Fedora 9 was released a yesterday!

I jumped on the downloads (Installer DVDs of 32bit and 64bit) as soon as I could, burnt the 64bit DVD, and rebooted, hoping to have it installed within half an hour.

I already had 10GB of empty space at the start of one of my 750GB drives in preparation – all I had to do was tell the BIOS to boot the DVD and install it!

Well, that was the idea… If only it was that easy… Linux is never (at least in my experience) that obedient
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I found this great guide which helps create your own local mirror Fedora Core YUM repositories – great if you have several local computers running Fedora, as I do.

I’m mirroring (locally only though, not publicly) the “Core” and “Updates” repo’s – I looked into doing the “Extras” repo too, but that’s nearly 10GB of files! That will have to wait for bigger hard disks… :P

So far I’ve got my laptop and my local Linux server using my local repo, and I’ll set my main pc to use it once I’ve installed Linux on it.

I also installed lighttpd on my local server, running on an alternate port, which should make installing large software packages over the LAN that little bit faster than if I used Apache 2, which runs on the default port. I’d switch to lighttpd as the main web server, but I couldn’t get PHP working well with it the last time I tried.

When I got home from University this afternoon, I found that (what appeared to be) my new laptop had arrived. However, it looked like it had been opened before, so I visited Comet’s website to see what their damage/returns policies were. Just as I was giving up on Comet’s website, which refused to give me the information I wanted, the doorbell went again, with another courier and what looked like another laptop

I checked the serial number on the outside of the first parcel, and discovered that it was the laptop I had sent back a week or two ago to Acer for repair! The second parcel was 100% new, factory sealed, and had several flyers from Comet in the parcel too, so I could tell where it was from. So I contacted LaptopShop who are now going to arrange a collection for the old laptop, which should happen in the next few days

I’ve now done the same thing I did with the first laptop – boot, setup, burn Acer’s recovery DVD, and format it with my own XP Pro (from my University’s MSDN). I had great fun spending another 10 minutes on the phone to Microsoft, typing the product ID numbers into their automated system, only for it to fail and forward me to an operator. I eventually got it activated for the third time after explaining that “Yes, it’s only installed on one PC” in about five different ways.

I haven’t installed Fedora Core 6 yet though, as I’m not sure how often I’d actually use it – I might prefer just to have the extra disk space.

And it hasn’t blown up (yet)!

Along with Firefox 2, Fedora Core 6 was released yesterday

So far it seems pretty similar to Core 5, apart from the changes to the graphics. In particular, the new login background is a lot nicer

Once I’ve upgraded my Fedora Core 5 installation on this PC, I’ll post a screenshot or two

Well it’s just been released, and so far I love it

Apart from the lack of add-ons (extensions appear to have been renamed) compatible yet, it’s really good. The new skin is nice too, but is gonna need replacing with something that blends in better with my SoftCrystal Linux WindowBlinds theme. There’s a built-in spell checker in text boxes, and much better tab/window handling – it can now remember (or so it says) what tabs and/or windows you had open in your last session, and restore them!

So far, I haven’t noticed any memory leaks – I hope it stays that way! The feeds system is also a lot better – I never really used to use it as it was quite hard to add a new feed so it would show as a pop-up menu – it seems a lot better now

I’ll update this post with any extra stuff I find, as I find it.

Update: There is a new extensions, or rather add-ons manager. It’s a lot nicer than the old one, and it seems to check for updates when you start the browser, and offers to update them then and there, and it doesn’t need a restart (as it’s not yet fully loaded) afterwards

Get Firefox!