December 2, 2006 - Reading time: 8 minutes

Fedora Core 1 was the first Linux distribution I used extensively. As a result, Fedora has always felt like “home” to me, and I’ve tried every version since. Recently I installed Fedora Core 6 (Zod) from scratch, and decided to put together this little document on addressing some issues that I found.

Since this is not really a review, but rather a quick “how-to” based on what I did, I make a few assumptions:

• You have (or will) install the x86 version of Fedora. Of course, there are similarities for the other architectures, such as x86-64, but some of the issues that I address are specific to x86.

• You have an Nvidia graphics card. I do not use any ATI cards, so I can not help here. If you want to install the ATI driver, I suggest you start by looking here.

• In my case, I’m using GNOME. If you prefer KDE then understand that some of the menu structures will be different.

• You are smart enough to know how to install and use Linux. While none of this should break your system, I am not responsible for any damage that may result. That’s my standard disclaimer. Read more

August 13, 2006 - Reading time: 8 minutes

Late 2019 Update: The screenshot images are currently broken, and I can't seem to find the originals. Sorry.

05.22.04

Greetings everyone. Believe it or not, I’m going to attempt my first Linux distro review. First, allow me to say that I have only been using Linux for about 5 months, so I’m a comparative newbie to many in the Linux world. I don’t make presumptions to know everything. With that in mind, this review is not geared toward the Linux veteran, but for people who have more curiosity than experience with Linux.

First some hardware specs:
Motherboard: MSI “865 Neo2-PFS (Platinum Edition)” i865PE Chipset
Processor: Intel Celeron 2.0GHz (Yes I know it’s lame. I care not.)
Video Card: ATI Radeon 9500 Pro
RAM: 1024MB Kingston PC2700
Sound Card: Soundblaster Live 5.1
Hard Disks: 120GB WD “Special Edition” IDE; 40GB Seagate IDE
Optical Drives: Lite-on DVD-ROM; Sony CD-RW
Mouse: Logitech MX300 (USB) Read more

August 12, 2006 - Reading time: 5 minutes

I’m a recent Arch Linux convert. I appreciate the quickness of install and the ease of Pacman. Yet I had a few slightly annoying issues configuring my system that I would like to address here. For the sake of reference I’m currently using kernel 2.6.10 and udev.

1) Blacklist ‘pciehp.’

Upon first boot, I noticed that there was an error loading the ‘pciehp’ module. This did not cause a problem for me as I have no need for PCI hotplugging, but it added a few seconds to the boot time. There are two ways to solve this problem. One way is to recompile the kernel and leave out the ‘pciehp’ module. The faster way is to add ‘pciehp’ to a list of blacklisted modules. Edit “/etc/hotplug/blacklist” and add the offending module name to the list. Read more