Same distro, new bugs…

…or maybe that should be ‘new distro, same bugs’?

Swapped Fedora Core 1 for 2 this weekend.

Same install procedure – although my old routine of copying the CDs to my server and installing over HTTP doesn’t work because there aren’t any boot disk images any more – so no great surprises. My standard install recipe consists of:

1. Install
2. Boot
3. Disable Kudzu so my 3C905TX works
4. Reboot into run level 3
5. Edit /etc/yum.conf for my local repositories
6. yum -y update
7. Reboot into run level 3 again
8. Install the latest NVIDIA drivers
9. Reboot into run level 5
10. Install apt from freshrpms.net
11. apt-get install synaptic
12. Edit /etc/fstab for my various NFS mounts
13. Install the various mp3 codecs and plugins for XMMS and GStreamer
14. Install Firefox + extensions

With that all done, there’s nothing exceptionally new and shiny about FC2 (apart from the fact that it’s new and shiny). It’s a bit faster (though not that noticeable on my classic Athlon 800MHz), and it’s got newer packages. Haven’t really got a strong opinion either way at the moment on the spatial nautilus thing – it works, and I’m happy with it.

As mentioned above, support for floppy boot disks has now gone, so my old HTTP installation routine no longer works. Instead they provide a bootable CD-ROM image and some PXE instructions that I’ve not looked into yet. I think PXE + rom-o-matic will be my new solution. I may have to invest some effort in Kickstart as well.

Of course there’s now another step added to my standard install: Mono, on which note:

My first Mono application – Hello World! – original, huh? This isn’t your typical hello world demo app though – it’s running against a PHP / NuSOAP based web service that I wrote and consumed.

I’ll save my commentary on Mono for another post – I’ll let you have one comment for now though: bags of potential…