Yeah, I'm late to the party. I kept FC5 installed until this past weekend even though I've had a Fedora 7 DVD for a couple months. I finally backed up all my data so I could do a clean install, here's how it went and some comments.
Installation was painless. Smolt? sure, why not. I chose the desktop & software development options, unchecked the SSH option, and went ahead. Why is SSH enabled by default? I still don't know if it's possible to allocate more than 2GB of swap (I'd do 8 or 10 for some test apps I write that can go way beyond physical memory) or how to do it - not that important. Having the DVD is fantastic - previously I had to babysit and change CDs several times during installation.
Updates were suggested and there were 136 available because I came to Fedora 7 so late. I said to go ahead and let it run.... Overnight.... I've got a 112K internet connection... Then I had to click something in the morning prior to the updates being applied.... go shower, eat breakfast, etc... System is updated and works fine. I also noticed some i386 updates (like firefox) but this is a x64-64 system. This has me puzzled but not concerned. The quantity of updates is also curious, I wonder how many are for security and how many for some other reasons - and what are those reasons? No big deal.
Changed Icon for Firefox on the top of the screen. I can understand following a theme and all, but I've changed the browser icon in every Fedora so far. Yeah, this is the type of complaint I've got about Fedora. BTW, the new background and icons all look more modern and professional. The only complaint I have is "a bit too much blue". Blue computer, blue home, blue trash can, blue folders in home that all look the same. Very nice, but a little too blue which is probably why the Firefox icon isn't used. I also didn't really care for all the empty folders in my home even though I would have created Pictures and Video on my own. I assume there are some applications that work out of the box with the names chosen, so I left them alone - later, a screen saver option to show pictures from that folder confirmed this.
Video Drivers had to be installed. While I could live without BZflag, and my own development uses SDL for blitting, things were slower but not sluggish in 2D. Reading a forum thread here, I saw some code for installing the nVidia driver from Livna. Highlighted it, middle clicked it into a terminal (cut and paste is so Windows) as root and nothing happened. The RPM
http://livna.... to enable the repository was not working and there was nothing in the thread about that. I firefoxed over and clicked on the link directly. RPM said something about a key for the repository and I looked around the site without finding it. Clicked to enable it anyway and then further yum commands for the drivers worked fine. The key-failure was not mentioned in the thread, and I believe this caused a silent failure previously when nothing happened. Is this expected for Livna or should I go back and find the key? Drivers work great now, performance of my code is now the same or 1% better than on FC5. Driver installation with Livna was simpler than ever.
Additional packages are always a must for me. I really feel that Inkscape, gnuCash, and gLables should be part of the standard install. gLabels in particular since it's so small for its usefulness. I check kicad (for circuit design) and wxMaxima along with BZflag. Everything installs just fine. I notice that kicad and wxMaxima are added to the "Educational" menu which is a bit better than kicad going into "other" like it did in the past. I still believe there should be an "Engineering" menu for kicad, gEDA, qCAD, etc... "Education" feels more like the apps are misplaced rather than forgotten completely like "Other" did. I'm still not completely happy with the menu placement. Again, this little stupid stuff is all I can find to complain about with Fedora. Good job guys. I noticed Flightgear is now available, but I'll wait for another night since it is a big package.
Add/remove software Has always been so much better in Fedora than over in Windows. Fedora gives you this great pile of software with some great stuff that you can actually ADD by checking the box. Compare that to Windows which really only allows you to remove stuff :-)
ZD1211 Firmware also caught my attention since it was checked by default in the package selection list. This is correct for my wireless device. I have a wired connection, so I never tried the wireless before. I did make sure I bought a device that was getting support in the Linux kernel and I figured at some point in the future it would just work out of the box. It looks like that time has come, so I'll play around with that one of these days.
Desktop Effects are a mixed bag. I never tried this stuff before, but I figured with the nVidia drivers it should work so I tried it. Going to the system menu to enable it was easy. The little box came up asking if it worked or if I wanted to go back to my previous settings. I said to go back, and the screen froze with no text on anything. Good thing there is a reset button. Later on I decided to try again. I clicked "Enable Desktop Effects" and said to keep it this time. I like the drop shadows a lot. I miss having windows that stick together. Not having sticky windows drives me insane using MS Windows at work. At least they can't be dragged off the top of the screen in Fedora. I find the new windows fading in and closed windows fading out much nicer than the normal instant behavior. I suppose it's less of a shock to the human visual system or something. ALT-TAB is very well done, but I normally don't use that to change windows. Maybe I'll start doing that. Anyway, I wanted to compare to the experience with Effects off to see if I really miss the sticky windows. The dialog came up but instead of "Disable Desktop Effects" it still said "Enable Desktop Effects". Oops. I figured the behavior of the button may be correct anyway, so I clicked it. Screen froze with no text anywhere just like last time, but since the settings are saved, I'm stuck with effects enabled for now. I'm OK with that, but I would classify this bug as serious anyway. It's an option that is built in by default and locks things up so bad I need to reboot (and they are still enabled). It's a good thing the effects seem to work correctly or I'd have serious issue.
Looking forward to the day when the nouveau driver can be the default at least for 2D, and preferably for 3D. Wireless remains untried, but if it doesn't work out of the box now, it clearly should at some time in the near future. Hopefully gnash will become good enough for default installations too (I still need to install it on F7 but it was mostly fine in FC5). I'm thinking Fedora 9ish may not require anything special for my hardware, and just MPEG support will require effort (a few more years for the patents to expire). Not that using Livna is hard or anything, it's just that having to DO something is an extra step beyond "just-works" which is how most of my Fedora 7 experience has been - even simpler with 7 than it was with 5, 4, and 3.
Comments on the above minor issues would be appreciated. In particular, the Livna key issue and disabling of desktop effects.
Linear Mode
