Long time no see…
KelsinIt’s been awhile since I last posted. Sorry about that. I guess a lot has gone on.
The main topic for this post: Fedora
I wrote last time (such a long time ago!) about how I had found Arch linux and I also mentioned how I hate rpm distros… well let me start from that point. Arch was going great for a while and I’d definitely recommend it to people that want a simpler distro (not simple in a windows way, but simple in a: very standard unix way). The package manager is definitely the highlight of the distribution. Very fast and very efficient. Searching was easy, installing and updating was easy and making your own packages was very easy. I was impressed until a normal system update (”pacman -Syu”) broke my system. It didn’t break it in a bad way, but suddenly Helvetica wasn’t on my computer. It was there but programs couldn’t access it. This broke a number of packages (namely eboard, a chess program). I suddenly lost all interest in arch when I went on the forums and heard a lot of people complaining about updates breaking stuff. It looks like a fun distro but it needs more work in order to staying bleeding edge and not break the system.
So I didn’t know what to do and put gentoo back on my laptop. I figured it was my favorite so far so why not go back. So while reading distrowatch for way to long I slowly began to compile my laptop system confident that I’d be happy for a while. This turned out to not be the case. I somehow didn’t remember how much work gentoo takes to get things working. Even small things seemed to take a long time. Nothing is set up automatically. I guess I got spoiled by Ubuntu having such a great gnome desktop setup. I began to read distrowatch more then compiling.
So luckily the first linux users group meeting came up and a cool guy named Peter was giving a talk about Bash shell scripts. It became apparent very quickly that he liked Redhat and consistantly joked with vice-president about Ubuntu. It was all friendly jokes but it was the first time that someone who I knew used linux for a while, and was very knowledgable about it, promoted Redhat. Somehow I’ve never been around linux users who like Fedora and my one experience with it was enough to turn me off forever (so I thought).
I had to use it for an honors project. But I didn’t just have to use it, I had to install it on an old piece of junk machine that I knew nothing about. Then since my project involved hacking a 2.4 kernel I had to get a clean vanilla 2.4 kernel from kernel.org working on it. This was a pain. I did not know enough about kernels at the time to get this done. I had NEVER installed a kernel that needed a initrd disk and even though I fully don’t understand the concept now, at least I could probably get it done. So at the time I was fed up. I realized while watching Peter talk that I had NEVER really tried fedora at all. It uses gnome as a dekstop, uses Yum as a package manager which most people on forums seemed to like. It has rpm which people said was as good as dpkg (again these were from bias forums but still… good to hear people say it) and it seemed that rpm’s didn’t have that “dependency” problem that people would talk about. I tend to try and use all gnome software which according to my reading made my rpm life even easier since I would ussually have all the libraries I needed anyway.
So I decided to give Fedora a shot instead of bashing it all the time without knowing anything about it. I’ve used every other distro I talk about… so why not this one?
Turns out I love it. The package management isn’t as good as pacman but I’ve been able to do everything I want, including building a source package (which are all available) and downgrade packages. The package list isn’t as good as debian but definitely better then Arch. The initial packages are fine with me (gnome based, but that is an install option) and unlike Ubuntu the base packages are not installed in some blanket package. I was able to remove Evolution AND OpenOffice without having yum threaten to uninstall my entire system (a thing I hated about Ubuntu). Even gentoo wasn’t able to install gnome with evolution… I have that working fine in Fedora.
The install took forever because I did all three of my fedora installs over the internet. I don’t have a dvd burner and didn’t want to “waste” 6 cd’s on packages that I would upgrade soon anyway. It was very easy, let me chose all of the options I did and did not want. It was also graphical to boot… I enjoyed it alot.
So far everything just works. The only thing different then Ubuntu for me was having to download the firmware for my ipw2200 intel wirless card. That took me 2 seconds. So I guess the bottom line is for me this system rocks. For my parents I would still install Ubuntu.
This project is just geeky enough to keep me happy, Very bleeding edge, with good package management, a good working system, lots of support in the forums and a very pretty desktop. I love it. It’s the best of all worlds. I can’t wait for Fedora Core 6 to come out because it will definitely be installed on all of my systems.