I found a new program to help me program my VHF ham radio and tried to install it on my Linux system at home this week. The flavor of Linux I like to run at home is Fedora and I was still on Fedora Core 10. The latest version right now is Fedora 18. That represents a significant difference. When I tried to install my ham radio software called Chirp, I needed to upgrade a bunch of different libraries. Instead of just upgrading the libraries, I decided to update the whole operating system.
Right now there are two major releases of Linux that most people consider: Fedora or Ubuntu. We are moving to Ubuntu at work and so I will be updating my computer there from CentOS, which is very similar to Fedora. As I will have computer running Ubuntu, I figured I would keep my home desktop on Fedora. That way I can compare both systems and find out for myself which flavor of Linux is really better.
Before deciding on the upgrade, I researched both Linux distributions thoroughly. You had the usual religious battles between both groups combined with a bunch of "impartial" comparisons claiming it is a tie between the two. We will see how much truth there is to that.
Unfortunately the Linux upgrade did not go as smoothly as I had planned. I made sure to back up all of my data and directories. Then I backed up my e-mail. When I tried to restore my e-mail, none of my messages appeared on the new system. Fortunately there is a way to import raw mail files into my e-mail program (Evolution) and so I just had to restore each e-mail folder one at a time. It was fairly painless once I figured out how to do it. Now it is just a matter of loading up all of the programs I normally use.
One nice thing about upgrading Linux versions is that I can now access my Windows partition, not that I have missed it. When I installed Fedora Core 10, I saved a part of my hard disk for Windows, but was never able to access it. Now it has started working again. So if I need it, it is available. I sure hope I don't need it though. I hate Windows.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment