Fedora 7 final review

Here are my initial impressions of Fedora 7 final on a modern Intel motherboard with built in video, ethernet and sound. I grabbed the torrent today.

Install was smooth. After that you create a user account and configure sound, then for some reason you need to reboot.

I set the machine to get an IP address via DHCP so the first thing I wanted to know was the IP address. Usually I run terminal and do a /sbin/ifconfig but terminal has moved to the "System Tools" menu. Fair enough I guess. I tried to find the IP address in System/Administration/Network but I couldn't find it there.

It might be good to make the IP address easy to find. The Places menu has a bunch of new locations, not just Documents but Music, Pictures, Videos, and Downloads. Seems like a good idea, but these are all folders that already exist in the home directory which does rather clutter things up. I'm unlikely to be doing much video on my linux box.

The updater killed the machine for a little while and then told me there were a number of updates. When I asked for them it said "Unable to retrieve software information" presumably the fedora updates site is being hammered right now. Still, the message wasn't informative.

First launch of OpenOffice was a bit slow, but after that it was really great. If someone wants a computer to to web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets and simple presentations then this Linux distro would do the trick. For everything else, get a Mac.

Under look and feel, there is something called "Desktop Effects" that can make windows wobble and do the Apple cube effect when switching desktops. This is surely a waste of time and just a pointer to what's to come in the future. I tried it but quickly turned it off.

Now that we have Firefox, one computer operating system is pretty much as good as another. I went to cnn.com, it said I needed Flash, I agreed and it was installed smoothly without re-launching the browser. Great stuff.

At work we deploy on Fedora 6, 7 comes with Python 2.5 so I'm pretty confident everything will just work (but I'll let you know).

My IDE of choice Komodo 4.1 seems to work just fine (actually a bit better than on MacOS).

So far, so good.

Fedora Core 6 - linux for my mother

FC6 seems like a great release. Install is smoother than ever, not quite as beautiful as ubuntu, but no hitches.

I've tried it on a Dell desktop, a Dell laptop, and my MacBook (via BootCamp). I couldn't get wireless going on the Apple laptop which is a showstopper for me, but the cool new "Desktop Effects" did work while they didn't on the other two machines.

Desktop effects so far seems to make windows and menus "wiggle" in to view. I guess this is the beginning of the effects we've come to expect in MacOS X and soon Vista.

The web browser is Firefox and is as good an experience as it is anywhere. Now that I use Google Browser Sync, I can jump from machine to machine and feel right at home with all my bookmarks and even cookies following me around.

On the software side, I enabled IPV6 and have had trouble with WebService clients that used to connect to "localhost" that now need "127.0.0.1" for some reason. Yes it's in /etc/hosts.

What a great set of default apps you get. The OpenOffice suite is looking fantastic and any MS Office user would feel right at home.

Recommended.