Back to Linux

It's been months since I last worked on Linux. My new job, eBanking software architect, had eaten me alive since March 2004. I managed to squeeze few hours last night to install Fedora Core 3 on my HP comapq nx9010 laptop, my work laptop. I had a bad start;thankfully ended well. Details below

I started repartitioning my 30GB hard disk using Partition Magic 8. I remember how frustrated I was last year when I used it on an NTFS disk. I failed to do it due to the infamous error 983 . The most proposed solution of running chkdsk /f failed then. Not this time thank god. I got the error and it put me off. I was about to give up. Anyways, the command worked and the hard disk got repartitioned. I have now 10 GB free. It's time to install Fedora Core 3.

I tested the DVD copy of FC2 few weeks ago and my laptop failed to boot from it. This time I downloaded the CD iso images. The installation progressed very smoothly. It detected all the hardware including my Linksys WiFi PC card. I selected the desktop edition and added few more packages. Then I run the up2date tool which took till morning to install all the required updates. The system is neat and runs with a moderate speed. I won't judge it now. Let me finish installing all my stuff first then we'll see.

Today I checked in the office and it booted up fine. I checked my email using FireFox accessing Outlook Web Access of our Exchange 2003 server. I also hooked my portable 60 GB USB2 hard drive and it got detected. Mounting the NTFS partition, my winxp drive, didn't work. It seems the code required to access NTFS is not in the kernel. I found this http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html and I'll check it out later.

I use dual monitor in the office for wider desktop space. If you do a lot of VS.net web development, you definitely need a lot of real estate on your computer desktop. Fedora has a configuration application to configure Dual Head. I tried it and it didn’t work. I’ll try to spend more time to make this work, if it works :)


I tried editing some conf files and I couldn't find my beloved editor PICO. I used it heavily in my previous job setting up and maintaining our Linux based DNS, Mail, and web servers. I'll share those experiences one day. Anyways I got the PINE RPM and pico is up and running.

I have tons of stuff to experiment on my newly configured Linux Laptop. First of all would be installing and using Eclipse IDE and Mono to do some .Net development on Linux.

I also want to do some work on Virtual Machines. I use VMware on my WinXP heavily. Time to try it on Linux and maybe try some other Open source VMs.

I have an asp.net project to tweak and deliver for beta testing this weekend. That’s a week of VS.Net work and no Linux stuff. My annual vacation starts next week so I’ll have all the time in the world to work on Fedora, it’s 3 weeks actually :(