Over the Vesak holidays I updated my FC8 installation to FC9 and boy it looks awesome! Without knowing the fact that from 2.6.24, iwlwifi drivers are an integral part, I didn’t update the kernel as my ipw3945 drivers refused to compile. Doh. Also it contains a working version of NetworkManager!. After a few very bad experiences with NetworkManager some time back (probably with 0.3, can’t recall the exact version) I didn’t touch that beast again because WiFi Radar worked out of the box and never complained.
In FC8 under Gnome, SWT apps were shit slow to the point where it’s not usable. FC9 includes OpenJDK and with it SWT rendering speed has improved and the responsiveness is up to a usable level. First thing I did after the installation was to disable the annoying speaker. Added the pcspkr to the blacklisted modules and it’s gone forever. Next up, changing the keyboard layout to Dvorak. Involves changing in 3 places. One, in the console; you have to change the keyboard entry at /etc/sysconfig. Second, GDM; change the XkbLayout in xorg.conf and finally inside Gnome. One place that I still has the awful qwerty layout is when it asks for the pass phrase for my encrypted partition at boot time (keyboard layout loads before getting into this prompt, yay!)
php-devel package was not included in the DVD- minor annoying fact. WSF/PHP needs php-config to build and it’s with php-devel. Still Xft support for Emacs is not in the bundled rpm (ARGH). So had to resort to -nw and thank god the annoying “broken comment highlighting” was gone. In FC8 when I opened emacs in gnome-terminal with -nw, for Perl programs it colours the ‘#’ character in red and rest of the line is shown using the foreground colour of the terminal. Since this was so annoying I compiled Emacs from the darcs repo and got Xft thing built. So I’m quite ok with -nw.
If you’re looking for a distro for your desktop to replace winborg and transition your activities seamlessly I wouldn’t recommend going for Fedora since by default you will not be able to play all your mp3 files and divx/xvid movies (it’s simple as adding the Livna repo and yum away the media players, but still). All in all the new Fedora release rocks! After all Sulphur is not as bad as it smells.
Posted in fedora · May 22nd, 2008 · Comments (0)
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