Whats up with Hatim!

In the last few days I had been reading reviews and hearing some good things about Fedora 9, so I decided to give it a try. I downloaded the 64 bit version of fedora kde-livecd. The CD booted easily on my Acer Aspire 7720-6604. I was greeted by a dark theme (which is not my taste). I then tried out some preinstalled software and frankly I was not impressed. The KDE version comes with Koffice and Konqueror. Since I have not used KDE for some time now I had not realized that I had grown used to Gnome. Overall there was nothing mindblowing about KDE 4 and it was yet another Fedora release. I then tried to do a dummy install to check that how ext4 support works, again to my disappointment there was no ext4 option available (i later tried with the kernel parameter ext4 but without any luck) I think ext4 is only available on the full installer version.

The lack of packages in precompiled distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora is prompting me to move back to Gentoo (or some even flexible operating system choice). Lets hope that Gentoo guys release 2008.0 before the start of 6th month of this year (its already behind schedule)

I now have the chance to move to 64 bit linux. There is a new Intel Core2Duo E4300 machine in my office. The specs are as follows (ill post detailed specs from with in the machine)

Intel Core 2 Duo, E4300, 1.8Ghz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800 Mhz FSB.
Intel D945 GCCRL Motherbaord (builtin video, audio,LAN)

It truns out that moving gentoo from a 32 bit machine to a 64 bit machine is not trivial. Also since I want to retain my harddrive and use it on the other machine at the same time , it would require some smart moving around data thingie.

I have the optiong of installing the 64bit version of Ubuntu Fiesty, but then it would not be the same as my current desktop would it :). Gentoo adds a whole lot of geek factor to my desktop, the main reason I am moving to 64 bit is to satisfy my geekishness, otherwise my current 32bit machine is more than enough for my needs.

I could also install 64-bit fiesty for the while and install gentoo at a slow pace, but that would be so not cool to both gentoo and ubuntu.

This time I plan to post a detailed blog on my gentoo installation procedure. This is just to share the various settings ect which I plan to do.

After almost a gap of 10 months I have a gentoo system up and running. I got a barnd new p4 3.0 Ghz as my new work machine. Its better than the Mac eBook I had at my previous job (although I do miss the solid MacOS). But the best thing about this machine is that I have gentoo on it.

I still have to fine tune the system to its full multimedia glory which requires enormous amount of tweaking ( which I plan to do over the coming months).

It was a bit disappointing to learn that gentoo is no longer supported for stage-1 compilation. But stage-3 isn't that bad (after all I was able to emerge every thing again with my new CFLAG and USEFLAG settings).