You may have noticed a bit of downtime last weekend – this was due to a RAM upgrade I got my host to install on my server, and then an OS upgrade from Fedora 8 x86 (32bit) to Fedora 9 x64 (64bit).

The server now has 6GB of RAM; two 1GB and two 2GB sticks of reliable Corsair XMS2 DDR2

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 have finally upgraded my ageing socket 939-based computer to a new quad-everything (quad-core, 4GB ram, 4TB HDD… I’m sure you get the idea)

Some of the basic specs:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
• OCZ 2×2GB 1066MHz DDR2
• Gigabyte X48-DQ6 Motherboard
• 4×750GB, 3×500GB, 1×250GB Samsung Spinpoint F1
• Antec Quattro 850W PSU
• Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit SP1

For the complete specs list, see the systems page. Thanks to Scan, eBuyer and CCL for selling all the components I wanted

I will be putting Fedora 9 on it (in 64bit of course) once it’s released.

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.

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