Putting on my Fedora

Well, I did it, I finally did it. I ordered a 320GB drive and set up a dual boot situation with my old Windows install and my spanking brand new Fedora 10 on the rest of the disk. So far so good. It wasn't a perfect process, including a 4 hour shrink of my NTFS partition. But I'm up and running. And I have an out to go back if things go bad, but I have a feeling I won't.

I have a Dell D830 and had to install the Broadcom wireless driver and the nVidia driver for my NVS 140M graphics chip. Now, since these aren't under open source licenses, you have to get them from other sources, in my case rpmfusion.org. This is part of what sets Fedora apart from Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, it's a lot easier to set this up. You know you can mix GPL and !GPL and it's OK ;). At any rate, I deal with it since I feel Fedora is a bit crisper, especially for those of us who think they know what they're doing.

So why would I bother doing this? With Eclipse, Windows is a pretty fine development environment. The command line environments there are abysmal, but that's why we work hard on ensuring that you can do all your work from inside Eclipse. But that's probably it. I want to get back into an environment where command line is king (I used HP and Sun workstations long before becoming a Windows developer) and get a better feeling for what development life is like there. That and as I've mentioned before here, Linux is just the best environment for building embedded Linux platforms which is my hobby as of late.

Anyway, we'll see how long I last here before running back to Windows. As I have it, it's not too far away just in case, just over there on /dev/sda1 and in a VM coming soon.