All right! I finally got Fedora accessing the Internet properly through my wireless card, and it did so without using the RPM packages that were required for Redhat 8 and Redhat 9. It’s got all of the necessary drivers built in, and it turned out that it was detecting the card all along. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m not entirely sure what I did, other than to avoid going through a firewall on the installation. The thing is, I wasn’t using it before and I still get a message during the boot process that orinco.cs device is not present – that’s the wireless card, even though it clearly is there since everything is working fine. That is troublesome.
I’m good to go, for the most part, but I’m still not sure I want to upgrade my work machine since my grokking is incomplete. I suppose I’ll probably back up all my important files and have a go at it sometime next week. I can always drop back to RH9 if it doesn’t work out since I understand how that setup works. Well, actually, I don’t understand it, but I can make it perform dependably. That’s the difference between the Power User and the Hacker. The former can make things work, they just don’t know why. Or, as the above example shows, sometimes how.
I like what I’ve seen of Fedora. It’s a little snappier, and it seems as if the programs run a bit more quickly than RH8. In particular, Evolution doesn’t spin its wheels while shutting down. I also just DL’d the latest version of WINE and was able to run my Windows Palm Reader, which was pretty cool. If I can do the same with the hotsync software – not an option on that machine thanks to its broken USB – I’ll be very psyched.