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After my employer crashed following a story worthy of Hollywood movies (complete with operations signed by 3-letter American agencies) I see myself finally on the jobs market and open to freelancing stuff. Considering the local market for graphic design using FOSS tools or for open community things, freelancing may be a long term option. Or embracing the "dark side" may be a more practical approach. We'll see. The net result is for the foreseeable future I should have more time to take care of the blog and participate to local FOSS events (one of those will take place soon, I will write about it in a few days when there are thing ready to announce).

So when freelancing the first step is to get an office at home ready for work. In my case, getting the household laptop usable: it was used with Windows 7 for trivial tasks: web surfing, multimedia play and very light photo editing. I left from the start some unpartitioned space to put a Linux "later, when will get enough free time" (and an unspoken "when a decent Fedora release comes out" - my desktop at work was still F14). I can't use a Windows system for real work, so a Fedora install was in order.

Since, aside the horrible new Anaconda UI, the experience of installing Fedora 18 Beta on my netbook was smooth enough, I expected the same on the laptop (a "N" series Dell, one of those sold with FreeDOS). But wrong I was. It was the hardest Fedora install ever, I may exaggerate a bit, but it felt worse than Red Hat Linux 4.2 (my first Fedora/RHEL/RHL) install.

The first problem was creating the LiveUSB: the Fedora tool refused to play nice and I didn't feel like going the dd way on Windows, so Unetbootin did the trick again.

I didn't count, but I believe I had to restart the installer over a dozen of times because it crashed in various places (most often when configuring the storage or right after it - and don't imagine I tried complex stuff, just "simple partition" as ext4).

Finally, I managed a workaround for the storage part (create all the partitions as LVM and then change their type to "simple") and had a "lucky" run with no crashes elsewhere and the install finished. Had to disable ACPI so the computer won't lock-up at boot, but that's pretty much a rule when running Linux. Now the computer is up and running with a shiny MATE desktop, configured to look and act pretty much as my old and trusted Fedora 14. I was able to take a first (unpaid) task today.