Welcome to Fedora 12!

I had tried to install Fedora 6 on my MacBook Pro 2-3 years ago but those days you have to hack to many things inside the kernel and config, that I gave up after one week of struggling. So, I have to use this %$#$%@ MacOSX, which looks like OS for emo teenager. I mean this young true emo kid, who is cutting himself with a pink razor to see his own artificial blood made of ketchup shouting and crying about Miss Spears private and public life. All this fancy jumping and zooming in and out icons and all this very deeply hidden options/configuration files...

Hopefully in the meantime good guys from Fedora were working on a new releases. And once Fedora 12 was released (well, I should say once I have realised it) I had gazed my eyes onto it eager to try it out once again. So I've downloaded x86_64 DVD ISO image, burned it and kept it at my fingertips, but the next step was o download and install in MacOSX small application called rEFIt. Afterwards I've downloaded and burned ISO image of gparted, moved, just for curiosity all my files to external USB hard drive and the repartitioning started straight away... I have shrunk main HD hpfs+ partition to 20 GB and created small /boot (300 MB), bigger /root (30GB) and rather huge /home (the rest) partitions, all using ext4 format. I've also created really small swap (2GB) at the very end of disk.

Then I put Fedora 12 installation DVD into slot and installation started. When it completed new lovely Tux has shown up under rEFIt menu just after resyc'ing HD master boot record with GUID. Then I logged to MacOSX once again only for changing boot options and choosing Fedora by default. I can't remember what I exactly did, but all details are in rEFIt documentation.

And then I've rebooted my laptop once again waiting with my fingers crossed to boot into Fedora 12 for the very first time.

What works out of the box? Built-in camera, track pad, ethernet and wireless cards, graphic adapter, special keys for LCD brightness, sound volume and keyboard backlight.

For the sound I have to tweak it a little putting into
/etc/modprobe.d/sound file this config:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=mbp3

and reboot it once.

Then I set up Polish keyboard mapping (System → Preferences → Keyboard → Layout → Add and look for Polish, then modify Options for input of Polish characters, AFAIR I've ticked "Any ALT key" in "Key to choose 3rd level" option). Et voila: ąśźżłóę. :)

Then I went to standard procedure of installation of VERY IMPORTANT APPS (krb5, openafs, LDAP for Thunderbird etc.) googling for their configuration in cern.ch domain.

And that's it! Since one month I'm working on Fedora 12. And I'm very happy!

Post-installation took me some more time, especially that Fedora guys are really good guys and they're not distributing any piece of code which has got some problem with the Law (so i.e. there are no mp3 codecs in official Fedora yum repos etc.). Fortunately all is quite good documented on Internet by not-so-good guys and easy to find thanks to Google, Inc.

Farewell MacOSX! Never see you again! Never ever come back!!!