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Originally Posted by senzmail
Regarding your comments on Fedora, it is not really a good distro. Upgrade is a pain. I failed to upgrade from FC5 to FC8. The Fedora forum insists that I should do a clean install.
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That's right, you cannot upgrade directly from FC5 => F8 (note the naming: 'core' dropped off after FC6). You would need to upgrade FC5 => FC6 => F7 => F8, and there is a possibility that any one of those upgrades fails partially or fully, and causes a lot of headache and repairing of the system. A clean installation is a lot faster and safer method, and if you have your /home on it's own separate partition, not even a hard one - just mount the newly installed system's /home to the partition where your home directories are and make sure it is not formatted during setup, and your personal data is spared. A clean upgrade (really an installation) is a lot better than upgrading trough a package manager because you don't need to be in an ethernet connection troughout the upgrade, you'll "clean" the root filesystem so any trouble that might be there is cleared at the same time, and overall things just work better, because the installation is a "predefined" procedure; it knows what to do and what to put where and what there is one the disks, whereas a package manager oriented upgrade might fail just because you have installed one or two packages that conflict.
Ubuntu offers a distribution upgrade trough it's package management system, even notifies you when a new version is out. It works, just as it works in Fedora (and you must upgrade it version by version like explained above, just like with any distribution), but still a clean installation is a lot better, and no slower.
Your personal data is the only possible culprit in the process. If it is not important to you, you can throw it away and have no trouble about it. If it is important, you have taken backups already, and you can proceed. If you haven't taken backups but you think your personal data is important, you should be taking the backups right away, because if you don't, you're pushing your luck. Every single piece of your computer may break at any moment, so don't count on any guarantees.
Fedora is just as good as any other distribution; the difference between them is what you think about them. For some Slackware is better than Fedora, others prefer Ubuntu, some plain Debian, others make LFS and some others love Gentoo. Simple as that. Your neighbour can't say Fedora sucks just because s/he dislikes it; you need to try it to see if it is the same for you than your neighbour.
Adding a module to the kernel doesn't always mean you need to recompile your whole kernel, but if it reads exactly so in the instructions, then you got to believe. It's not that bad compiling a new kernel, rather it's fairly easy these days. The "trouble" comes if you want to have the kernel upgraded after that: automatical upgrade won't work, because it would "get rid of" the module you insterted there yourself. But you don't of course have to upgrade your kernel every two weeks; you can live with that one kernel until your next distribution upgrade, and then recompile it again. Getting the kernel source code is easy trough the package managing application (install a package that says it contains kernel source), and after that all you got to do is follow the instructions. Just don't remove the running kernel, and don't remove it from your bootloader configuration, and you have a "backdoor" to use if the new kernel won't boot - easy as that. If it fails, you can re-try as if nothing had happened, or if it works, you can start using it.
I still wouldn't go about recompiling your kernel just because of an antivirus app. Linux doesn't suffer from computer viruses the way Windows does, rootkits and crackers are a more serious threat. Of course if your machine is connected to a Windows machine network, it's a good idea to scan files that travel trough your machine, to pick off infected ones and thus prevent the Windows machines from getting all that bad stuff..
