A look at Fedora 12

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Introduction

With all the problems I've had with Ubuntu 9.10 on my Lenovo 3000 C100 notebook I decided it was time to give another distribution a try. I briefly considered Debian GNU/Linux, Linux Mint, and OpenSUSE, but settled on Fedora for a few reasons:

• Red Hat Linux (before Fedora) used to be the bomb both in home and business.
• Red Hat Linux still is the bomb in business use.
• Of all the "mythtv" distributions I've used I've had the best success with MythDora, the Fedora-based distribution.
• The Fedora team has some pretty novel projects going on (Sugar).
• I've met with some of the Fedora team and find the project pretty interesting.

Installation notes

One of the first steps I usually do even before installing is change the installation resolution from a safe 800x600 to 1024x768 (which is the maximum my notebook can do - I know it sucks). The Fedora 12 DVD doesn't appear to have an F-key setting to change the resolution, though I'm sure it's possible by appending to the command line. As it turns out that setting wasn't necessary, Fedora seemed to do a good job setting the installation resolution to 1024x768 all by itself.

The next important step was partitioning. I decided to keep Windows XP Home on my other partition and my partition setup is a little more complicated than the average setup, but Fedora handled it well. In the past I had problems with the partitioning/formatting tool crashing in the middle of a job, no such problems with Fedora 12. My setup looks something like this:

no mount point ntfs 20GB (Windows XP)
/ ext4 20GB (Fedora 12)
/dos vfat 5GB (Share for Windows/Linux)
/home xfs 33GB (Fedora /home partition)
swap swap 2GB

The only two gotchas are that I couldn't set the Windows XP ntfs partition with a mount point and the /dos mount point is set so that only root has permission to access it (easily changed in /etc/fstab).

One other oddity was that I deleted the / (originally Ubuntu) partition instead of just formatting it. When it came time for formatting only the /home and swap showed up in the list of devices that were to be formatted. That said / did get formatted. If you delete a partition during the setup and then create a new partition, just be aware that it might not show up in the devices to be formatted, but it will get formatted if you specify.

One really nice feature that I miss in Ubuntu is the ability to name and select the WindowsXP (or other OS) as the first device to be booted. This is really well implemented in Fedora.

I was also able to check off extra repositories (sources of software) for Fedora to pull from during the installation. I added the Software Development packages and the i386 and i386 updates repositories.

As programs began to install I saw each one pass by, rather than a marketing message. I like seeing what's getting installed and it's done in an elegant manner.

While there were 1406 packages being installed I expected the install to go a bit faster. After the install it seemed like Fedora had installed a lot of software, but the menus were practically bare. This is of course because a lot of what got installed are command-line tools and system management tools. I expected to see more than 3 tools in the Programming menu.

Usage

When I rebooted Fedora I saw the same hated/dreaded GDM2 login screen. I absolutely hate GDM2 and cannot understand why distributions are adopting it, it plain sucks guys!

One pleasant surprise was that my Broadcom wireless just worked! I think this is because I used a DVD install instead of the Live CD install. Whatever the case, I was very pleased to see it working right off the bat - top marks just for that.

The background and general theme are a whole lot more pleasant than Ubuntu, but I like blue much better than brown. Fedora seems pretty bare compared to Ubuntu in the software available. There are fewer games and fewer applications installed by default. But I like this minimalism.

One of the things I do on my notebook is edit video. I was surprised to see that dvgrab is included in the repositories, but kino is not. I solved this by adding a repository for RPM Fusion. There are good instructions for adding RPM Fusion on the fusion web site. The Fusion repositories make quite a few proprietary packages available that are not in the Fedora repositories.

So far, so good. My Lenovo 3000 C100 seems to be operating at a low temperature, and some of the Fedora 12 notes reflect the fact that one of the things improved in Fedora 12 is power management.

All in all I'm very pleased with Fedora 12. It's fast, it's stable, it looks nice, and it seems to just work. While there's a little bit more work to do than Ubuntu, it's pretty darn stable and seems to work better than Ubuntu's latest incarnation.