Monthly Archives: February 2009

Fedora 10 and my story with Linux

I finally managed to install Fedora 10 on my idle and wasted Pentium 4 desktop. The desktop has really good spec, but was run down with Window XP Home edition and adding to this I installed Kaspersky anti-virus on it (which is very slow). Since I work on my laptop most of the time (as I tend to sit on the sofa and watch TV at the same time) the desktop is hardly being switched on. But, whenever I switch it on I feel so frustrated that I still keep windows on that good machine. Adding to this I always wanted some useful educational programs for my two daughter aged 3 and 4.5. The deal breaker for me was a new experiment that I’m hoping to do, which involve application servers clustering with a front-end Web server. Given the fact that my P3 Fedora Core 5 server is already been utilized as a firewall/router, web server, file server and svn server I didn’t want to carryout my experiment on it,  so my only option was to make a move and put Fedora on my Pentium 4 desktop.  

I have always been a fan of Red Hat Linux, starting from RHL8,9 and I was there when Red Hat decided to split it into the Fedora project. And I was there when Fedora Core 1 came out, I tried it and tried Fedora Core 3, I adopted Fedora 5 as my server’s OS and I went to tightly secure Fedora 8 as part of my uni security course. I always loved Red Hat and loved their Linux. In-fact I have never tried any other linux distro other than RHL and Fedora (Although I did install IPCop, a linux firewall distro).I downloaded the Fedora 10 DVD image and as usual for some reason it was corrupt and ended up wasting a couple of hours on the installation, which I then abandoned and decided to download the netintall image which worked perfectly, but I had to leave it overnight to download the required packages.

  

 

Amazingly there was a large number of Educational programs and kids games, plus hundreds of other packages of useful stuff. My daughter were so happy to play the games, so I left them on the console and I used vnc from my laptop to have my own X desktop and finish off the installation of other stuff. It just makes realize how powerful Linux is. Anyway as usual with any of my Linux installations I had to add the static routes to manage my sub-nets, I ran the commands then put them in /etc/rc.d/rc.local

route add -net 192.168.3.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 192.168.1.5 dev eth0

route add -net 192.168.3.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 gw 192.168.1.5 dev eth1

 

All in all, performance was good, the installation was easy, all the hardware was recognised automatically, the only problem I encountered was my fault due to my corrupt image, but other than that it an easy install. Definitely Linux has come a long way and specially Fedora and at version 10 it looks awesome.