Fedora Core 6 Mini Review

I upgraded my desktop to Fedora Core 6 which was released earlier this week.  Its a pretty sweet system.  One of the coolest features is that  booting and installing from USB devices finally works as advertised.  Installing from my USB hard drive took about 15 minutes, even faster than the network installations.  Gnome 2.16 is pretty sweet and Fedora has lots of new eye candy.

Most of the external repositories such as Freshrpms and Livna already have the majority of their RPMS built for FedoraCore 6, at least on i386.  This made a huge difference in pulling in alot of the smaller applications that don’t fall under the Fedora Extras umbrella, due to licensing restrictions or other reasons.

All in all it’s a great release and it is definitely worth the time and the hassle that sometimes come along with upgrading Linux distributions.

Potsdam

This weekend I’ll be in Potsdam for my fraternity’s alumni weekend.  I’m not sure what time I’ll be getting in but I might have time to swing into the lab on Saturday during the workday, right now it depends on the weather.  It’d be nice to see it completely put together.

Fiber Optic Networking

Burlington has gradually been rolling out a Fiber Optic network in Residential Areas and neighborhoods. This service is available through Burlington Telecom. This is a municipal utility that is offering Cable, Phone, and Internet on the cheap.  I’ll probably be switching.  It’ll be interesting to see how much faster it is than my current connection from Adelphia.  It’s also got symetric speed for Internet service.

Fedore Core 5 and Ndiswrapper

So I’ve upgraded to wireless on my desktop because I’ve gotten to frustrated with having constantly run an ethernet cable from my bedroom through the kitchen to my living room.  I went with a Dlink DWL-G120.It’s a smaller USB 2.0 based network adapter with a long cable so you can move it to get the best possible reception.  The adapter is based on the prism54 chipset that does have some Linux support that is currently in development.  I chose to use Ndiswrapper to use the Windows driver because it will be more stable.

The driver that was included on the CD (Version 2.00) that came with the adapter did work after a little bit of work.  It didn’t work with the latest version of Ndiswrapper,  and the latest Fedora kernel but it did work with Ndiswrapper version 1.18 and kernel version 2.6.17-1.2187_FC5

Hello Ada

Here’s a simple Hello World program written in Ada.  Its as simple as any other Hello World program in most modern languages.

with Ada.Text_IO;

procedure Hello is
begin
Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line(”Hello, world!”);
end Hello;

To compile and execute this execute with gnat, with the make option.  gnat make and then that will create a hello execute that you can then execute like any other program.

A little bit about Ada

A lot of people have barely heard of Ada.  It’s an older language but has alot of features that aren’t found in many modern languages.  These features make it great for embedded systems and other large and very complex systems.  Some of these features include some of the features found in modern OOP based languages.  They include

• Generics
• Packages
• Thread support

In addition to the features of most modern OOP languages it also has support for lower level hardware based programming that makes the code much more maintainable that C.  There are several different Ada compilers and IDEs available.  GCC contains support for Ada through the Gnat compiler.  There is also an IDE that integrates with Gnat called Gps.  It can be downloaded here.