After Fedora Core 6 came out (which was supposed to be the most stable build so far) I decided to give it another chance as a desktop OS. Of course I didn’t have the courage to try it on my home PC, but I went ahead and installed it on my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop.
First impressions:
- Fedora Core 6 is definitely more stable than FC5.
- For some reason FC6 installed the 586 kernel instead of 686. I noticed this while I was installing additional kernel modules. I found the right kernel RPM files and manually installed them. Then, rebooted the machine with the new kernel and removed the 586 version.
- Hibernate and suspend functions work out of the box, but wireless functions die after the laptop resumes. Restarting the NetworkManager works for now.
- Sound and video functions worked without any extra configuration, although I did have to install the latest Nvidia drivers for my GeForce Go 7300 (desktop effects with wobbles are cool).
- Haven’t really tested bluetooth, but it seems to be working.
- Getting wireless to work was the biggest pain. Compiling ipw3945 with WPA2 support and making it work with NetworkManager was pretty ugly and I ended up using a pre-compiled dkms package from freshrpms.
- Gnome doesn’t seem to crash as often and it is much better in terms of performance and stability.
- Customizable panels and themes are sweet.
I must say I’m very impressed with Fedora Core 6, despite the fact that it needs some improvements and bugs to be worked on. I have been waiting for an alternative stable desktop operating system that works out of the box and FC6 is definitely a good candidate so far. Of course not everything I need is currently available for Linux, but I’m sure that companies are starting to realize that Linux is getting more popular every day and hopefully they will start writing commercial software for Linux as well. Linux community needs software that works on Linux, without the need to rely on various emulators and Wine.
Thumbs up for Fedora Community!
Check out my desktop screenshot below.
Nasim Mansurov
Assalomu Alaykum. Nasim aka Internet Explorer orqali saytingizni ochsam MENUlar umuman pastga tushib ketmoqda. Mening saytimda ham shu problema. w3 style togri tushmayapdi shekilli! Otib ketga bayramingiz bilan.
Akon!
Sizni ham utib ketgan bayramlaringiz bilan. Endi hammasi ishlashi kerak :) W3 style emas, bitta image kottarog’ edi…
yummy desktop broth ;) slushay nimaga yana javob bermayapsiz maillarimga? bro we need support each other;) new projects… did ya get my last mail ’bout web project?
xattabych: my email was down for almost a month because of hosting issues, so I haven’t received anything lately…
I get constantly spammed over ICQ and I decided to stop using it :)
happy birthday bro! wish ya all the best in the world!