Chris Matchett

There is a great deal of satisfaction to be found building your own media centre, especially when it involves breathing life into an old and broken laptop. This is my solution which I hope inspires you to take a closer look at what you have lying in the cupboard or that drawer full of tech bits. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been using Redhat/Fedora linux for the past 10 years, starting with RedHat 5.0. I recently decided to move to Ubuntu and here are some reasons why…

The move was sparked of by the fact the Fedora 7 installer couldn’t install to my 80Gb hard drive without destroying all the drive’s existing partitions. Potentially destroying my ‘/filestore’ partition which has survived many installs. The Ubuntu installer didn’t encounter any such problems and was happy to work with my drive.

After wrestling and installing Fedora 7 Yum went through a cycle of downloading 500Mb worth of updates and not managing to apply them. Ubuntu’s Synaptic package manager is excellent, I have always struggled with Redhat/Fedora’s package managers.

I decided to to go with the long term support version of Ubuntu ‘Dapper Drake’ released in October 2006. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact the Ubuntu had my digital freeview tv card working out of the box. I didn’t check with Fedora 7 but Fedora Core 6 needed the necessary module to be loaded manually.

All in all I am enjoying my move to Ubuntu and plan to stick with it…so thank you Redhat/Fedora for the last 10 years and all the best for the future!

I was installing Fedora 7 and anaconda was having some problems initialising my 80Gb hard drive. Anyway, the installer asked if I would like it to fix these apparent drive problems and warned that all data would be lost. I agreed and crossed my fingers hoping some of the drive’s existing partitions would still be there when using disk druid. No such luck, all the partitions were gone and there was a /filestore partition I hadn’t backed up. Ooops!

So how do you recover deleted partitions? Boot your system with your favourite LiveCD and in a terminal run ‘parted’. Here’s a bit of a howto from the parted documentation…

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