assorted stuff
This was a pretty good week. Definitely one of the more productive weeks I've had at work in quite a while. I did some test installs of a few new Linux distros:
* Fedora Core 5 Test1: I did an x86_64 web based installation. Text mode blew up early with some python/anaconda errors, but X mode worked fine. There's some scary bad kernel problems with the nvidia X driver, but beyond that it looks ok
* Slackware 10.2: I did an x86 install from the CD, but made the mistake of choosing the 'test' 2.6 kernel. There's a bug in their installer where it fails to installs any kernel modules for that 2.6 kernel. Once I sorted that out and installed the kernel-modules package, all was fine
* SuSE-10.1-alpha3: complete & utter disaster. The folks at SuSE still have zero clues about how to make a 'public/community' distro easily accessible to the masses. They have *broken* links on their download page for the 'Internet Installation' ISOs, many of their mirrors are out of date. When I managed to find the internet installation ISO (that Fedora Core makes easily & readily available for their distro), it turns out to be useless, because none of the mirrors have the packages available to perform an internet based installation. I gave up at that point, cause i just didn't feel like wasting CDs on this.
* Ubuntu: I installed from the x86_64 CD. The installation is brain-dead easy. In fact, too easy. There's basically no configurability whatsoever in terms of package selection. I can see why its become very popular for new Linux users, but overall I'm not terribly impressed.
* Mandriva-2006: I installed the x86_64 DVD. It was clean, albeit semi-cheesy installation. They ship with NVIDIA's 1.0-7676 driver as an RPM, and everything seems to work ok in my very limited testing.
This morning we got up early, and took both cars for an oil change. We then walked down to IHOP for breakfast while the cars were being worked upon.
I got back from getting a haircut a short while ago.