I can’t believe I’ve been using Linux for 20 years already! I started off with Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow) 20 years ago. It was in this book:

Red Hat Linux and Fedora Unleashed Cover

Boy has the technology come a long way in those 20 years!

One of my earliest desktop screenshots from back then:

Gnome - 20151002

Now one of my more recent desktops:

This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows.  I pop the CD in and boot up.  I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.

Nothing here different from a Linux distro.  Then the Windows logo pops up.

A bit more complicated than it should have been.  That’s really the lesson here.  In fact, it appears not to have worked at all despite about five tries.  The first two times I did it 100% with the GUI and had no idea why things were going wrong.  The third time I did it on the command line so I saw that it was complaining about not having enough space - even though it did.  And the fourth time I used the “trick installer into downloading” trick on this page and it still didn’t work.  It appears not to be downloading the updates.  I’m going to take to the mailing lists to try and figure out what’s going on.  No one was able to help (or willing?) on the IRC so for now I remain with Fedora 11.

My wife said since she isn’t using the Linux computer I built for her, that I could use it.  It has a Intel Core 2 Duo Dual Core chip, so I was pretty excited to try out 64-bit computing to see if there would be any problems.  I installed Fedora 10 since I’m used to that platform.  Installation process was pretty much the same as with 32-bit.  It took 20 minutes to install.  Blender was found in the repositories along with Inkscape - so far so good!

Fedora usually has a wacky little story to go along with each release.  Here’s the one for Fedora 9:

An ancient text prophesised this day would come, detailing the fate of all who are willing to accept what is offered to them:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/index.html

And that day has come: the Computer said “I will convert these unbelievers, and now that I have Sulphur it will be easy.” At that, the heavens opened and burning Sulphur descended upon all the world, taking on many different forms.

1. The bootup screen is pretty, but….

2. The default GDM screen looks a little ugly to me….perhaps it’s just too new.

3. The new SELinux notification tool may be useful if something is not working correctly, but it just bugs the heck out of me as every single program appears to be trying to access protected memory. Of course, some people may welcome this new program. It looks very nice, but I’ve never been one of those who had problems with SEL to begin with

Man have I been busy. I’m finishing up the wedding I shot a couple of weeks ago, so I haven’t had time for much. I think I have nVidia up and working now, although still just one monitor is working. glxgears gives me 1340 FPS - is that good or bad? I’ll have to look into my blog and see what happened last time. hmm….looks like I didn’t write anything down before. Well, now I have it here for the record for next time.

And it’s called Moonshine. I like the name better than Zod, Fedora Core 6’s name.

Here’s the announcement from the Red Hat Mailing List:

\* From: The Fedora Project \* To: fedora-announce-list redhat com \* Subject: Announcing Fedora 7 (Moonshine) \* Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 03:28:41 -0700

Howdy, cousins! Welcome to our little Fedora hollow, where we’ve brewed up some mighty, mighty Fedora 7 Moonshine for your enjoyment. Here, I’ll help you pour that … and some for me … *cough, cough* Smoooooth … sure does taste good. It’s been sitting here in the jug for almost a whole month now! Go ahead and help yourself to some more:

Fedora 7 should be out in 8 days. This time around there isn’t much I’m looking forward to in the new release as they are mostly just laying the groundwork for more changes in future Fedoras. My wish list is better compiz support and just a few newer versions of stuff like Pidgin (formerly Gaim) and Blender.

A few big things in Fedora News. First of all, the Fedora Summit happened recently. They are tackling a lot of things for Fedora Core 7 including blurring the line between Core and Extras (a point of contention for those moved from Core to Extras - they were less important they felt) and finally having a true LiveCD. You can read more about it at Linux.com’s review of the Fedora Summit.