starting fresh

Monday, May 03, 2004, at 05:22PM

By Eric Richardson

I'm waiting right now for Fedora to install on my laptop. It had been a Redhat 9 box since I got it last fall, but a number of nagging annoyances prompted my move. Instead of upgrading I decided to install fresh and avoid building up the cruft I usually tend to accumulate in a Linux installation. I'm curious to see how a number of the things that have been most annoying to me of late work out:

• Random hangs, particularly related to hot-swap type behaviour with PCMCIA and USB. The PCMCIA part seems to have gotten better now that I destroyed my old wireless card, but yesterday I got pretty ticked when I pulled my USB bluetooth adaptor out and it hung the machine solid.

• Suspend to disk. When I upgraded my memory to 512MB it got bigger than my swap and I was no longer able to suspend to disk (since on linux you write the mem image to swap). I upped the size of the swap this time, so I'm curious to see if things have gotten better between the early 2.6 kernels and now (2.6.5?).

It used to be that I was all about the challenge of getting things to successfully work. I remember spending hours figuring out dependencies, compiling stuff, etc. Now, though, I get angry at things with dependencies. I'd much rather just use something that's already installed on the box.

What are apps that I'll install on top of a new installation?

• wlan-ng drivers
• kismet
• firefox
• enlightenment
• Eterm
• lyx
• Gimp 2

That's really about it.