I have had the chance to try out Fedora 11 with the second generation eeeBox hardware.
The first generation eeeBox had numerous problems with various Linux Distros especially with 'X' due to the graphics Hardware. The second generation uses an ATI Radeon GPU instead of the Intel one and this time things are very different. The B206 comes with a wireless KB & Mouse as well as an IR Remote Control which makes it very suitable for a media centre. The ATI GPU has a HDMI output and is supposed to be able to decode HD TV streams whereas the old version (B202) could not. The OOTB package includes XP-HOME (Sigh) but is useful to make sure everything works prior to installing Linux. I booted the Fedora 11 X86 DVD off of a DVD drive connected to one of the 4 USB ports on the box. The usual Anaconda boot process started off. This was a big difference to Fedora 10 release on a B202 due to the GPU problems mentioned above. The install process was identical to installing Fedora on any other system. I partitioned the 160Gb HDD manually using a mixture of EXT3 & EXT4 filesystems. The actual software installation took approx 30mins following a 'custom' selection. If I had used the netinstall and a remote HTTP source for the options, this would have been a lot less (I did a recent install with almost identical package selections in 14mins). After rebooting the Anaconda? First Boot process took over and after setting up a user and the time, the Fedora Login screen was presented. As with Fedora 10, root login is disabled (something I don't like) so I logged in as the use I created in the first boot process and was presented with a familiar Gnome screen. Something else I don't like is that even though ipconfig reports that both eth0 and wlan0 are configured you are not connected to the local LAN. You have to enable this via an icon on the desktop. eth0 came up straight away. I only had to enter the WEP key for wlan0 and then I was connected to my wireless network. This is a once only exercise but I find it frustrating anyway that at least for eth0, it is not enabled automatically. I moved a MySQL db over from another (Centos) system and started the service and everything worked. Infact everything on the B206 seems to have worked with Fedora 11 right from the word go. A big thumbs up here with one reservation. The supplied ATI driver won't run compiz and at the moment there is no proprietary driver available on rpmfusion at the moment. This is very much a 'nice to have but not essential'. what's next? I'm going to try to use it as a media centre. I'll install myth TV with a DVB-T USB tuner and see what happens but that is for another day. I have installed Fedora 11 into a couple of VM's and again had no real issues. A PPC Mac mini install was just the same. Everything working OOTB. Conclusion:- This is (As far as my limited testing goes) a pretty good release OOTB. Stephen D -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
