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Sun, 25 Jan 2009Changing DistrosPosted to Technology categoryI think I'll be researching different distros. I've been using Fedora since I got my Lenovo T60p. It came with Fedora 6 from LinuxCertified, however, I almost immediately re-imaged it as I didn't like how the disk was partitioned.I recently upgraded to Fedora 9 then 10, in the last few weeks. I'm not sure which upgrade broke what. But I had to fix a lot of stuff that should have just worked. The wireless, audio and vmware always seem to break between upgrades on this laptop. Those all broke this time too, but as I was finding the fixes for them, other more annoying things broke, my CDMA support disappeared, then my wired network. I got them back up after a few hours, but had the hardest time getting wireless back. It would see all the APs in the neighborhood, except mine. I assumed I had my ssid in some config file somewhere that was blocking it from showing up in the scanning window. Never could find out why, but using the heavy handed approach of manually attaching to my AP via iwconfig I was able to connect. I wrote a startup script to manually connect on startup, need to remember to turn that off the next time I'm traveling. No idea why Network Manager still doesn't show my AP. The audio was easy enough to fix.. or so I thought. I got it playing flash and YouTube videos/audios, but found out that streaming audio and mp3/wma's no longer played. I'm not sure which version of Fedora when out of their way to remove support for mp3s and other 'non-free' formats. I tried installing multiple codecs, but it took me most of today to find the right combination to get things working. It's still not exactly how I'd like it, but I can now play mp3s and wmas again. The streaming audio still has problems, some radio stations play on my laptop but not all. For the most part it seems good enough. Not sure which distro I'll switch to, or if I'll bother to on this laptop. It is 3 years old this spring, about time for a new laptop. This one's only shortfall is the harddrive, 80gigs, I can't load it up with multiple VMs, maybe I'll look into upgrading it's harddrive first.. I like CentOS, but not sure I'll like it any better than Fedora for a laptop. The issues with file formats will be the same, as CentOS is a clone of RedHat, and I doubt they'd add support back in for something RedHat took out. Posted at: 5:06 pmCommentsYour Comment |