Windows Anonymous

Hey Fedora, how's it going? Yeah, long time no see. So how've you been? I have to say time has been kind to you, you look good. I hear you've successfully moved on; I have too. What's that? You have a new version and you want me to see it? Ummm...

Quick recap: Fedora was my first. We didn't exactly part amicably; I had frankly outgrown my relationship with prepackaged distros, and at that point Fedora didn't really know which direction to go. We had good times together but it was time for me to move on. There are those out there who would at this point tell me to get a life; it's just an OS, one of many Linux distributions, it's not really that big a deal, right? It's not healthy...or something. If so, then tell me how many times any of you sat down in front of a machine and cringed upon seeing the Windows logo or hearing whatever 4 notes it was using to announce that it was (technically) started...how many times you felt that "oh, Gawd" shiver when someone started up a Vista box. Tell me it's not an emotional thing.

I last reviewed Fedora at version 11 here; read that to get some background on Fedora if you like. That review was KDE (which Fedora still treats as "the other desktop environment", so this time I'm rolling with GNOME, specifically the liveCD, which spcifically runs version 2.30. I failed to remember from the last few times I installed Fedora that for some reason they leave out GCC and make, requiring a noob to install something he/she doesn't even know exists much less is a requirement to install anything that isn't an RPM; interestingly enough, when I attempted to install Guest Additions (as I was running this in VirtualBox), I ran the generic x86 script out of habit, forgetting until later that there's an RPM for that. I was also reminded later that once you have Fedora installed, there are usually about 500 updates waiting for you. Okay, in this case it was only 329, and I was testing this a month or so after it was released.

Given my history with Ubuntu this might sound biased but I've always liked Fedora's GNOME implementations better. In this case it doesn't seem to fight me as much when trying to get things done. If you disagree there's still KDE and XFCE spins, but keep in mind that since this is primarily a GNOME-based distro, you'll pull in a truckload of GNOME dependencies if you want to actually do anything outside the realm of your chosen desktop environment. In keeping with Fedora's past, SELinux is here and partially enabled (at least on this install); it reminded me that some potentially bad things were potentially happening but it was in log mode and didn't cripple any functionality. SELinux is a great way to harden a Linux box but it'll require a lot more in the way of time and effort to set up than the average user will care to expend. Indeed, there's a GUI to config iptables, something I wish I had starting out (I did have firestarter but it had limits in terms of port-forwarding and that was a time ago).

Elsewhere, the feature list for this version includes: Automatic print driver installation, better webcam support, NetBeans 6.8, python 3, RPM 4.8, NFS over IPv6 (and make NFSv4 default), several GNOME-related tweaks (see, told you Fedora's version was better), improved KVM support, and better Nouveau support for NVidia hardware. There are other minor changes and fixes; go to the Fedora site to find out more.

The Fedora group did a good job on this one; no showstoppers anywhere with this install, and other than Fedora-specific quirks like the aforementioned make and GCC thing, it works well. The liveCD is just about a full CD's worth of download, and they have USB images for you cheapskates. Get a copy and check it out; you may end up with a new desktop. Yeah, it's that good.

Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/