Reimage! Reimage!

july 27, 2006

Ok, so SUSE 10.1 was working just fine for me, but I downloaded the DVD image and wanted to see what a DVD install would be like. What a mistake. The DVD image was whacked and I couldn't get it to install.  Worse yet, SUSE doesn't offer any way to test the media -- something that Fedora Core and Ubuntu lets you do during installation. I installed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS and was impressed with the install -- about 20 minutes and the system was up and running.  All my hardware was detected and working.  Another hour and the system was up-to-date.  But, I hated the brown.  Brown, brown, brown.  It is not as brown as the previous Ubuntu release, but still it's not a pleasant theme color.  The Human theme itself is a beautiful theme, but overrun with brown.  And, there are no extras on the CD.  I wanted to have mysql installed, but I'd have to use the add/remove facilities to do that.  That is only a problem for hardcore users though -- as Ubuntu is an excellent distribution for home users.  It installs everything a home user could need and fits all on one CD. So, I figured, why not, lets give Fedora Core 5 one last try (yes, I have a love/hate thing going with FC). I downloaded the FC5 DVD and installed FC5 without my WiFi card in the PC Card slot. When it was installed, I added my WiFi card manually (not too hard) and then updated the system. The udev problem did not show up again. FC5 is working just fine right now. The one good thing about FC5 is that it is using Gnome 2.14, which is a highly optimized version of Gnome. SUSE 10.1 uses Gnome 2.12, which is fine, but a bit slow. I have CentOS 4.3 downloaded and am going to try that in VMware Server soon. Lastly, I have to ask:  Why my 5GB install of FC5 took 30 minutes to install, while a 4GB install of SUSE 10.1 takes over 2.5 hours?


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