kvikende's blog
Random stuff from a Norwegian student
My experiences with Debian Sqeeze and Fedora 14
I have been using Fedora for some time on both my laptop and my desktop, and when my dad’s Windows install somehow broke I installed Fedora on his laptop as well. Only thing he complained about was Firefox because their bookmark handling is somewhat different than IE.
Desktop computer
My desktop computer ran Fedora 13 acceptably fine. I then decided to upgrade to 14 because I love new shiny stuff and stuff began to break. On every boot ABRT (Fedora’s crash detector) reported a kernel oops. When editing LaTeX documents I could get Gedit to crash by fiddling a bit in the settings. I use MSN, and Empathy related plugins would crash and the maintainers of those plugins would not respond on the bug reports.
I then decided to go for Debian Squeeze. It installed fine, but the Installer looked and felt archaic. That it only supported open or WEP encrypted wireless accesspoints shocked me. I got experimental repo installed because using a Firefox 3.5 isn’t acceptable for me. I like my stuff new and shiny regardless if it compiles on the Alpha platform. Only issue I have is that after a long while the keyring begin bugging me about being locked and I have to provide a password.
I’m pleased.
Laptop
I used Fedora but I found it slowing down over time. I had also Windows set up as a dual boot. Around Christmas I installed Debian on it. The installation was awful. I had no burnable CDs or DVDs available so I thought I could just do as I always do: Unetbootin. Sadly it failed every time. I then got very frustrated, but I began reading the manual (manuals are for wimps) where it gave clear instructions on how to do it. When I followed those everything went fine.
Being a computer I would bring to Univ I wanted to make it look less crap when booting by installing Plymouth. I could not get it to work. I gave up in the end and installed Fedora 14 on it again. This time a clean install and not upgrade from Fedora 13. It now works fine and I love it.
I also removed the Windows install and made sure no proprietary software was installed on it. Only proprietary stuff on it is some firmware but I need it for my wireless to work.
Dad’s laptop
Because dad is moving and bringing his laptop with him (which means I cannot help him physically anymore) I decided to install Debian Squeeze on his machine. I don’t think he misses much except the pretty boot on Fedora. Hopefully he won’t have any problems as I’m kind of unable to help him now. I trust you Debian guys to not break his laptop! 🙂
Comment or something if this was an interesting read in any way.