Agreed. This is too late to do this. Like almost a month after. But, I wanted to get my hands dirty before I tell something about it. Much of us are ‘Windows’ians. We hate it when we have to login into Linux. It is like parents forcing you to go out with a girl whom they want you to marry. But, you’ve got a sexy diva waiting for you just round the corner. What would you do? Curse yourself. Déjà vu? LOL. Anyways, back to the point.
I had that same feeling, when I wanted to try it. Code named Beefy Miracle, this version the Fedora Desktop edition is touted to be the best ever release in years! But, behind all the frenzy and excitement, is a reason, they say. And I wanted to get a feel of how this beef tasted. But, the past week has been so enjoyable. So, what in this meat has left the generations of linux users drooling? We’re about to find out.
Cooking up the meat
Fedora 17, Beefy Miracle as it is named can be acquired as a DVD or as a standard CD-ISO from the fedoraproject.org. Setup uses the good old Anaconda. If you’re beginning to think what an Anaconda is, it is just another name for the GUI installer (also) used by Red Hat. I’ve installed it almost like thrice by now in three different computers and there hasn’t been a hassle. This is the most painless and error free Fedora Installation so far.
Good news is, this version seems to work well with PCs with nVidia drivers as well. Fedora seemed like to have a problem with nVidia video cards until its previous version, The Verne. But, I didn’t find any in this version of it. (Except the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 model video adapter). There was supposedly a problem with the Broadcomm WiFi drivers (Dell laptops, is where I found the problems to be) in the previous version. But, don’t know if it has been rectified.
Boot / Shutdown Times
The system boots really fast. Much faster than the Windows. But, not as fast as Mint or Ubuntu. Shutting down is almost exactly the same as Ubuntu like around 3-5 seconds.
File System
The default file system was planned to be btrfs – Binary TRee File System. Brtfs is an advanced file system that has support for 16 Exbibyte of storage, which means 2048 times bigger storage than ext4’s which has 16 Terabyte of maximum support. Brtfs also fares better than ext4 in terms of check sums, file allocation, indexing. Ideally, targeting enterprise and business class users.
But, it didn’t make it to the final cut. Or did it? No. Simply because they didn’t have time. In their time scheduled they had to write the code to implement btrfs file system, and also, modify the Anaconda installer. But, they just could write the code and had no time to modify the installer to work well with the file system. So, you could do a command-line back end install of Fedora 17 with Btrfs file system anyway.
Another feature discussed here, is the unification of file system. That is the merging of all /bin /sbin /lib /lib64 folders into /usr directory. Why is it significant? What difference will it make if I just move the folder directories to another space? Well, look. it is always easier said without realizing what it really means. With this, it is easy to port the scripts and programs written for a particular linux distribution into another. You’ll not need to fix the paths to the system directories and binaries henceforth for your ported scripts to work.
With an example, if there is a system call for a file or script in the folder /lib, with the unification of file sytem, /bin or /usr/lib both invokes the file – the one in /usr/lib folder. Which makes the confusion around porting go away. With this advancement, Linux works more closely with Unix file systems.
The Desktop Interface
Just as anticipated earlier, Fedora(default) ships in with the latest version of the Desktop interface manager – Gnome3.4. Although, not visible to the normal user, Gnome 3.4 has brought great changes to the desktop environment. Should you not know anything about Gnome by now, Gnome stands for GNU Object Model Environment, or just simply the one that defines the UI. It is slick, stylish and easy to use. Although, not as pleasing as the Mac OS X’s app dashboard, Gnome too consists of a nearly equivalent one here.
For PC users, you may find the ‘Workspaces’ intriguing. Workspaces, are seperate desktop interfaces that you can use to categorize or organize the running programs into. In another way, instead of using all the programs in a single desktop interface, you can have like four desktops that can be switched between.
Online Accounts
This is best realized, if you’re an ardent Apple fan. If so, you must’ve witnessed the latest WWDC, right? And, the point is, Apple has introduced Facebook and Twitter integration across all its applications and notifications – summed up as online account integration. Fedora-Gnome has got a similar one with it too – with Google, Facebook and Windows Live. But, wait. There is not much to online accounts here. I am beginning to wonder if there is really any use to having it, except for the Instant messaging and Contact Sync.
Documents
This is a replacement for the default document folder, heavily inspired from the iCloud-iWork. Nothing so, ‘I-just-dropped-my-saucer-on-seeing-it’ stuff. Best part is, it gets synced to your Google Docs or Drive, whatever you prefer to call it.
Toppings and Sausages
The default Fedora distribution ISO just won’t do any good. It has got just the basic packages like, Firefox browser, gedit, Cheese Webcam booth, Empathy Chat program, Transmission Torrent Client. A normal user would require more than just these stuff to get on with.
Installing Programs
Ask any amateur linux guy, he’ll bet that Ubuntu is much more better than Fedora. That is because, it has been easier for him to install programs. This is one thing where Fedora has been criticized a lot. Ubuntu or its downstream distros has got their own Software Centers to do a ‘one-click’ install. Honestly, Fedora lacks this feature to attract new users.
There is however a workaround. You may install, Autoplus – a GUI that in some way tries to ease up things. Firefox lacks Adobe Flash to playback YouTube and other animated stuff you find in most of the sites. Flash and similar programs can be installed using Autoplus easily.
No Audio/Video codecs
The first thing anyone would do after installing an OS, is to play a media file – audio or video – in all of its players – Totem Video player, Rhythmbox etc. Fedora lacks all the proprietary codecs to play content like mp3, wmv, avi, mkv etc. Can play only open formats like ogg, WebM etc. It prompts you to download and install these codecs whenever you want to play a file with a specified codec. Another way to overcome this is to install the VLC for Fedora. Ah, common, you know VLC ! It plays all the file formats. Favourite player for many by the way, you too I guess.
No Chromium
Clearly the best and most used Web browser today. And yes, I would love to have it installed in Fedora. Chromium repositories are found in all the major Debian distributions. But, not in Fedora though. So, you may install Google Chrome from its official download page.
No Automount for HDD
Hard drives mount during startup in Windows. This lacks in all of the Linux distributions except for the root and /home folders. That is one thing I hate. You might’ve created a playlist of files to play that are there in those HDDs that doesn’t boot during startups and you will have to open them, and type in your administrator password and then play those files. To hell with all this !
Easy way to solve this is to install the ‘ntfs-config’ package. Although actually written to support NTFS file systems, which are now available by default, you may install this to enable, ‘Automount during startup’.
Programmers’ Paradise
The reason why Fedora still is the best. Fedora contains compilers for all the major software programs and codes. Updates to all the software compilers like Perl, Java, C, C++, Python, Haskell are really fast.
Extensions and Applications
Gnome3, the default desktop environment for Fedora can be forked easily with few extensions that can be obtained easily via Extensions Page.
And there goes our list of ‘Must-Use’ Apps for Fedora
- Libre Office – Office Suite
- Google Chrome – Web Browser
- VLC Media Player – Media player to play all formats
- Turpial – Twitter Application
- Gpodder – To view download podcasts and
- Pidgin – Chat client
- Skype
- Autoplus – GUI Installer
- GIMP – Photoshop equivalent for Linux
- Audacity – Audio Editor
- gFTP – FTP client
- BlueFish – HTML editor
- Deluge – Torrent Client
Relish It !
Fedora might not flaunt all the rich fonts and graphics but sure is tailored to cater not just the ‘Rich’. There are a little ‘if’s and buts’ here and there. But, on the whole, it is one you thing you should be using or at least trying.