Fedora Live USB?

I wonder if I can put the contents of the Fedora 7 LiveCD onto a USB drive and boot off it.
Now wouldn’t that be cool. I’ll have to search the interwebs to see if anybody has done it yet.
Update: I guess it can be done.
Now I’m going to have to get a USB thumb drive to try this out on.
Update 2: Got the LiveCD onto my 2 GB thumb drive. Tested it out and it’s very cool Way faster than using a CD. The best part? I can still use the remaining 1.2 GB that’s not taken up by the LiveCD stuff for porting things around. So cool.

Fedora 7

Installed Fedora 7 on the two computers sitting on my desk at work today.
I haven’t had a chance to play with it much yet, but I like the new installation process using the Fedora Live CD. Only one CD image to download and burn as opposed to the 5 for FC 4-6. Of course that means you can’t install all the packages you want initially, but they’re easy enough to afterwards. The install goes much faster though. There’s always the DVD image you can use too, which I’m sure is much more complete.
Unfortunately, I won’t get to play with it a whole lot until after next week.

On Fedora’s cutting edge

I’m slowly getting my Fedora box resurrected. After spending a couple of weeks and fitful starts getting FC3 Test 2 loaded back on, the box is finally running. Still working on getting it back to useful shape. The last couple of days have been spent downloading and installing the new packages associated with FC3 Test 3.
Problems like the X.org server refusing to start with build 1.603 of the 2.6.8 kernel, but working fine with builds 1.607 and 1.541. Gnome not being able to open the X display. Messy things like that.
Next task will be to get all the server apps reconfigured to the way I like them and installing stuff like needed Perl modules and stuff. And then there’s the task of restoring databases and web pages I was working on before.
Much work ahead that will have to be squeezed in during my spare time between my real work.

Fedora Core 3 Test 1

I see that FC3 Test 1 ISO images are out and available for grabbing. It’s probably better to use one of the mirrors to grab it.
I wonder how you go about upgrading an existing Fedora installation…
Oh wait, I just need to look here for updates.

Taking Fedora Core 2 for a spin

The new Windows XP desktop system the computer guys rolled out at work just didn’t fit the way I work, so I decided to install Fedora on the box instead (2.4 GHz Dell Optiplex GX270). Too many constraints on their desktop model, including a 30 MB limit on your login profile which apparently includes all your data files as well. Heck, my stored mail alone takes up more than 30 MB.

Like Fedora Core 1, Core 2 was a pretty easy install, and the 2.6 linux kernel seems much peppier than 2.4. Compiling GCC 3.4 took hardly any time at all. The only glitch I ran into was the BIOS version on the computer caused the XOrg server problems with detecting the proper graphics card settings, leaving the display stuck at 640×480.

Argh. Spend a couple of hours trying to troubleshoot the X server and figure out how to make it do different screen resolutions. Google search yielded several promising posts and web pages that said the GX270 BIOS version A03 was the source of the problem and and upgrade to the latest version would fix it.

Download the latest BIOS version (A04) from Dell and copied it to a floppy. Uh oh, the BIOS flashing program only runs under Windows.

No problem, I’ll just make a DOS boot disk, boot off the floppy and run the flasher from the disk.

Well, then I discover that you can’t make bootable floppies with Win2K (the only other Windows machine I had around).

Crap. Stoopid Windows. I guess MS has decided nobody needs to boot off floppy disk anymore.

Stumble around trying to come up with a way to get around this. Finally I remember that I have a Win2K CD! But that means I have to wipe out the FC2 that I just installed. Well, nothing else to do so I break down, install Win2K just to flash the BIOS, then reinstall FC2. PITA.

But finally, I have a working, stable (at least until I start hacking at it) installation of Fedora. And so far I like what I see. Working on getting Apache properly configured and migrating stuff over from my old Sparc20. I think I’ll even try using it to replace my Win2K box for a while and see how it goes with OpenOffice.

This is going to be fun…:)