Fedora Core 6

Since I have just finished installing Fedora 6, I thought I would begin by sharing my thoughts on the process:

I downloaded the FC6 DVD months ago, but not being a Gnome fan I didn't really get into it very much, and without really trying it out it got quickly buried underneath other distro's I wanted to try. Well, time passed and I found the DVD and decided to give it a shot. The install was very straight forward. The one thing that stuck out in my mind was the default use of LVM groups. I understand that these are more functional than normal partitions in many ways, but I personally dislike them because with many OS's installed, they make it very difficult to share data between partitions. So I did my own partition setup and the install went fine from there.

After the install I booted the system, and was immediately struck my the Fedora DNA theme in the boot splash. Not only did it actually work with my ATI card (note: pay attention here, Ubuntu), but it actually looks tremendous. In fact, the whole DNA theme is great. Once booted, the system worked well. The desktop was slow because Fedora (being a F/OSS distro) had chosen the open source 'radeon' drivers for my card. I was impressed by this (normally the 'ati' choice is used by default, which doesn't work with my card). These drivers, however, left me without 3D acceleration. At first I searched the Livna repository (a 3rd party repo) for the drivers, but they wanted to update my kernel from the i586 version to the i686 version and that gave me errors (note: I had installed the updates available and gone from kernel 2.6.18 to 2.6.19, so the i686 kernel was nearly identical to the i586 one... more on this later). No problem I thought, I'll just use the ones from the ATI page. This was a nightmare. Neither the RPMs created by the installer or the direct install worked (my xorg.conf was properly set up, but the kernel modules would not build properly). So, I did what any linux user would do: I reinstalled to clean up the mess. This time I didn't do the updates before installing the drivers via Livna, and it upgraded to the new kernel perfectly. After a reboot, 3D acceleration was enabled.

As for the OS itself, I was blown away. The polish is tremendous. I love the default apps, I love the little touches (like when I double click on a binary I get a dialog that asks me if I want to run the program... most distro's would open a text editor!), and it is gorgeous. I went ahead and themed a lot of it, but left more than I usually do. I have never been a fan of RPMs, but yum is a very usable tool. Much better than whatever Mandriva uses (I can't remember), and much quicker than Yast on SuSE. I did have an issue with OpenOffice.org (which to my surprise was of the 2.0x series, not the new 2.10), but I uninstalled it to use abiword/gnumeric anyway, so that was a non issue.

Overall, I love Fedora. I was once a Ubuntu diehard, but that lost its luster and I have been floating for a while without one stable OS... I have now found it. I strongly encourage anyone to try Fedora, as it is one of the very best linux distributions I have tried to date. I give it 9 penguins (out of a possible 10).