It started as an accident, but I’m taking it as a sign from God. I was trying to dual boot my new laptop (HP tx1320us tablet pc) with Vista, which it came with, and Fedora. I blew the Fedora install and accidentally wiped the Vista partition, and since today is Day Zero of the Fedora 8 release, I decided that the gods must be talking to me. I continued with the Fedora install, which at the time was Fedora 7, then I took it home and began a Fedora 8 upgrade via Yum.
I realize that since Fedora 6 or 7, they no longer recommend major version updates via Yum. Perhaps I’m a masochist. Perhaps the Moloko that’s playing in the background is egging me on. Perhaps I just didn’t feel like waiting for a download of the full DVD ISO for Fedora 8. The install is running now. To be precise, the packages (993 of them) have been downloaded and the terminal window is now patiently, defiantly “Running Transaction Test.”
I’ve heard good things from folks who were able to get most of the functionality of this lovely laptop working under Linux, and I’d like to be one of those success stories. I’ve even started my next novel in OpenOffice and created four of my instant message accounts (2 AOL, 1 Yahoo and 1 MSN) in Pidgin, I have that much faith. More updates with more detail as I move forward this this quick project.
FC7 successes: Touchpad works fine, networking is fine, video drivers selected properly and video is crisp.
FC8 goals: Wireless, touchscreen, VPN, DVD, Lighscribe. I haven’t researched whether there’s Linux software to run the fingerprint reader yet.
0 Responses to “Going off the grid”