11th
7 + 1 = werewolf
It’s been a couple of days since its release and I decided to give it a shot in my home workstation. During years, I’ve tried many distributions and almost all of them had some sort of bug or out-of-the-box misconfiguration that ended up taking away the fresh look and appeal they had in the home site. This second release after the name change from the traditional “Fedora Core” to just “Fedora” comes into public with a lot of noise and successful review tests. It predecessor, the Fedora 7, set the bar pretty high with high stability from the beginning. Will the newborn make his way up to his parent? If you want to find out, keep reading…:-)
From the very first moment that you put your 3,4Gb DVD in the drive, you start to get the feel that this is not just ‘another’ release of a well known OS. Unlike in other distributions install processes, you don’t get to see thousands and thousands of lines of hardware-probing-process; instead, the not so new yet powerfull Anaconda welcomes you with a fancy logo and a couple of options.
The installation is pretty straightforward from beginning to end; package selection is well organised in different areas; networking setup is intuitive as well and disk partitioning turns out to be really simple without the need of sometimes obscure fdisk-like tools.
But the fun-fair doesn’t end there. After you finish the installation process you can log in into your system with a really nice login box. It’s really impressing to see how Fedora guys have taken into account every single graphical detail to make it fit with the rest of the system.
Applicationwise you don’t get any headaches either. You either use CLI based yum or GUI based pirut to perform any install/remove/upgrade process. You even get a system tray tool to warn you about any updates available in the repositories. One of the coolest thing in this new jewel is how they got compiz-beryl to work in easy steps. There are no longer dawnting waits, broken dependencies nor buggy results. It simply works. Of course it’s not perfect, you sometimes got to download packages yourself and install it, but isn’t much considering that the RPM system is up out-of-the-box.
It isn’t as customizable as other distributions, but it copes with his task in a marvelous way. It’s what it promises to be, a newbie-friendly environment, a intuitive workstation and a sucessfull production system.
Now it’s time to express all this magnificence with a number, it could easily be a 10 out of 10. But I’ll leave it in a 9, I’ll leave the extra point for a further release, which I’m pretty confident the Fedora team will make well worth.
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