[Hampshire] Fedora 11 & eeeBox B206

I have had the chance to try out Fedora 11 with the second generation
eeeBox hardware.

The first generation eeeBox had numerous problems with various Linux
Distros especially with 'X' due to the graphics Hardware.

The second generation uses an ATI Radeon GPU instead of the Intel one
and this time things are very different.

The B206 comes with a wireless KB & Mouse as well as an IR Remote
Control which makes it very suitable for a media centre. The ATI GPU has
a HDMI output and is supposed to be able to decode HD TV streams whereas
the old version (B202) could not.
The OOTB package includes XP-HOME (Sigh) but is useful to make sure
everything works prior to installing Linux.

I booted the Fedora 11 X86 DVD off of a DVD drive connected to one of
the 4 USB ports on the box. The usual Anaconda boot process started off.
This was a big difference to Fedora 10 release on a B202 due to the GPU
problems mentioned above. The install process was identical to
installing Fedora on any other system. I partitioned the 160Gb HDD
manually using a mixture of EXT3 & EXT4 filesystems. The actual software
installation took approx 30mins following a 'custom' selection. If I had
used the netinstall and a remote HTTP source for the options, this would
have been a lot less (I did a recent install with almost identical
package selections in 14mins).

After rebooting the Anaconda? First Boot process took over and after
setting up a user and the time, the Fedora Login screen was presented.
As with Fedora 10, root login is disabled (something I don't like) so I
logged in as the use I created in the first boot process and was
presented with a familiar Gnome screen. Something else I don't like is
that even though ipconfig reports that both eth0 and wlan0 are
configured you are not connected to the local LAN. You have to enable
this via an icon on the desktop. eth0 came up straight away. I only had
to enter the WEP key for wlan0 and then I was connected to my wireless
network. This is a once only exercise but I find it frustrating anyway
that at least for eth0, it is not enabled automatically.

I moved a MySQL db over from another (Centos) system and started the
service and everything worked. Infact everything on the B206 seems to
have worked with Fedora 11 right from the word go. A big thumbs up here
with one reservation.
The supplied ATI driver won't run compiz and at the moment there is no
proprietary driver available on rpmfusion at the moment. This is very
much a 'nice to have but not essential'.

what's next?

I'm going to try to use it as a media centre. I'll install myth TV with
a DVB-T USB tuner and see what happens but that is for another day.

I have installed Fedora 11 into a couple of VM's and again had no real
issues. A PPC Mac mini install was just the same. Everything working OOTB.

Conclusion:-
This is (As far as my limited testing goes) a pretty good release OOTB.

Stephen D