Thread: Back to the desktop

Booting up the brand new system, I notice the flicker-free X server initialisation missing because of being on a system with an NVIDlA chipset. The good thing is Fedora now uses the free Nouveau drivers for NVIDlA instead of NV-we all knew how unreliable NV was, right? I remember Fedora 10 live CD won't even start the X server; F11, on the other hand, even lets me use the maximum resolution of 1280x1028 using Nouveau.

Oh yes, the DVD installation gave me a more complete GNOME desktop, including 000 and F-Spot. Talking about 000, its icons are still the ones that appeared with the release ofRed Hat 8 back in 2002, and they are ugly.

Anyway, time to see what else is there on the DVD. Alas, the PackageKit/Yum interface doesn't include the DVD as a source by default and expects you todownload the packages even if they are available on the DVD. Talk about waste of bandwidth and time. What's worse, the GUI doesn't give you an option to add it. Heck, even a simple option to add a proxy is missing.

The only option it lets you have control over is checking boxes to enable/ disable the repositories. I understand this is adequate if you're only interested in adding third¬party repos like RPM Fusion. You can simply head over to the website and install the RPMs for free and non-free repos, and it will automagically configure and enable the repos in your sources. But what if you're behind a proxy or want to add the DVD as a source? Well, then you've got to manually edit some files.

So, the first thing I did was install the Echo icon theme. Although, it's not a finished product, it's still gorgeous! Next thing was to test how the auto mime installation works. I headed over to my music folder and double clicked on an mp3 file. It automatically prompted me to press 'Search' to look for appropriate codecs, and returned gstreamer-ugly¬plugins soon. Somehow, I wasn't so lucky with AVI files.
Still on the subject of Package Kit and Yum, I think it's rather slow in figuring out dependencies or even searching packages. I'm sure those from the apt-get wonderland would be disappointed here. Heck, I even find Mandy's urpmi and openSUSE's zypper faster.

To end the discussion on package managers, the 11th edition of Fedora also officially supports delta RPMs, thanks to the Presto Yum plug-in, although this is not enabled by default. Install it by executing: yum install yum-presto.

You must be aware delta RPMs are a great way to save on your bandwidth traffic. This is because when updates are made available for any package, the package manager only needs to download what has changed in the new release since the last time (aka the diffpatch). However, please note, it will only work if the said repository supports delta RPMs.

Coming back to applications, we all know the needs of users vary significantly. However, Fedora, just like other distros, has done a pretty decent job of selecting the defaults. And if you need more, you have the DVD and the online repos.

One thing I'd like to mention here is the decision to include Firefox 3.5. We'll, it's still a beta release, but nonetheless, it's working like a charm on my installations. The new version debuts with the private browsing feature¬you can access it from Tools->Start Private Browsing. The immediate result is, Firefox saves and closes all the currently open tabs, and pulls up a new empty window with the following info: "In a Private Browsing session, Firefox won't keep any browser history, search history, download history, web form history, cookies, or temporary internet files. However, files you download and bookmarks you delete the history for an hour, two hours, four hours, today's, or everything. Additionally included is Thunderbird 3.0 beta, which finally comes with an outbox :-)