Fedora 8-based distro /UP2000+

[Jay Estabrook]

Jon_norstog wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the announcement.  Did you work on putting the distro
> together?

I made the CD, and did a lot of the testing as I've MANY machines
still available (though that number is sure to decrease over time
as power supply attrition and space constraints apply).

Almost all the building was done by Oliver Falk and his merry band of
builders (see http://buildsys.zero42.at front page for a list).

And much of Sergey's and Christian's work on AC-2/3 was applied
as well - a GREAT deal of credit belongs there.

> I burned a CD and did a graphical install on my UP2000+ with 4D10t
> (Permedia 2) video card.  The install went down with no hitches, it
> installed the SMP kernel in the right place and the boot process was
> able to locate the root directory (unlike the 3/14/08 EV6 release).

Only thing I don't approve of is that on SMP boxes, only the SMP kernel
gets installed; I like to have the option of either, in case the SMP one
is broken. Case in point: AS2100 (SABLE) runs nicely with the UP kernel,
but crashes attempting to do SMP; one is really stuck on that machine,
being forced to run in "rescue" mode to install the UP one after the
fact... :-\

> The Xserver is a little shaky but puts out a clean picture at 640x800
> and thousands of colors.  KDE came up as default desktop (I installed
> everything on the CD except the Bhutanese and Tibetan fonts) and is
> pretty shaky.

I didn't spend much time with Permedia 2 or 3 post-install, but I
certainly did a lot of them. Post-install, I like to set depth to 16,
as you did, and set monitor params in the xorg.conf, along with modes
line to one more reasonable (1280x1024).

Some cards, like Radeons, seem to allow automatic monitor param detect,
via EDID or some such data, but others, namely Matrox and Permedia, do
not do as good a job, and require manual intervention (xorg.conf edit).

> I'm sure when I get a little spare time it will be no problem to fix the
> small stuff and then work on the apps I need.

Keep us posted of your progress.

> Big Kudos, guys

Thanks on behalf of the whole team!

--Jay++