Fedora 7: The Good
Been a while since I launched a Linux post. What better catalyst than the recent release of Fedora 7. Note the omission of 'core.' Since one of my companies proprietary tools had a domestic disagreement with how SuSE 10.2 handles USB devices, I was forced to replace my usual distribution with Fedora. Despite all the purple in the default theme, so far it has been a great experience. There are a couple of things that Fedora does right, and a couple of things it does wrong. Let us begin our two post discussion of Fedora with the good:
The Good
Installation
First on the list of good things is the installation procedure. It took me less than 20 minutes to install Fedora 7 from a DVD. That is very impressive. Additionally, all the installer screens are sleek, intuitive, and very well designed. Creating a custom harddrive partition schema was much faster than in any other distribution I have used so far.
Fonts
Fedora's biggest big green check in my book is the way it renders fonts. Or maybe it's just because SuSE 10.2 does this horribly. Fonts in Fedora are beautiful, crisp, and sub-pixel hinted straight out of the box. No screwing around with byte-code values or dpi settings. It just works.
Hardware Compatibility
Something should also be said about Fedora's hardware compatibility. Hands down this has to be the most hardware friendly distribution of Linux on the market. It automatically detected my NVidia Quadro and configured the xorg perfectly.
Package Management
One thing that confuses lots of Linux newbies is how to get software on their machine. These days most Linux distributions have jumped on the package manager bandwagon--to the advantage of users everywhere, but users must still install package repositories because of legal issues with some software that cannot be shipped with any distribution (mp3 support is a good example). Fedora simplifies the repository setup process by having the Red-Hat Package Management (rpm) system do all the work for you. To install a new repository like LIVNA, simply go to the website and install the repository rpm. That's it. No more configuration needed. New software can be browsed relatively easily via Fedora's dependency resolving package manager.
So far I am quite happy with Fedora, but it is not without it's annoyances and room for improvement. I'll save that for next post =D.
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July 10th, 2007 - 12:57
xgl/compiz?
July 10th, 2007 - 20:43
i understood you better before you graduated.
July 10th, 2007 - 23:54
I updated the kernel this morning and forgot the fact of now that I’m using an Nvidia graphics card, that you have to update/reinstall the Nvidia driver to match your kernel. Rebooted, and no gui. So after bumbling around in Yseless YAST as I’d like to call it, I finally ran Smart in shell form, and it really works great. I removed the old driver, and slapped in a newer one. Smart also warned me that I still had an ATL fglrx driver installed. Ooops. Updated, which gave me a new Thunderbird that finally has the nice little popup notifcation like the Windows version, restarted X, and now things are great again.
Though, I really have learned my lesson about running a 64-bit OS. It’s not horrible, but it’s not perfect by any means either. YMMV though.