IT Gang - A place for tips and tricks

Lately, I've been thinking a lot on migrating to linux, but I was never forced to do it. I had my "linux testing periods" when I would install one of the (too) many Linux distributions and play with it for a while... Then, I would forget my root password (you can imagine how frequently I accessed my Linux partition in order to forget the root pass...) so I would either just leave it installed but never use it, or I would simply format the hard drive and move on...

I couple of months ago I started working on my own, being my own BOSS, taking the full responsibility for my actions and income (negative income so far, but ask me again in a few months :) ). Being an employee I have never given a dam on the licenses my work computer has, legal or not, expired trials or now (I know, BAD BOY - yes, I am). But from now on, every decision I make would affect me on legal terms as well, so that gave me a little thinking subject...

So I decided to go over to the other side and use free / open source software. Many people would say "Congrats!" other would say "Why not pay for licenses?". I plan on posting a post that shows a comparison between paid/free software doing (almost) the same thing, but bare with me, I still have a lot more to learn in this new (for me) environment.

Anyway, to wrap things up, I installed Fedora 10 on my Dell 6400 (Intel Dual Core, 1.6GHz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD, shared on-board video board). The install went fine, pretty smooth, kind'of like the Windows installer. That was great, since I was hoping to find more similarities between Windows and Linux, so I would still feel like home on my PC :)

But after the install, and after my initial "hello linux" good feelings, the frustration strated taking over... I struggled for about 5 hours (hey, I'm a linux newbie, don't expect too much from me, but I do have A LOT OF PATIENCE!). The problem was my wireless card was not detecting any wireless network, although I had properly setup and test my wifi on multiple Windows systems, including my Dell. After hours and hours of despair, I finally found out that it was the "Network Manager" that was broken, not my PC. Some guy (I thank you, although I don't remember the name/link) suggested on a forum post to update the whole linux to the latest version (yum update). I did that, took about 10 min to download ~450MB, then it took about ~2hours to install the updates, but eventually it finished. And VOILA! A brand new Network Manager, that is able to save your settings and has options to input different types of key encryption (WEP/WPA, etc.) AND accepts ASCII keys! Brilliant, simply brilliant!

I was so happy to see it (my new Linux) work that I started learning more and more about it, and getting more excited about my new Fedora Dell! So people, if you want to install a Linux distro, you can start with Fedora 11 :) I hope it saves some of the "fun" I had with my wifi. But if you decide to go with Fedora 10, please, please, PLEASE run "yum update" as the first thing you do, it will save you a lot of hair, nerves and time!

Will come back later with small newbie articles on some of the "Linux must know" commands. I have now just installed my first Wordpress blog inside lampp so I have to go back to what my new job is: web development under Linux!

See ya!

PS: I happily announce that this post has been written on my new Fedora 10 PC, running Firefox. No more Explorer error for me from now on ('till I will have to test one of my pages in IE :P )