I used a slightly modified version of my instructions in this earlier post to upgrade my laptop from Fedora 13 to 14 today, without using a DVD drive or USB key etc. Basically PXE booted over the network and did a DVD upgrade using an NFS mounted ISO image.

Last time I did this for F13 I used the yum method which caused something like 3Gb to be downloaded and took overnight. With the DVD upgrade method it did the upgrade in about and hour, then I did a yum update which pulled down about 500Mb of updates newer than the DVD.

Everything went fine, at no point was there any manual fussing required or uninstalling/reinstalling of RPM’s, so it definitely went better than F12->13.

I’m thinking of buying a Netbook for using when on the road, along with a 3G modem. As Netbooks seem to be essentially all the same spec, I can’t really decide between an Asus Eee-PC 1005PX, HP Mini 110 3105sa or Acer Aspire One D255.

I’m leaning towards the HP as it has 2Gb RAM and a 250Gb hard drive, which will come in handy as I plan to triple boot Windows 7, Fedora 14 (or Ubuntu 10.10 or even Meego/Android) and MacOSX 10.6, it also has an Atom N455 processor which means DDR3 so slightly faster memory operations than the N450’s.

I tried Nessus and OWA at 1024×600 on my aunt’s Toshiba Netbook and it seems fine on a 10.1″ screen, especially if you go into fullscreen/kiosk mode or hide some toolbars.

Update: I’m now leaning towards the Asus 1005PE-M as its supposed to have the longest battery life of all the Netbooks at around 11 hours quoted, tested to 8.5+ with a 48Whr battery (the rare 1005PE-P does 14/10 hours with a 63Whr battery!) It is 250Gb and it has gigabit/802.11n/bluetooth, which just means upgrading to 2Gb which is about 30ukp on ebay or ebuyer, but that’s taking the total into the 280ukp+ range of a laptop…..

The 1005PX has a 48Whr battery quoted at 9 hours, and one less USB port.

The HP no longer seems to be advertised with 2Gb RAM, and has gone up to 260ukp for the 1Gb/250Gb version, and looks like the battery life is 6.5 hours.