It appears as though NTFS support in Fedora is no longer considered to be a “Forbidden Item”. A request has been made to include NTFS-3G into Fedora Extras. This has always seemed silly to me. The kernel has had NTFS read-only support for years. The kernel source shipped by Fedora includes the source to the driver. However someone thought that it violates some rules if shipped in binary format, but not in source.

I do not know how many people require PHP4 on Fedora Core 5. However since I find that I use it, I am providing PHP4 binary RPMs. Since I made the files available I did receive some complaints. Primarily a compile failure on x86_64 architecture and a compile failure on PPC architecture. I have no means to test PPC, however I have tested with x86_64 and had success. For x86_64 architecture, I have tested the src.

The market for Tablet PC’s and Webpads is not very large compared to the Desktop or Laptop markets. Their linux market is in fact much smaller. Some manufacturers however do produce linux compatible devices. Fujitsu provides a rather nice series of webpads. The older version Stylistic ST4110 Tablet PC originally had Windows XP Tablet Edition which was replaced with Linux. Users of Fedora know that a great deal of extra customization is required to properly setup the operating system.

Over the last weekend I installed Fedora Core 5 on a Dell Latitude D810 laptop. Unlike Jason’s laptop criteria, I basically required a Dell laptop. I wanted the D610, however it was unavailable and I had to settle for the D810. Even though I customized it, I really did not have any control over what hardware specifically would be better for Linux. However one luxury I was afforded was to be able to maximize the provided features.

With the recent purchase of a new harddrive I did not want to re-install every operating system on my previous drive. Since I dual boot with Windows, I first attempted to copy Windows. I tried multiple solutions and Norton Ghost met my requirements however a problem in 48bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing) in Windows 2000 caused too many problems. In the end I re-installed Windows. (Note: Linux does not have this problem).