loaded Fedora 7 and also had no install problems. I works very well and saw all three of the other PC’s on my network (2 other PC’s running XP Home).
Good luck with your machine.
Comment by Phil — August 4, 2007 @ 10:54 pm