Fedora 9 on my T60p

My T60p is a machine provided by my employer and it had been running Fedora 7 and then I yum upgraded to Fedora 8. Some of the things on it were not working as best as they could, like the screen saver and such. So I decided to do a clean install of Fedora 9.

I got the DVD and reinstalled, formatting the / and /boot partitions and leaving the /home partition mounted by not formatted (don't want to lose my data). Prior to doing all this I got all the packages I needed to get on the VPN so that I could connect to my office and get the additional tools I needed as well as a few config files.

The reinstall went quickly and then I had to install about 400MB of post Fedora 9 patches and another 400MB of tools for work. The only gripe I have about the install is that I did have my network activated during install, why could of the updated packages not have been installed at that point, anyway, minor nit.

All in all about 3hrs later I had my laptop working with VPN and connection to my office and I was able to get on our email system and get my mail. I then grabbed a couple of other apps and then got VMWare working (needed the vmware-any-any 117 patch). After that I added my acpi scripts and everything was working fine. 3d is not working on the machine since fglrx does not work with Fedora 9 yet and the r500 drivers have not been pushed to updates yet. I understand that they are in queue, just waiting for a bit more stabilization. Everything else on the machine is working except for the dialup modem, but I think I would have to be really desperate to have to resort to that.

I was able to use my laptop on battery for about 2.5hrs the other night which is not bad and the meter said I still had about an hour of battery left. The other thing is while I was on battery the machine was VERY cool. And in fact the machine seems cool even when plugged in. Which is nice as a hot laptop is a pain. The machine is a dual core (2.16Ghz) with 3GB of RAM in a < 1" slab so to even be slightly warm is something short of a miracle.

So to completely reload a machine from DVD and have it all updating and working in about 4-6hrs is pretty great. I've very sure I could not have done that with a Windows box. And remember with Windows you still have to install Office and all that other stuff, where with Fedora it comes as part of the install.