Doink!

Well, ended up having to restore my computer last night. I was running FC5, just playing with some VMs and... well, I'm not sure what it was, all I know is it disappeared. I had installed it a couple of weeks ago over an Ubuntu Dapper install. Mostly because I have had a love/hate with Red Hat way back since the (in)famous Halloween release v0.9* (remember the bat?). I just had to try it out. I'm used to the hierarchy in /etc (although debian-style is not all that different), and the artwork in the default GNOME theme and icon set is fantastic.

Fedora 5 is just... sluggish. I'm not sure why. I had the same network drivers, the same kernel version, the same Nvidia drivers as my Dapper install. It just seemed slow. And there were packages Fedora used to have that it phased out. There was also a lot more manual configuration than I remember. Everything was stable (or so I thought), but I just couldn't squeeze anymore speed. GNOME acted like it was on Valium. Anyway, it died.

Thank god I back up /home.

So I decided to switch back to Ubuntu. That was a bit more pain than I wanted. I have never had a problem installing Ubuntu on either my desktop or my laptop.

Last night it decided to be contrary. Of course the first part was my fault. I though I'd give Edgy Eft a shot, even though it has not been officially released. Well there's a reason it's not released yet. It started complaining that the modules it was trying to load off the DVD did not match the kernel the DVD booted with. Huh? Screw it. I'll just do Dapper Drake, the latest official release.

Everything went fine. Added my extra apt repositories without a problem. Got my wireless up and working with WPA2. Synced my Firefox bookmarks and cookies using this great extension. Got my win32 codecs, libdvdcss2, mp3 support. Everything I like to have on my machines.

And then, we get to the Nvidia card. Something I have never had a problem with before. For some reason, the nvidia driver in the repository kept thinking my card was an ATI (but it still tried to load the nvidia Xorg driver). Weird. At one point I was going to manually install the driver, but then realized what a PITA that would be when I tried to update either the Kernal or X. Plus, one of the reasons I went with Ubuntu is so I don't have to muck around with config files and kernel modules.

Finally got it working around 1 AM so all is well in the world.

*Holy crap! I just looked up the exact date of the Halloween release. 12 years ago... I've been messing with Linux that long. I'm getting old.