Hello All, Though faithful to the Debian based distros, I could not help flirting with Fedora 7 which is being touted as a great distro.
It was the bootable DVD that came with July 2007 LFY. The hardware, Pentium-4 2.4 Ghz., Intel 845 GEBV2, 256 MB RAM, Samsung 80 GB IDE HDD, Sony DVD writer, Samsung CD writer. The DVD cleared the media test and the installation began. When you come to the partitioning part, please note that like other distros it does not list choices in radio buttons or check boxes. It is a drop down list. I did not see the list and checked a manual option placed below. However the warning that my entire disk will be formatted saved me from a Himalayan blunder. The drop down list has the actual manual option. After that installation was smooth. When it comes to the packages part, please select everything you want from the DVD in this step itself. I did not do that and found that the DVD repo is not added to the Yum package manager after installation. So everything selected later is downloaded from the net. By default, only Gnome is the installed desktop. Installation looked slower than Kubuntu, though the number of packages is similar. Fedora 1007, Kubuntu 950 approx. Post installation was smooth too. The screen resolution was 1280 x 1024, a very nice thing. However it was switched manually to 1024 x 768 for easy reading. Sound setup comes up during first boot and you can play a test sound. The wallpaper is great. You are floating above the clouds with hot-air baloons around you. The top panel bar does not have any applet enabled on it but you can add whatever you want manually by right clicking on the panel and selecting 'Add to panel'. I liked the 'Dictionary' utility very much. 'Eyeballs' are nice too and move as you move your mouse. Next to the date is the user's Name, which is handy for the boss to know who is logged into the desktop. By default the user does not have sudoer rights so you need to open a terminal and 'su -' with the root password. Edit the file /etc/sudoers. In that file, go to the entry which mentions '## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands'. Uncheck the option below it. Keep the % sign. Then edit the file /etc/group. In the line containing the wheel group, after root, put a coma and add the user_name. This will make this user, a sudoer. For multi-media codecs, go to http://fedoranews.org/cms/node/2853 and follow the instructions as given there. Copy the commands and directly paste them into a gui terminal using Shift + Insert. Please add sudo to the beginning of every command or do the whole exercise as root 'su -'. From that web page, please note that VLC player installation is optional and not necessary. The same is true for the installation of Amarock, as it is kde based and is a whopping 77 MB of download from the net, due to extra kde components. It can play mpg, wmv, mp3, 3gp, dvds etc. DVD playback is good. However VCD playback is kinky and after a few seconds of video and sound, it crashes whatever player you use. I tried 3 and all crashed. Looks like the new kernels are not VCD friendly. I could not try the USB of the MTNL ADSL router as mine is a 4 port one without usb. Overall a very good system and very pleasing to look at. I could not try out kde in it as it would have to be downloaded from the net. With latest hardware and more RAM, it should be a pleasure to work with. So go ahead and try it out. Regards, Rony. ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Answers - Got a question? Someone out there knows the answer. Try it now. http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/ -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
