I cannot believe this. I am actually chugging a blog out of a LINUX machine. No, the world is NOT coming to an END. Shouldn’t be anytime soon, especially now that I actually respect a Linux flavor. No, its still not got the XP charm [don’t even dream about it], but it CERTAINLY deserves a LOTTA respect. Maybe it was the time of the night [some 4 am on the 24th of Feb, 2005] or maybe it was the sleep that time… it certainly WOWED me out.

The sluggish, drab boring interface of Mandrake and Red Hat flavors that earlier had adorned my desktop gave their way to the slick XP and its blazing speeds, and amazing user intuition. Now, that is facing a very stiff competition from this very unassuming entry from the “Fedora world”. The Fedora Core 3 came across my way in the form of 5 CD images in a Digit DVD given to me by Shameer. At that time, I was cursing the damn thing coz it had to be actually written onto 5 CDs. Yeah I paid Rs. 48.00 and bought 6 cds and wrote the whole thing. But, now that effort doesn’t seem so bad.

The whole thing [or whatever I have installed of it] took about an hour of toiling and 3 CDs.. The end result – WOW! Although it will take some time to setup the look and make it behave the way you are used to – LIGHTNING QUICK, will take some time. Getting access to your NTFS volumes will take another chunk of time and searching through the various manuals and rpms. And one word of caution/advice. Go through the damned documentation. I tried searching and trying everything to cut to the chase and take the easy way out of getting access to NTFS volumes, but finally had to read that instructions webpage. The worst part, still not able to access it. Taking a break and hence decided to blog.

A Huge success for me was to set up the FC as a DHCP server that enables the other box in this room – another XP/FC3 box to utilize NET by making this a NAT [Network Address Translator] – the Linux counterpart of ICS [Internet Connection Sharing] – a wonderful ability of XP. I read through lot of bytes and finally was able to configure my FC3/XP machine to now act as a residential gateway and also got it to automatically assign IPs and DNS data to a computer that wants to network with this machine :)!

Well, I am getting back to getting my NTFS data in my FC3 environment. Shall do a proper write up about what are the steps that one needs to take in order to actually set up a working FC3 machine – a source for all the other seekers like me there. This should hopefully make their journey a lot more shorter. On my way to do that, I am off for another search about the NTFS crap!