This afternoon during lunch, I downloaded Fedora 11, burned it to CD, and ran it on a test PC at work. The PC is an HP D530 Intel P4 running at 3.00 GHz, 2 GB of Ram, and 80 GB SATA hard drive, and a unknown video card connect to a 22″ Samsung wide-screen. Currently I am writing this post using the Live User session from the CD and it works nicely. I was pleasantly surprise that I was able to enable the Desktop Effects to have the spinning cube and wobbly windows. Usually I have no luck with that kind of stuff.
I was going through the menu and found a cool program called Palimpsest Disk Utility. I selected drive sda and it told me the drive was running for 4.25 hours (which I know is incorrect because the PC never turns off), the current temperature, when it was last tested and updated, and assessment. I can click on the Details button and see all kinds on information such as Spinup Time, Seek Error Rate, Write Error Rate, plus a slew of other attributes. there is also a Self Test button which I do not want to run because this PC is a production unit, and if I goof and wipe out the hard drive, I’ll have to rebuild.
If I get a chance, I’ll have to install it on a test PC to check out the other features and see what’s new and different between FC11 and Ubuntu 9.04. But as of right now, my work day is over and I need to head home to be with the family.
Drahusz 