Code is Love

So, I finally decided it was time to upgrade to a modern Linux distro — and I was pushed by the fact that some experimentation with dmraid from way back had left my system in a sorry state. A coworker was already running Fedora Core 6 on his laptop and while I don’t always love Fedora for it’s lack of longevity per release, I am a bit addicted to the bleeding edge.

In the last week I have installed FC6 Twice. Once on a homebrew desktop:

Asus K8N-E
AMD Athlon 64 3400
1 GB RAM
2 200 GB Maxtor SATA 133 Drives in dmraid mirror config through motherboard based controller
OEM Graphics card w/ nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200]
Onboard Gb NIC
etc.
etc.

and a laptop:
Dell Lattitude d620
Intel Core 2 Duo T7200
nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 110M / GeForce Go 7300
Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card
1 GB RAM
80 GB 5400 RPM SATA drive

The first install had a number of small hiccups — some related to hardware installed that was, well, kinda broken, and some minor anaconda explosions. None of these were that big a deal, but one lesson learned would be don’t configure an IP on your system if you are them going to add extra repositories to install from (this part has another network config screen, and it clearly didn’t like that I had already chosen to give myself a fixed IP). Run with dhcp until after the install, then set your static IP.

The second install went great — until I ran into a problem luckily already witnessed in my office — a stupid Linksys device that couldn’t handle the TCP window scaling properly. Thank you: “echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling”. The symptom was HORRENDOUSLY slow network performance before making this tweak (think downloading a few rpm updates all day).

I knew that eye-candy in gnome was finally working because I had stumbled across this news a while back, so I had to try it. Fedora comes pre-installed with the compiz package which, so long as your graphics card supports it, does some nice GUI effects, like rubbery windows, each desktop on it’s own side of a rotating cube, etc.. Really cool stuff, and to my amazement it mostly worked right out of the box. Linux is finally catching up in the UI world to the likes of Apple, so for the people who don’t generally live at the command line, this is a big deal. Nice work, everybody who had a hand in design/coding/testing/documenting/etc./etc.. This rocks. Amazing stuff.

A couple bumps in the compiz road that were/are being faced: the closed-source NVidia driver is necessary for those of us with nVidia chipsets as far as I can tell. None of this really works on the Xen kernel, currently. Also, running said nvidia driver causes IRQ conflicts with the Broadcom/Dell WiFi, and the wi-fi is currently unusable with either the ndiswrapper or the reverse engineered bcm43xx driver. Note: ndiswrapper works for some indeterminate amount of time before either dropping the wireless or freezing the whole system requiring hard reboot.

Another thing I discovered in all of this is Beryl. Whoa Cool. It basically takes the GUI effects in your desktop to the next level.

So, if you haven’t seen what desktop Linux has been up to in a while, go out of your way to see all the new stuff in Compiz and/or Beryl on a system near you - you won’t be disappointed.