Recently I brought a new PC. It is a Pentium IV 2 GHz, 256 MB DRAM machine with 40x12x48 CD-RW and a DVD-ROM, 40GB hard disk, On-board sound and genuine Intel motherboard. It is enclosed in a nice burnish silver colored casing with a stylish handle at the top which is helpful in moving the computer if I want to rearrange it. The computer has 5 USB 2.0 ports with one port at the front and four ports at the back of the casing. I did not buy a new monitor and decided to use the 14" (Samsung Samtron 40Bn) monitor from my previous PC - which by the way was an Intel Celeron 333MHz 98MB RAM machine. My new computer came with windows XP Professional pre-installed. So the first thing I did was install the latest version of Linux I had with me, which was Fedora Core 2. All things considered, I decided to dual-boot between WindowsXP and Linux.
Unlike my previous experience ( Read my previous posts - sound , mouse and modem issues ), this installation went smoothly.Fedora detected my on-board sound card - 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio - correctly and loaded the snd_intel8x0 module. Mouse was detected as a PS/2 scroll mouse and the installer even detected the optimal resolution of the monitor and configured X to start with the best resolution. As far as Internet is concerned, I got myself a (broadband ??) 128Kpbs Cable Internet connection and the modem was connected via an ethernet port.
The performance gains were incredible. It took less than 30 sec for my new machine to load KDE desktop from the time it was switched on; while it took forever on my Celeron 333MHz machine.
But the installation did have a few rough edges though. It correctly detected my video card as a NVIDIA GeForce 2MX. But when I tried playing Chromium BSU game in Linux, it was too slow - though I was able to play the game in windowsXP quite well. I found to my consternation that X was using a generic display driver.To get the full power of the graphics card, I had to configure X to use Nvidia drivers instead of the generic ones.
Overall, I am really satisfied with the way my new machine responds to Linux.
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