Installing Fedora 7

With the purchase of my MacBook Pro, now called arne, I’ve decided to move all of my file serving from the NSLU2 to the Dell. Rather than run Windows on this box, I decided to install Fedora. OS X just wasn’t that stable on the old thing, unsurprisingly, since it was a severely hacked version. So, I bought a new hard drive (so I can keep the OS X and Windows installations on their original disks in case I need to go back), and installed it. I made my first mistake in installing it as the Secondary Slave, since that was the only available channel. I installed Fedora, and it wouldn’t boot. So I tried again. By this time, I had figured out that it was something to do with the GRUB bootloader not being installed, so I moved the hard drives around, but still no joy. I spent ages trying to get it to work, including using a (very) old Debian CD I had lying around (which, by the way, I’d never actually installed on anything!). No joy here, as this only recognised the first 8 GB of the 320GB hard disk! Finally, I almost gave up. I started to install Windows, just to get the disk reformatted (I’d accidentally hit the power at some stage, and nothing else was recognising it). So, I let it get through the formatting stage, and then reinstalled Fedora. And finally, it worked. Now, I just need to get everything on there I need: Samba, AppleShare Filing Protocol, mDNS (Bonjour), and Print/Scan/Fax sharing. It already comes with some cool stuff, like virtualisation (I’m going to compare this to Parallels and VMWare, and choose the best), and a torent server/client. Oh, and the name of that machine is now poul. I’ve gone down the road of four letter machine names, which are also the first names of designers. Finally, this is my first offline blog post, on the train on the way home. It’s not like I could do any real work on the short trip…