When I installed Fedora on my laptop I used the 32-bit x86 version (3 days ago).  It didn’t even occur to me that the laptop I’m using has an AMD 64-bit processor in it.  My “normal” laptop, which runs Vista, has a 32-bit Intel proc in it.  I guess I got a little too used to installing 32-bit stuff…

Anyhow, I’m rebuilding using the 64-bit version of FC9.  I caught myself heading over to a Windows box to download the ISO and burn it using Nero when I thought, “Uh, hello?  Windows hunger strike, remember?”  Well, as a day-to-day “Linux as my desktop noob” I realized that I’ve never burned an ISO using Linux before.  Well , how to do it?  A few google searches showed me that are many ways of making it happen.  I was initially going to use dvdrecord from a terminal (which I found referenced here) but then decided to try a GUI tool instead.  I found a reference to a tool called K3b on this page.  It is not installed on FC9 by default so I tried typing yum install k3b from a terminal.  Bam!  Dependencies resolved, downloaded, installed …along with k3b.  There were 13 additional packages that needed to be installed to support k3b.  Without yum I’m sure I would have spent hours following that trail (which I have done waaaayyyyy too many times before).  I can’t express how much yum impresses me.

With any luck my next post will be from the 64-bit version of Fedora 9.

Colin