Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Last weekend I bought some more RAM and a new, larger hard disk for my laptop. I was worried about the RAM, seeing the dramas that Chris Smart had with buying RAM for his laptop recently, but it went in smoothly. It may have been a bit more to buy Kingston RAM but I felt a lot more confident that it would work, and I really hate having to grovel around with different settings and playing with different configurations to try and determine whether a new hardware upgrade has worked.

The hard disk was likewise pretty easy to upgrade - SATA laptop drives don't have to have a special easy-to-connect dongle wasting space internally. Also, one of those naked drive to USB adapters is an essential part of any techie's kit. I set up a new boot partition and LVM system on the drive, copied my partitions over to it, and then booted up the Werewolf install CD (I find it faster to install off an NFS share, and better on the environment to reuse a CD-RW). Yes, that's right, I was installing Fedora 8 as well.

That last part has caused me the most grief of all. Werewolf is a very nice piece of work overall - it detected the full resolution of the screen without having to fiddle the BIOS with 915resolution, it had the Intel 3945 WiFi working with zero hassle (a big change from FC6) and its font choice, though very large, is quite nice. I have, however, had major problems with it in getting Compiz working and getting it to suspend to RAM without subsequently crashing. Both, more annoyingly, seem to have come good of their own accord, although when resuming I seem to have to press Ctrl-Alt-F6 and then Ctrl-Alt-F7 to get the screen to refresh. Also annoyingly, because of having to do a fresh install (because it couldn't resolve dependcies for the upgrade) it's clobbered my GNOME keyring.

Still, compared with Fista it's an absolute gem.