I am moving to blogger for future posts. I think that it has less restrictions than wordpress does so you can follow me on http://sliceoflinux.blogger.com but I am purchasing a domain soon so I will keep you posted

Cheers paddy.

I am the kinda person that wants to help out and after my mini rant which has had no comments on. i have decided to jump all in and download karmic to my main machine.

You might be thinking why i am doing this and am i not aware of the potential risks involved and admittedly i am aware of the risks so i have offset them as much as humanly possible, i will detail my plan for upgrading properly.

1: Backup everything – although this goes without saying even when using a stable version accidents do happen.

2: Expect the unexpected – This is a alpha version so if you go on and expect everything to be peachy then you are going to be mistaken you will have bugs some minor one and some big ones, i would of course urge you to report everything using launchpad so they can be looked at and move to get fixed.

3: Be patient – hopefully it will all work but i am expecting a few problems i hope that i am prepared enough for them and that i don’t get too many.

I will of course write a mini review of karmic such as install or in my case update. any problems i have and ways around them if i can.

so adios jaunty and say hello to the koala!

paddy

Everyday new people join our community and people will leave it is only natural for people who join Ubuntu and Linux in general are life long windows users and just can’t make the leap to Ubuntu, people often forget that Ubuntu is not Windows it has certain similarities but it is not the same and I don’t want it to be, but I digress.

Community is our strong hand those millions of people I was talking about have made the system what it is but what the really good thing is they are constantly making it better than it was before, so here is the question do you contribute to the community? I feel that the more people we get to contribute even doing the smallest thing helps us get even better, some give monetary aid, some comb through the forums and help those taking baby steps in to the world of Ubuntu and some make the programs that we are using on a daily basis. The community can only exist if we are that a community we need all hands to make even the smallest contribution. I am a member of the bug squad and it gives a feeling of satisfaction knowing that I am helping Ubuntu and learning more about the operating system.

There are thousands of projects looking for help from spell-checking the document to debugging or beta testing a program there is a part for everyone to play and in a team that is has something for you. Join one and help out you will feel a sense of satisfaction that you will make you wonder why you never did this before.

Consider this – Linux and ubuntu is what it is because of every one of its contributors. We have built a system to challenge the might of windows, what if every single member of the community contributed? Imagine what we could achieve??

Linux has the advantage that it is really easy to change the flavour of linux it is easy to download and install. so i have decided to sow my oats as it were but installing fedora on my netbook here is the results.

I have currently on my net-book (the Samsung NC10) Ubuntu 9.04 and find it an excellent system but I just want to try things and see how Ubuntu would stand up to the likes of Fedora and Opensuse the 2 main ones that I tested (albeit briefly)

Fedora is now running at version 11 (at the time of publish) I had the disk from a version of Linux format.

The Installation.

The basic installation is surprisingly similar it will ask you for your location and your choice of  partition type etc., where it does differ is after the basic installation I found that from the disc it install a lot in fact over 1000 packages are installed and whilst I understand the reason for this is to make it more user friendly and so that you don’t have to install any programs as they are all there but I found that the 20+min wait was too long for my liking,

First Impressions.

but I waited and it powered up admittedly a bit slower than I was hoping for but I was keen to see what it was like and once the blue desktop of Fedora loaded I was happy to fiddle away but apparently I had bad sectors in my HD that had to be repaired fair enough I went through that and tried to connect to the internet and naturally went to select my wifi network and this is the disappointment factor no connection fearing a wireless memory leak which my cards can be plagued with every now and then so I went down for dinner and left it off for 30mins, powering up again was quicker but not as fast as Jaunty I know that people will say that they are based off different systems one RPM and one Debian based there was still too much of a slow down, once powered up I faced the no internet problem again which I was disappointed in and the restricted drivers didn’t help much either now wireless is a bone of contention with me I expect that my adapter which is a popular brand of wireless its a Atheros Communications Inc. I expected the latest version of Fedora to work out of the box which I was disappointed with. but I decided to take a look around and I must say apart from the wireless issue and the warning about my hard-drives self destruct warnings, the Fedora sound manager was a lot easier to use it had 2 options my usb headset or internal audio now I am sorry but the audio control functions on Ubuntutu leave much to be desired and I feel that the Fedora interface to much more user friendly. I am running a duel monitor set-up at the moment and as you might appreciate a 10in screen isn’t ideal for a main screen, and Fedora did require some tweaks on the monitor but nothing major.

Fedora Conclusions.

I quite liked Fedora but the lack of native wireless support hampered the process of using it for everyday use, the option of installing all the major programs in one go is a benefit to those who might be unaccustomed to Linux but the installation time just bugged me I should be able to install what ever programs I want but I can see the other side too. there are some things that I really liked for example the bluetooth headset just stubbornly wont work in Ubuntu but it worked straight in Fedora and I loved the layout of sound manager which as it is gnome I am sure I can find the version I will post it here if I can find it.

Fedora Vs Ubuntu – Which one wins?

In this post it might appear that i am biased and in part thats right i like Ubuntu it works for me but it i can see parts in which i feel ubuntu has missed, but it is the small things that could be used to improve it that make me choose ubuntu over Fedora the choice of an operating system is a personal one, your own experiences will be different that mine differences in hardware being the main issues. the winner of Fedora and Ubuntu in my view is neither they both offer people different things

I am doing this blog for a few reasons.

In all my time on the internet i really haven’t had a web presence which i do now.

I use linux and i have a desire to help other people so i will be writing articles on problems that i have had how i fixed them or worked around them,

Also the latest distro and app reviews.

And also i will be my Linux+ course so i will put down a bit of what i learn each week.

So everyone speak to you all soon