100% Fedora 7 installations

Note: This post was originally written several weeks ago, and I’ve just been lazy in finishing it. I’ve been

Alhamdulillaah, with my move to Fedora 7 on my workstation in my workplace, I am now running Fedora 7 on 100% of my machines (excluding my Linksys router and iRiver, which are running OpenWRT & Rockbox, respectively). This means my main PC, my laptop, my secondary PC, and my work computer are all running the same OS. In fact, all but my laptop are running the x86_64 version, as well, so even the platforms are the same (though my PCs are AMD Athlon 64s and my work computer is an Intel Pentium D).

I had been using Fedora Core 6 on my workstation for quite some time – the move was an easy-enough decision to make. However, when I decided to install some brand of GNU/Linux, I made the conscious choice to preserve my Windows XP installation and just shrink the NTFS partition to make room for the Fedora Core installation (thank you, System Rescue CD!). So, a good number of GB were consumed by this infrequently-booted partition that was occupying prime real estate on my measly 80GB hard drive.

When I decided to install Fedora 7 at work, I also decided that I no longer needed my WinXP installation at all. So, after backing up my profiles from both the Fedora Core 6 system as well as the WinXP installation, I hosed the entire disk, partitions and all, and installed a fresh, disk-spanning installation of Fedora 7.

Another important decision I made, which I hope will not come back to harm me later, was to manually configure the disk partitions without using the default LVM (Logical Volume Manager). Therefore, I have three simple partitions – one for booting, one for swapping, and one big slice for the Fedora 7 installation. In all my years of working with Fedora (starting with Fedora Core 5, which I don’t remember shipping with LVM enabled…?), I never experienced the need or even benefited from the usage of LVM, and since it makes working with the raw partitions much more difficult (say, with Partition image or other software), I decided to just go with one huge ext3 partition with nothing hindering it. LVM really did cause me a lot of problems as I tried to debug various disk- and partition-based issues, especially with all the hassle I had to go through whenever I wanted to work with two partitions on separate disks, both of which were part of VolGroup00…blegh. I spent an entire night trying to debug that one…

But I digress. As always, the newest edition of Fedora brings some much needed software upgrades, not the least of which are Firefox 2.0 and Thunderbird 2.0. Additionally, PHP has been upgraded to version 5.2, which had some crucial updates that I needed on my work workstation (e.g., the new memory-related features).

Interestingly, due to the delay of my posting this post, the Test 1 release of Fedora 8 has already been let loose. I guess I’ll be seeing Anaconda soon…I guess I’ll be posting about that soon, in shaa Allaah!

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