vibrokatana
New Member
After work Monday I decided to wipe fedora 7 from my system and install the new release. For awhile I had wanted to install the 64bit version but was deterred by incompatibilities with the 32bit necessities (mainly flash and binary games).
Backing up data:
Since I have my /home directory (which contains all my personal files) on a seperate partition I simply kept the partition and mapped it to /home/oldhome in the event I needed something from it.
Installation:
Fedora uses anaconda which is a very mature and robust installer, which tends to be very user friendly once you have used it a tid bit. Some people may be confused by the more advanced options, but they can be safely left alone. Due to my system configuration (2x 160gb and 1x500gb) I set up a raid 1 with the gui and threw a huge volume for downloads/media/backups on the 500gb.
After the partitions are set up it is pretty much just clicking next until you reach the installation stage where you can start it and safely go out for a snack and/or watch tv for a bit.
Quirks:
The new version of fedora uses pulseaudio which for the most part works wonderfully but has issues with some older programs. Luckily there is a simple gui to switch the system back over the the traditional alsa system.
There was a bug in the updatedb program for locate which causes it to error out when it tries to index usb devices (which it shouldn't do), a quick google and 30 seconds later the bug was fixed. I am a big fan of the locate utility, which is the only reason I used it.
SELinux by default will beat the snot out of samba, which you can fix pretty easily following the information in the alert messages that pop up. It even gives you the exact command to fix it o0
When I installed I had 190 updates waiting for me, yummy. Newer users might frown at updates being released so often.
Front end:
For the most part the front end is the same, however gnome has been updated and the overall look is much nicer. The desktop background, theme, and fonts has been integrated into a simple window with tabs. There is a simple thing to switch various font rendering stuff, like sub pixel rendering which looks great on LCDs.
Firefox can run in 64bit and contain plugins in 32bit via ndiswrapper. A simple visit to the adobe site yields a rpm you can install, reboot the browser and flash is setup. My nvidia drivers still requires a third party repo, luckily livna still has a wonderful repo that only takes a few minutes to install. One command and the video drivers were installed. Use the simple gui tool the repo installs to configure the driver and you don't even need to touch the xorg.conf.
Fedora still does not include support for unlicensed codecs, which is proper for licensing issues in america. Livna includes a few "dirty" packages that installs just about any codec you would need to play along with xine, which has flawless dvd playback.
Compiz comes configured out of the box and works like a charm once you have the proper video drivers installed, included is a simple gui to turn on the effects.
Conclusion:
Nothing really new besides a few improvements. Overall I like the new release and the small improvements are very satisfying if overall minor in the scheme of things. Total installation and setup time was something like 3 hours for all the major components, which is very very nice compared to some of the other operating systems.
Images:
some video playback
effects toggle
fonts tool thingy
That was boring...
Backing up data:
Since I have my /home directory (which contains all my personal files) on a seperate partition I simply kept the partition and mapped it to /home/oldhome in the event I needed something from it.
Installation:
Fedora uses anaconda which is a very mature and robust installer, which tends to be very user friendly once you have used it a tid bit. Some people may be confused by the more advanced options, but they can be safely left alone. Due to my system configuration (2x 160gb and 1x500gb) I set up a raid 1 with the gui and threw a huge volume for downloads/media/backups on the 500gb.
After the partitions are set up it is pretty much just clicking next until you reach the installation stage where you can start it and safely go out for a snack and/or watch tv for a bit.
Quirks:
The new version of fedora uses pulseaudio which for the most part works wonderfully but has issues with some older programs. Luckily there is a simple gui to switch the system back over the the traditional alsa system.
There was a bug in the updatedb program for locate which causes it to error out when it tries to index usb devices (which it shouldn't do), a quick google and 30 seconds later the bug was fixed. I am a big fan of the locate utility, which is the only reason I used it.
SELinux by default will beat the snot out of samba, which you can fix pretty easily following the information in the alert messages that pop up. It even gives you the exact command to fix it o0
When I installed I had 190 updates waiting for me, yummy. Newer users might frown at updates being released so often.
Front end:
For the most part the front end is the same, however gnome has been updated and the overall look is much nicer. The desktop background, theme, and fonts has been integrated into a simple window with tabs. There is a simple thing to switch various font rendering stuff, like sub pixel rendering which looks great on LCDs.
Firefox can run in 64bit and contain plugins in 32bit via ndiswrapper. A simple visit to the adobe site yields a rpm you can install, reboot the browser and flash is setup. My nvidia drivers still requires a third party repo, luckily livna still has a wonderful repo that only takes a few minutes to install. One command and the video drivers were installed. Use the simple gui tool the repo installs to configure the driver and you don't even need to touch the xorg.conf.
Fedora still does not include support for unlicensed codecs, which is proper for licensing issues in america. Livna includes a few "dirty" packages that installs just about any codec you would need to play along with xine, which has flawless dvd playback.
Compiz comes configured out of the box and works like a charm once you have the proper video drivers installed, included is a simple gui to turn on the effects.
Conclusion:
Nothing really new besides a few improvements. Overall I like the new release and the small improvements are very satisfying if overall minor in the scheme of things. Total installation and setup time was something like 3 hours for all the major components, which is very very nice compared to some of the other operating systems.
Images:
some video playback
effects toggle
fonts tool thingy
That was boring...
