Installing

Fedora’s slick and easy-to-use installer.

I wanted to upgrade from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 (see this post) but ran into some problems with Preupgrade, the upgrade software and Anaconda, the system installer. It complained about a missing repodata file. Filing a bug with Fedora BugZilla, asking on the forum and the mailing list did not give me an answer. I solved it by playing around with the parameters – turns out Preupgrade made a faulty bootup file. I don’t think that it’s not a widespread problem though – it probably has something to do with me having both Fedora 9 and Fedora Core 6 installed on the same computer. So the upgrade is not without a bump on the way, but after the little problem solved, it was smooth sailing.

Where’s My Pretty Boot?

Fedora 10’s boot splash — much less glorious for those of us who don’t have ATI graphics cards. (Compare this with the one shown in Fedora’s website.)

Fedora developers decided to change the way Fedora displays the “boot splash” – that is, the screen that shows you how bootup is progressing. The new Plymouth system is much better than the old system – it means no more flickering and quicker bootup speeds. However, when I first booted Fedora 10, an ugly text-based boot splash appeared. Where’s my pretty graphical boot, like the one shown on Fedora’s website? It turns out that Plymouth only supports ATI graphics cards at the moment, so for the many of us who don’t have those, a cold text boot splash greets us everytime we start up Fedora 10. If you really want to see the “pretty boot”, however, there’s a small hack that enables it.

The Interface

Fedora Core 3 (released 2004) on the left and Fedora 10 on the right. Apart from a few icons, colour scheme and background changes, it has remained the same.

Fedora deserves some credit for its new theme, “Solar”. It includes a superb background image which changes depending on the time of the day. However, apart from that, the interface is the same as Fedora 9’s, Fedora 8’s, Fedora 7’s… in fact, every release since Fedora Core 3. you can’t really blame Fedora though, since it by default uses GNOME, which has a policy of gradual change. However, I heard that GNOME is going to have a major makeover soon, so let’s look forward to future releases. Fedora 10 also comes with Sugar, an interface which is used by the OLPC XO “$100 laptops”, and also LXDE, which is quicker to load than GNOME. I don’t see the point of including Sugar – but then again, some people may actually like the (ultra-)simplicity of Sugar.

New Toys and Annoyances

Yay, OpenOffice.org 3 at last!

Fedora 10 comes with updates of old favourites – OpenOffice.org 3, GNOME 2.24 (desktop environment), and others. It also comes with a few new default programs – Conduit is the ones I find the most annoying. Conduit is a synchronisation program which transfers files from one place to another automatically. Good replacement for manually syncing my MP3 player with my music library on the computer, right? Wrong. Conduit gave errors everytime i tried to synchronise. Talk about unusable software.  Fedora was going to use Empathy as the default IM client, but thankfully did not do so. Empathy is in a very unusable state, and it is wise that Fedora didn’t use it in the final version of Fedora 10. (Thanks Rahul for correcting me!)

There are a lot of under-the-hood changes as well, many from which we users benefit from. Upgrade to RPM 4.6 means quicker software installation, inclusion of libv4l means better webcam support, better printer setup application means easier setup and use of printers, and the inclusion of First Aid Kit, an automated recovery system, means that if things go wrong, we don’t have to despair.

Conclusion

Fedora has come a long way since Red Hat, the parent company, created it back in 2003. Maturity is definitely shown in Fedora 10 with good apps and solid configuration tools. However, there are a few things that I am not satsified with – stupid defaults being one of them. Nevertheless, it is a solid release and a step forward – if not a relatively small one. I would recommend Fedora 10 not only to existing Fedora users, but also people who have never tried Linux before.

If you haven’t used Fedora or Linux before, it’s good (though not necessary) to get a Fedora geek to help you with installation and setting up, so that if something unexpected happens, help is at hand.