After a good experience with Fedora Core 8, and a reasonable experience with Fedora Core 11, I decided to install Fedora Core 12 on my Chembook laptop.
In summary, while FC8 and FC11 worked out of the box, FC12 failed to provide me with sound. I discovered later that the KDE mixer had set the center volume to mute. Once I unset that, I had sound.
Other than that, it worked pretty well.
Continue reading Installing Fedora Core 12 on Chembook 2370VA
Valgrind
comprises a bunch of very useful tools for detecting problems with your programs. I first came across it a couple of years back and find it to be excellent. In particular I use its memory profiler, which helps you catch errors such as memory leaks and invalid accesses.
I cannot praise the revision-control tool git highly enough, and often use it as a buffer between SVN and me. Much of my professional work flow involves fixing a bug here, fixing a bug there — lots and lots of small changes in many different branches. git is the perfect tool for this kind of work. And it is fast.
I got around to installing Yellow Dog 6.1 using a DVD of the full distro. The installation went OK, and the installer fired up in graphical mode. However it proceeded to create the swap partition almost immediately because of low-memory concerns.
When it completed YDL was quite zippy – a much, much better experience than I got from FC12. I even had audio.
I may actually use this – it depends if I can get particular media players running on it.
In between bouts of Wipeout HD, I net-installed english-language 64-bit PowerPC Fedora Core 12 on my 80GB PS3.
Installation with PetitBoot didn’t present any problems, though audio didn’t seem to work. However FC12 is quite slow on my PS3, so I ain’t going to use it – it seems it’s paging to disk a lot.