Fedora 10 - A Report

For the past one year, I have been trying to install every linux distro in my laptop just to realize that there is some problem or the other. Hence, no linux installation has lasted for more than a week in my laptop. Ubuntu, the people's favourite failed to impress me. As a matter of fact, I have always hated ubuntu for its colour. But there was ubuntu studio which had better colours and made the desktop look beautiful. Still i faced all sorts of problems pertaining to graphics. The first distro that has lasted for above a week in my laptop is Fedora 10 - 'Vanilla' as they call it. As i try to confess why i liked it a lot, i try to bring out the things which i had to do in order to get other distros working and hence the stuff that i din't have to do in vanilla.

Firstly, i have never got sound working right in any of the distros. An update of alsa alone has never solved the sound issue. I have always needed to google everything and copy all those lib files from one folder to the other and keep restarting endlessly until i have it working at some point of time miraculously. After lot of slogging, I feel great that I got it working finally just to figure out the successor of the current OS is out already! On the contrary, an update on alsa solved all the problems in vanilla. People might argue based on the newness of the OS and all the updates that are available in view of this. It may not be out of place to mention here that i could not get sound working properly in Intrepid Ibex which is the latest release of Ubuntu!

Secondly, I liked the appearance of fedora 10 more than any distro. I have no idea why but the colours were way better than its contemporaries, esp Intrepid Ibex. It had a better wallpaper collection to choose from. Before my encounter with fedora 10, I really liked the appearance of OpenSuse 11. But surprisingly, except the appearance, nothing else was available in that distro! A bundle of problems.

Most important of all, as you catch a glimpse of the screenshot, you might realize that i have installed a lot of softwares. In the general case, I would feel a marked decrease in the speed of the OS. But vanilla is as stable as it can get. To add here that i have not been able to install so many softwares in any distros because some prob would definitely pop up and hence the OS would slow down. Hence I never got an opportunity to make a complete software package until fedora 10 happened.
As I have explained why i liked it and hence its features, let me move into the problems i faced with it which were meagre. I had a few problems while connecting the laptop on to a TV. This works precisely in windows. But there is some issue which i have to look into. Other than that, everything else is configured properly.

Some problems with previous distros:
1) OpenSUSE 11 - Touchpad working was based on the mood of the OS. It will work when it feels like working. At other times, you switch on some music and it would start working miraculously. Yup! Music does exalt moods.!
2) Ubuntu 8.04 - I never got my pen drive to auto mount in this version of Ubuntu - Hardy Heron. I had to plug it in and give it a restart which would take ages!

A point to note. I installed 1248 packages totally in the beginning which is inclusive of java development packages and a few more. The size of the OS was 4 gb which i guess is a little on the higher side for a linux OS, but i m not sure about the bandwidth occupied by other versions.

Verdict:
Instead of wasting time reading reviews of Vijay's Villu, try this distro out. Don't worry. You wont miss out on anything. You already read this review for his previous dishyum-dishyum movies. Its the same thing!!!

If you have already tried it out, let me know your verdict too!