Fedora 8 Review on DELL D620.

I have 2 Pentium D PC's running FC7 and DELL D620 Laptop running Ubuntu in dual boot. I'm so satisfied with the configuration and performance of FC7 that as soon as I heard FC8 was available I went ahead and tried to blast away Ubuntu from my laptop and replace it with FC8. One of the reasons I was dissatisfied with Ubuntu was because from the get go (installation) Ubuntu failed to detect my video resolution properly on my DLL620 laptop. Once I got that working right (annoying) then Ubuntu failed to get my wireless card configured properly (WPA not available). Did you notice that in that in the Title of this post I specifically mentioned the hardware being used? More than ever your experience to any Linux distro depends on the platform being installed. I daresay, is the make-brake point of a popular and unpopular-obscure distro. I'm sick and tired of those reviews that trying to give an overall experience of a Linux Distro when we know that is a hit-miss scenario with, until now, more miss than hits. Enuff said. But let's gets started shall we? Fedora 8 X86_64 torrent This the first time "evar" I installed a 64bit OS. I dloaded the FC8 distro using uTorrent on Windows XP and took about 3 hours for the 3.6 Gig iso. Once dloaded I used roxio to burn it to a DVD. To verify the burn process, I went ahead and tried to load the DVD on my other PentiumD PC running FC7. The PC complained that the disk was unreadable. My guess is that the DVD is for 64 OS so a 32 OS would say: uh? Speak in short sentences!! So I paid not much attention. The DVD works fine in the Dell Laptop. Nevertheless to quench my curiosity, I check on Wikipedia to see if the Pentium(R) D 3.00 Mhz processor supports 64 architecture. Wikipedia Intel info page says yes Pentium D. But my Asus PC won't boot from it, what gives? I looked around the web and after reading all the effing mumbo jumbo I concluded that NO, the Intel Pentium D CPU is not 64 architecture and left it like that, but the laptop has the Intel Dual Core chip and that's why FC8 x86_64 DVD boots dandy. FC8 installation was a breeze. I feel like I need to repeat this. FC8 installation on a DELL D620 laptop was a breeze. I detected another Linux installation (Ubuntu) on my laptop and gave me an option to blast it away without touching my Windows XP installation. I picked the Developers install and Grub to control my boot partitions. I let it rip and in less than 20 minutes it was done! (must be the X64?) I rebooted and went through what marines boot camp experience call "the moment of truth". You know, the system spits out the installation CD. You close the tray and the system reboots, you get the PC Vendor splash, the black screen and the fear of previous installation experiences comes back...remember this ones? a. The system freezes. b. The system boots into Linux and freezes during boot. c. The system boots into Linux and your Windows partition is a goner? d. The system boots into Grub screen, you select windows and system freezes. Or, after 10 years of travails, t he system boots into the Grub, it shows my Windows installation as "Other" and Windows XP boots fine. Then I reboot the system, select FC8 X86_64 and boots. All systems GO! Video resolution configuration. Check. LAN Network card detection and configuration. Check. Wireless Network card detection and configuration. Detection Check, Configuration Fails. Sound card configuration and detection. Check. Power management configuration and detection. BIG CHECK!!! I'm first timer on this one. FC8 did a FINE job installing itself on my DELL D620 in dual boot mode. What about the Wireless network? Dad did not go well. (did I feel a Windows fanboy cracking a smile?) Since the installation knows I have a wireless card it should install a tray icon to at leas show me the available networks in the area (Ubuntu did that). Instead nothing happens. The network settings for the gnome environment let me configure the wireless network card but the dumb applet asks me to type the network SSID instead of having some kind of applet let me pick from that available networks in my office. Perhaps my mistake was that I did not installed the KDE environment which is known to be a better bells+whistles array of configuration applets. So, If you have a DELL D620 Laptop, go ahead! Try Fedora 8. You don't have to take my word for it.