I must confenss that I like xfce, In my view, it has acheived the goal of a good gui — it goes away and allows me to work. It is not (yet) bloated. And it is available as a fedora spin.

I find this useful, as Fedora understands RAID 1 and RAID 0 devices. This allows me to mirror my main (“root”) and swap partitions, and to stripe my ?home partition. And it will boot directly from the RAID, so I don’t need to have little /boot partitions that — at least in my hands — generally go wrong.

I managed to bork the main home computer trying to transfer a large teaching file. Machine froze, and would not reboot. Had a backup available (from previous day). so…what to use?

Xubuntu is prettier, but… it does not handle RAIDs well. Arch does, but it is a pain to set up, and on a server I want some stability. Chakra in my view is not ready to the real world. The new debian installer… is flakey (it probably needs a few more weeks) and Debian is a little conservative in userspace. So… back to fedora.

So get the iso, burn it and boot it. It looks pretty. It recognises both screens. It allows different pictures on either screen: so far, so good.

Then I try to install it. A failed install had locked one of the two hard drives.

Invoked mdadm. Removed the offending section (/dev/md0. Delete offending portions, and resize, combining old /boot and /(root). Set type as “fd” ie linux software raid. Reboot.

Check raid is in place. modprobe for raid0 and raid1. Then… use the installer. It finds two raids, and allows you to format the resized partitions as raid partitions and then make a new /.

Rest of install is unventful. Reboot — which takes some time as all three RAID partitions have to mount. Then can finish installation by adding user and switching ntp on.On

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Once that is done…. update. I prefer to use the command line… yum update indicated that 278M of deltaRPMS and new software required — the iso was under 600M. The big decisions for tomorrow are to choose between libreoffice  and openoffice (one is needed), restoring data (from usb drives) and working through the unofficial fedora FAQ.

Then… if (and only if) that is stable and fast, consider moving the laptop and work machine to the same system…. and ditching gnome and kde for the forseeable future.