I thought I'd give a short review of my experience so far running Fedora Core 5 on my laptop. First, a brief review of the specs of the computer.

• HP Pavilion zv5000z
• AMD Athlon64 3000
• 512MB RAM
• 1680x1050 display
• NVidia GeForce4 420 Go display adapter
• Texas Instruments firewire and PCMCIA chipsets
• Synaptics touchpad
• 100 GB hard drive
• CD/DVD Combo drive

And, I use a Netgear 802.11g cardbus PCMCIA adapter which is supported by the madwifi Linux driver.

I have been running the x86_64 version of Linux on this laptop.

First impressions

Out of the box, FC5 works very well. Many more things "just worked" whereas they didn't work so well with FC4 and FC3.

The look and feel of FC5 is polished and clean. The Fedora project seems to be distancing itself from Red Hat and trying to create its own distinct identity. A fluid "f" cut out of an angled figure-8 is the mark of Fedora. The red hat icon is gone as the proverbial "start" button and replaced with an "f" icon. This almost completes Fedora's rite of passage which started with renaming all the redhat-config-* utilities to system-config-*.

What didn't go so well?

To get the Netgear cardbus adapter working, I had to employ some old tricks I learned from my experiences with FC3 and FC4. First, I had to add a couple lines to the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file:

include memory 0xe0100000-0xe17fffff
include port 0x3000-0x7fff

The cardbus card would (again) not be recognized unless this command is run: /sbin/setpci -s 0:a.0 SUBORDINATE_BUS=0A. I put it in /etc/rc.local.

Then, I needed to install the madwifi driver to access the Netgear card, but I knew LIVNA had RPMs for it before, so I checked to see if they had FC5 RPMs yet or if I could just grab a source RPM and build it myself.

LIVNA had the RPM I needed and I grabed the source RPM too because I knew I might need to compile it for a new kernel soon.

Well, as I type this, I'm using the wireless card, so it's working.

kpilot

The kpilot/korganizer applications haven't worked with my Palm Treo 650 since FC3. It's nice to see they're working again. This was a combination of kernel issues and KDE issues.