FC6 live running on my Gateway

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I downloaded the FC6 live CD ISO and booted it on my Gateway M685. It was just a quick look to see if there was any chance of it replacing Suse 10.1. I found good and bad news during the trial. Unfortunately the bad news overcame the good.

The good is that the kernel (2.6.18.1) enabled audio on the notebook. Audio has been broken under Suse 10.1 on this machine since day one. That means no music and no DVD playback under Suse. When FC6 booted on this machine it found it and I was able to successfully test and play back test audio. The bad is lack of wireless (802.11g) support. I don't know if this is a problem with the FC6 live CD or a problem with FC6 in general. But I need wireless support, and Suse 10.1 gives it to me out-of-the-box without any special tweaks or installs. It Just Works.

Other features I found pleasant were
  • The recognition of the proper screen resolution of this notebook (1680 by 1050). As you can see by the two screen captures everything started up and used the full screen at its best resolution. Ubuntu has been able to do this for some time now, so it was good to see this capability in another major distribution.
  • Full recognition of USB devices, including my Western Digital Passport portable USB drive. The recognition of such as large capacity device along with a live CD makes checking and using new releases extremely easy.



Comments

  1. DerekNovember 13, 2006

    From those screenshots, FC6 appears to come with Firefox 1.5. So now I wonder, what is involved in upgrading to Firefox 2.0? Do you have to manually shove it in? Add some unsupported 3rd party package source? Or is there a clean way to install it without breaking your distro.

    Not being able to upgrade across major versions of software without breaking my distro somehow has been an on-going frustration of mine in SuSE 10.1. I don't want to wait for 10.2 just to upgrade Firefox (or GnuCash, or anything else), when its a simple "download from the original source and install" for other platforms.

    Thankfully there are a gazillion 3rd party package sources to address this issue in SuSE, but there shouldn't have to be.

    ReplyDelete

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