Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Fedora 7 test 4 review

Ok. So I finally got to install fedora without any problems. Installation was smooth except it took a lot of time. It took over 2 hours to install 862 packages. Well i guess that is because of my aging hard disk. But Yast never took so much time. SO maybe a problem with Anaconda installer. Anyways I had a good sleep in the meantime.

Here is what the KDE looks like.
By default KDE is not installed and Gnome is the default session. So make sure you install KDE. The K-menu is like the default KDE menu, no changes, I guess. Here is another one showing the menu.
Unlike openSUSE, Fedora doesn't mount your windows partitions by default. So if you are a beginner you might face a little problem. That was easily fixed by editing the fstab file. Another thing, you cant play mp3s like other linuxes by default. To do that you have to update the xine engine and/or install real player. That done Redhat works out to be like any other Linux. Connecting to the internet isn't that hard.

It seems a lot of bugs still remain to be fixed. The desktop effects don't work on my system though they are mostly the same as others out there, the wobbling effect and the cube effect. The add/remove software crashes every time I try to start it. it runs neither in KDE nor in Gnome. That are the problems I have experienced so far.

Fedora said it would merge the Core and extras. What that meant to me was it would contain a lot more packages. But I was disappointed to find almost no extra packages. if there were any i failed to discover them. there were no new packages which I had seen for the first time. Almost all packages are available in other linux.

The bottom line is Fedora doesn't give a reason to install it over other distros. Almost all linuxes are becoming the same. But one good thing is that it is fast even on low memory though the desktop effects may not work. So if you are a fedora fan you can go for it, otherwise be happy with Ubuntu or Suse whatever you are using. Theres nothing new here.

1 comment:

Aaron said...

When Fedora 7 is released on May 24th, Livna should provide an accompanying third-party RPM repository so you can download video drivers, MP3 playback support, commercial DVD playback support etc. using the (hopefully fixed) software updating tool, or through yum.