FC 5 installation results and Solaris woes(was: Why I love Fedora)

[Micah DesJardins]

I just wanted to give a Post Op on this process in case anyone else is
feeling squirrely enough to try it.

Hardware:

Dude! Work got me a Dell! (Optiplex GX620 P4 with 2GB RAM and 160 GB SATA)
Came with: XP (of course)

I tried a number of usually rock solid distros at first and I coudln't
get anything to get anywhere close to booting. (FC 4 and RHEL would
both crash before the prompt to verify media, it looks to be a video
syncing problem)

Knoppix 4.02 booted for me and I was able to get in and resize the
default ntfs partition from taking the whole drive down to 40gb
(qtparted from a root shell)

I was able to get Fedora Core 5 Test 1 to install properly after
wrestling with the video a bit (Bug in the default driver for millions
of colors, thousands works great for me and since I'm not doing image
editing I haven't taken this issue further at the moment. Also, it's a
test version so it will likely be fixed before FC 5 final.

Solaris 10 wouldn't install at all.  I tracked it down to a problem
with the SunOS boot loader and my USB only mouse and keyboard. 
Eventually I just moved over to the Solaris Express Community Edition
build 27 which is a snapshot of the 'In Development' Solaris, which
runs like a champ.

The only problem ? It wouldn't recognize any UFS partitions or free
space, and insisted on repartitioning the drive in order to install.

In the end I did this:

1. Installed Solaris (50GB partition.
2. booted with Knoppix and set up an NTFS partition (40GB)and left a
little over a third of the drive free (60GB).
3. Reinstalled XP from the factory install disks ignoring all the
gloom and doom about the Windoze boot loader and needing an active
partion.
4. Installed FC 5 test 1 and added the Solaris and XP partitions to
the boot menu.

All three OSes are running just ducky now, though Evolution does run a
tad slow. (This is largely due ot the fact that i operate at the very
limit of my quota most of the time)

Anyhow, FC 5 looks pretty spiff.  Is anyone else out there using it?

Micah