The Site With the Lamp

September 1, 2008

p>I moved away from Fedora a few weeks ago after becoming increasingly annoyed with it's messy upgrade process. The distro that I chose was Debian. Here in Sri Lanka we have adage that goes like 'giving up ginger to get chilly'. The saying apparently first came into use a few centuries ago when Portuge invaders were chased away and the Dutch took their place.

In English, you say, out of the frying pan into the fire. If Fedora is almost as bad as windows and Debian is just as bad. Thus someone moving from Fedora to Debian can claim to have fallen from the frying pan into the fire.

I've been annoyed with it for quite a while but the last straw was when my Lanka Bell wimax connection crawled to a halt. Amazingly it seemed to be pretty quick on windows. Obviously there is no way that Vista can be better than linux at anything so that means there is some configuration issue. Then I tried my media server which still has Fedora 9 and that was as fast as the Vista lappy I tested the connection with.

It took me quite a while to figure out the cause of the problem - there is a major misconfiguration on the part of Lanka Bell. More on that later - i want to give them time to fix it before making it public. Suffice to say, i was being routed through a network that I shouldn't have been sent through. The trouble is I never could figure out how to make it stop on debian (yep, that really is my fault - I never got the hang of the /etc/ layout in debian). However fixing it on my fedora box and hardening the firewall was a breeze.

So the logical decision was to remove Debian and put in Fedora once again. Guess what, doing a fresh installation is a lot easier than an upgrade.