kekoa vincent

I decided to put it on my laptop, an HP Pavilion ZD7000, since it is the less important of my systems.  The install process was a very simple graphical experience.  The only thing is it took a while to select all the packages I wanted and deselect those I didn't. I will proceed to give my unprofessional opinion of my experience.

The first thing I noticed was the sleek looking login screen Fedora has.  It is actually very sweet, the new DNA theme that entices me to want to use it more.  The cursor and little animations are also very nice touches.

For a distribution like Fedora, I expect things to be mostly autodetected, or at least easily configured.  In a few ways it was easy, for example it included support for the synaptic touchpad on the laptop, and offered a graphical config for it(by adding a line to my xorg.conf file.  I will create my list of pros and cons:

Good Things

• Super easy install-- too easy probably, making me feel like a total Linux wimp.
• Nice theme and gnome setup, everything looks clean and usable.
• For a plain-Jane Linux setup, this is one of the easiest installations I've ever done.
• Xen virtualization engine. My favorite thing about this distro so far.  I will see how easy it is to use...

Bad Things

• Super easy install - You won't learn about how Linux works by installing it, but it's a good place to start.
• Does not include ndiswrapper for my wireless card... It's not even in the package repository. I have to manually install it... bummer.
• Does not include nvidia drivers-- this is actually a big one and is quite unacceptible.  The Linux Nvidia drivers have been around for a long time, the least Fedora could have done was include a compiled kernel module to be turned on with modprobe.
• Xorg controlled by init level.  This is probably a personal preference, but I can't stand the fact that you can't easily kill the X server without changing to a different runlevel.  I feel so out of control when there's no /etc/init.d/xdm that I can use.  Unless someone can point one out to me, I couldn't find it.
• Kernel compiling - Probably my biggest problem with FC 6 is that I can't compile the kernel with the source that came with the kernel-devel package they have.  Instead I get a broken copy that I can't even type make menuconfig to configure the kernel or even be able to compile the kernel.  Yuk, yuk, yuk.  This makes me very upset, I can't just stick with the default kernel.
• No cpufreq module.  Okay, so it's a pretty standard requirement for laptops, you need to be able to throttle your CPU to save power.  The cpufreq module does not even ship with Fedora 6.  AND I can't easily compile it into my kernel because the sources they gave me are broken.
• Horrible documentation and community support.  Okay, maybe this isn't totally fair, coming from Gentoo which has the greatest community support out there, to where I couldn't even find kernel compile instructions for fedora.  What's up with that? Give me a broken kernel source tree and don't tell me how to use it?  Bogus.  What about a true fedora sponsored wiki where anyone can post their tutorials?  They have a long way to go in this area.

The only reason I didn't choose Ubuntu to try out was that the fedora project seems so promising, and I also really, really like that the Xen virtualization engine is standard on FC 6, because I want to play around with virtual machines(for free).  I like that the fedoraproject is seeking to move forward with it's thinking, yet I think they need to spend a bit more time prettying things up if they want to be the supreme average-user distribution.

If Fedora doesn't do what I want it to, I will happily try out ubuntu.  I expect a lot from modern big Linux distros.  I don't think that's unfair given my laptop is a few years old, everything I can do with gentoo, and I've done all of the above with Gentoo, with some work, but virtually no complications.  I'll give it at least a month to live on my laptop to give it a fair chance.  The latest ubuntu does look pretty good though, especially because of it's superior package databasing system, namely Debian's apt-get.