Rui CarmoI was probably one of the few hundreds of people who didn't stay at home and watch the Spanish royals' wedding (as much as I respect them, Portugal is an entirely different country, despite the close ties we have).
Besides a boatload of shopping, I took the time to burn the Fedora Core 2 ISOs and reinstall my old Toshiba Tecra 8100 from scratch. I never do upgrade installs on my laptops - anything on them is supposedly backed up someplace, and I like the "clean slate" approach.
Everybody else seems to be doing reviews (1, 2), so here's mine. It's short and to the point, mostly because I can't spare the time.
The fist hint of trouble was that the installer persisted on creating two network devices (eth0 and wifi0) for my wireless card (I never use laptop docks, either, so it hasn't detected the dock's network card). The second was that both audio and Wi-Fi failed to work after the install - courtesy of the 2.6 series kernel.
Since this is a breach of my "it should just work" principle, I'm going back to Fedora Core 1 - any distribution that doesn't get this sort of thing right is wasting my time.
Not that this is unexpected, mind you. The 2.6 kernel is a very different beast, and Core 2 is bound to be optimized for newer hardware - but the 8100's PCMCIA controller was very well supported in 2.4, and there's no real excuse for the buggy sound support.
So, like the 2.2 traditionalists did when the 2.4 kernel was all the rage , I'm sitting this one out until someone else has legacy hardware support licked.
And before Core 1 settles back in, I'll probably see what FreeBSD can do these days - after all, and despite years of Linux habits, it still feels like home.
News of Interest:
- Palm has invalidated the Xerox patent that made them completely botch Graffiti. Which is good - I hope they reinstate Graffiti, because their current recognizer sucks asphalt-coated rocks - one of the reasons I got a Pocket PC was that the "block recognizer" is absolutely identical to the original Graffiti (I guess Xerox didn't have enough cash to sue Microsoft).
- VLC got bumped to 0.7.2, with improved OpenGL support on the Mac.
- Windows 98 SE emulated on the Pocket PC. - Glad someone else is wasting their time this weekend... (what's the point of running Bochs on a Pocket PC anyway?)