This section will feature info on the latest Fedora Red Hat and Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) Linux Distribution. Mandriva '06 is a vast improvement over the Mandrake 10.1. The wireless support is a lot better. It is detailed in my wireless section. The hardware detection is fabulous. It has a much fuller feature set including Peronal Information Management calendars, a nice media player, a good Adobe style PDF reader and can even detect external USB DVD/CD drives. The new version of Webmin for administering your servers is really nice.
Fedora is nice as it is now the only free Linux Distro that works on the
MAC Power PC (G3 G4 G5) chip. Note, there is a a problem with the
detection for the sound card. You need to edit the file /etc/rc.local
and add this line to it:
modprobe snd-powermac
right at the very top.
You also need to install a plugin with Mozilla Firefox to get Flash
working. You can install one or both of these by typing this at a
terminal prompt when you are root:
yum -y install gnash-plugin
yum -y install swfdec-mozilla plugin
Note this is a little buggy and still will not work with
Youtube.com. In the long run, Adobe needs to write a proper flash module
that will work on the Power PC chip. Please file a feature request on the
website
. If you can get to it, add to the feature/bug request I already filed at:
website
.
Aside from not getting your Flash properly working totally this is a
great distro giving you the standard mysql, perl, php , python and the Apache
web server. Of course you also get Open Office Version 2.4
There is a way for you to see You Tube Videos and Democracy Now programs along with Internet TV using the Miro free program which works on all Linux and MAC platforms. The images are really sharp and the sound is great.