After a day of struggles, I finally managed to installed Fedora 13, specifically the Electronics Lab Spin, on my desktop. Not that the amount of time it took me to install should deter anyone else, the trick that finally made it install was resetting my BIOS to its defaults. Why this worked is beyond me, but it strikes me as another one of those quirks that my computer has developed over the years.

So, now begins the process of configuring an new operating system to work the way I like it to. But, on the bright side, the hard drives show up, USB drives automatically mount when I plug them in, programs maximize within each monitor rather than the entire spread of both monitors, and best of all, I don’t have to screw around with xorg.conf at all.

I will note that I still have to unplug one of my monitors before I can boot into a system without graphics drivers installed, or else have an unusable output, but as soon as I installed the Nvidia drivers the problem was fixed (as usual).

Once I’ve finished installing all the programs I use on a daily basis, I’ll have to play around with some of the extra programs included on this spin (spin is Fedora’s word for edition).