I've decided to jot down some notes regarding my move from Windows to
Fedora. Consider me writing this email as a cathartic exercise for
myself, if nothing else. But for those current Windows users out there,
consider this a cautionary tale (even though it has a happy ending). So,
just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip...

It is now Sunday, 3:30am. I've been working on this since approximately
Thursday. (obviously, it hasn't been a full 4 days working on it, but
don't make me count the actual hours, it will make me cry). Now,
granted, I fully admit I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I
think of myself as a fairly intelligent person and I have used
UNIX/Linux in the past (e.g. I once was forced to develop solely on
AIX-only systems for 2+ years, and I used Linux back in the day when
re-compiling the kernel was a necessity to get SoundBlaster audio cards
to work - funny, now that I think about it, Linux still hasn't
straightened out their audio problems after all these years - I'll get
to that shortly).

Here's what went wrong - you'll notice in the beginning, not a single
thing worked "right" the first time I tried it. In some cases, it didn't
even work right the 2nd, 3rd or Nth time either.

1) burned a F11 Live CD - booted up, got a black screen with nothing but
a mouse cursor. Can't use Live CD.

2) burned a F11 DVD - booted up, again, got the same black screen - I've
since called it the "black screen of death".

3) booted up F11 DVD, but in the boot menu, I switched to using a
"basic" video driver. This worked - I got into the anaconda installer.

4) Anaconda crashed - once, twice, three times a lady. Actually, it
probably crashed more than that, all while trying to set up my physical
and LVM partitions. Eventually, it gave up and I won.

5) Tried to get the microphone to work (because I want to get a
softphone installed). Microphone is dead. Dials and switches and knobs
oh my! No settings I tried could wake it up. OK, screw it, let's come
back to that... (BTW: pulseaudio is crap)

6) Tried to set up OpenVPN - no go. Everything looked to have the proper
settings, but it failed to connect successfully. OK, screw THAT, let's
come back to that.

7) Try to get dual monitors setup with useful resolutions. None of the X
display utilities that installed with F11 came close to being able to do
anything I needed - in fact, when I tried, X crashed and couldn't
restart, I had to revert the config manually. Learned that my nVidia
video card must get special drivers that don't come with F11 out of box.
I'm actually surprised I didn't have to re-compile the kernel in order
to install them - so Linux is getting better. How I was supposed to know
about these drivers prior, I don't know. But, in the end, I got it
working and received total consciousness, so I got that going for me.

8) Let's see what the problem is with my microphone again - I hear Skype
has some way to test audio input, so I install it. Skype promptly seg
faults as soon as I attempt to install it. Ok then, never mind.

At this point, Softphone still doesn't work, VPN still doesn't work and
lots of little things crop up and annoy me.

....

Trying again, I believe I installed F11 from scratch about 4 or 5 times. Each time, I
learned a little more as I went along. I ended up figuring out the magic
of getting the microphone to actually work with a softphone (twinkle, in
case you want to know - and I had to not explicitly install pulseaudio
and I had to flip some settings in some audio utilities to get the mic
to work). I got the VPN to work with vpnc. I installed most of what I
need and I'm now at a point with a usable F11 machine on the VPN with
dual monitors and a working softphone, and with my development tools
along with a database. And there was much rejoicing.

I went like one that hath been stunned, and is of sense forlorn a sadder
and a wiser man.