Fedora Linux 9 is definitely worth taking for a spin!

In my quest for the ultimate operating system, there can be only one…..

OK, maybe I like the Highlander too much, but this is serious stuff…

Right…well this morning I decided to hop over to Fedora 9, I know I said I was going to OpenSuse, and I tried OpenSuse 11 and it stayed on my hard disk for a few hours before I decided I wasn’t really happy with any of their desktop environment customizations, and the “one-click” Nvidia driver ended up turning into me compiling kernel modules by hand, at the Terminal, after frantically trying to get YaST to recognize the package I was giving it, which the process went something like this:

1. Boot into KDE 4, launch Konqueror…segfault.

2. Click on Konqueror again….segfault.

3. Click on Konqueror again, it opens, and I head to OpenSuse’s site to click on these one-click drivers they speak of, the ymp file (a script for YaST) chokes Konqueror and it falls over dead yet again, so I open Firefox which makes it to the site and opens the ymp file without an issue, it opens it in YaST and YaST crashes.

4. Log out and log back in to GNOME, open Firefox, click on ymp, YaST installs the driver, I reboot……..still using “VESA”…….What in the HELL is this? The least it should have done was give me the 2d accelerated “NV” driver, so I try installing it again, negative…..

5. Uninstall the package from YaST, download the Nvidia driver from Nvidia thenselves, drop to the terminal, build the modules, build looks good, reboot, and…….VESA, I have the Nvidia control panel, but thats apparantly the only part of it that did work and with no functional driver, it won’t do anything for me anyway!

You know, at this point I’ve gone beyond what a typical user would know how to do, much less the target audience they refer to in their emails saying things like “Your Linux is Ready” and “Linux without chown, chroot, or chmod-ing anything”, or “Linux for people that don’t grok the concept”, whatever, they can bite me, I’d rather be stuck with Debian at least it’s possible to make it work, and what about “chmod +x” on my video game installers from id Software? Jackasses!

So since I was sitting there with 2d video, no sound (did I mention that?), and a system full of segfaults on a $1,000 piece of equipment, I decided to get on my laptop and download Fedora 9.

Now the first thing to know about Fedora, assuming you know nothing, is that it is a community project built around Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora replaced Red Hat Linux Personal Edition back in 2003, so you can think of Fedora 9 and something of a Red Hat 18.

Being built on an enterprise grade foundation brings a lot of benefits to the home user, the system is very stable, extremely secure (moreso than most desktop users even need, but the more the better) shipping with SELinux enabled and Enforcing by default, Red Hat’s Exec-Shield, and the new Linux kernel’s own Address Space Layout Randomization and PIE executable protection, and then it gives you a robust firewall set up utility, put it simply, it would have to be super worm made by super hacker to get into your system, compared to your average Windows box that pretty much crawls with all kinds of bad things.

Fedora is also very geared towards maximum performance and stability, because Red Hat Enterprise pretty much has to be when their customers are a who’s who of the Fortune 500.

But enough of that, why else do *I* like it?

I picked up on everything I needed to know in a matter of 3-4 hours using it and a little reading of the unofficial community documentation, of which I’ll recommend two sites very highly in a bit.

It was very easy to install, get my repositories configured, and pull the software that I wanted, it’s no fuss whatsoever actually, my ralink wifi works out of the box, and with WPA on my network for a bonus, with Ubuntu I was hacking on config files to jerry rig all of that and the next operating system upgrade could be the end of it.

http://www.fedoraguide.info/

Do a system wide upgrade before doing anything else.

Add the repos you need.

Make sure you get the protect-base and presto plugins for YUM.

For my Nvidia driver, which is the only proprietary driver I even needed, it was “pull the driver from Livna repository, reboot, it works”.

Media codecs and flash: Grab the latest copies of gstreamer-plugins-ugly, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-ffmpeg, swfdec, and swfdec-mozilla from Package Kit. (System/Administration/Add Remove Software), you may also prefer Banshee (latest version!) to the Rhythmbox, so add Banshee and remove Rhytmbox if you like, get libdvdread if you want to play DVD movies.

Now don’t forget to configure your firewall.

32-bit compatibility files: If you’re on x86-64 and play Quake Wars or Doom 3 or the like…

su -c ‘yum install alsa-lib.i386′

su -c ‘yum install SDL.i386′

And you now have a working system!

Oh, just remember to not upgrade the kernel until there’s also an updated Nvidia driver from Livna, it usually happens pretty rapidly, if you screw up don’t worry one is on the way, and remember to get adblock plus for Firefox. (since I know most of you use it)

So as you can see:

Debian and Ubuntu could learn a lot from Fedora, looking at Fedora (last time I used it, it was Red Hat Linux) it’s clear that Ubuntu is a mere toy, and OpenSuse is a broken pile of crap.

Also check out Fedora’s new Compiz settings, you can flick the mouse cursor to the upper right and do this:

Or Ctrl-Alt-Down arrow, and tapping left or right, pulls you to a view of all of your virtual desktops.

Or Ctrl-Alt-left/right arrow rotates your virtual desktops as a “cube”.

So grab a copy today, this time free is worth something and it really is “open”:

http://www.fedoraproject.org