Fedora 7 is out. Had to get the torrent and download it as soon as I heard the news; though I had briefly tried out the FC6 liveCD (non-installable) when it came out, I really didn't spend enough time with it to get any real sense of what Fedora was all about.
Now Fedora Core and Extra have merged, and the project is simply called Fedora; previously, the team of developers at Red Hat worked on Core privately, and the volunteer developers worked on Extra. No more.
Fedora 7 comes in a liveCD which is installable; I wasn't very perceptive and downloaded the Fedora 7 KDE version liveCD, when what I was looking for was the GNOME version. Perhaps it wasn't there, or I just overlooked it; adding GNOME in the install should be no problem.
The first thing you notice when booting into the liveCD mode is the speed of it; it truly is astonishing how fast it runs as a non-installed system. Better yet, all of my hardware was correctly recognized and I was able to surf the web as I installed.
The real selling point for me was that Beryl is turned on with simply a click, and the Beryl setting manager is so chock full of choices that I probably spent nearly half my time in the liveCD just playing with all the options.
Sad, really, how a new distro can turn my head; just a little more than a day before I had net-installed Debian Etch; I never did get a chance to automatix-ize it. Though Etch is an excellent distro, having used Ubuntu so extensively over the last three months or so provided few surprises.
So I decided to go for it and install the liveCD. Unlike every other Linux install I had done, this one simply copied the live ISO image to the hard drive; the only question I was asked prior to this was regarding my choice of root password, and what partitioning scheme I wanted (I chose to erase the entire drive and start fresh). If you wanted to resize a drive or push back and existing partition to make room for Fedora 7, then it's truly easy; the system uses the finest partitioner out there, GParted.
From clicking the 'install' icon to restarting into my new desktop environment took only ten minutes; start up was near instantaneous, barely leaving me time to yank the install CD out of the drive. Don't know if surfing the web and using various Beryl effects during install slowed it down; didn't have an apparent effect, though one never knows. When you consider that this is on a seven year old Compaq Presario laptop with a Radeon 350 graphics card, 1Gb ram, 120Gb IDE hard drive, then you have to agree that the results are impressive.
The newly installed system was blindingly fast; it was hard to believe that this was actually a KDE desktop. Very pretty artwork, but just wanted the simplicity of GNOME; the package management are done through pirut and pup. Pup is the system updater, and pirut is the add/remove software deal. If there is a simpler or more cleanly laid out (especially for beginners) package management front end out there, I want to know what it is; I never touched the terminal once when installing the GNOME desktop, or indeed, at any point in my Fedora 7 experience.
But I've gotten ahead of myself; Fedora 7 uses the SELinux protocol, and the first thing you do when starting in the newly installed system is to configure the firewall, the only option checked out of the box is SSH. You have to select http and https, as well as the options for mail and the like. You can configure these later once you are finished with the process, so no worries if you leave one out. You also have to choose your time zone, add a user (if so desired, though recommended) or users and then you're in.
Installing the GNOME desktop environment was done through pirut, and once booted into it (control-alt-backspace), I was immediately notified of five software updates. Installing them was as simple as giving my administrative password and then clicking install; I first had to start up Beryl under GNOME and spin the cube a few times, just for kicks.
This machine runs like lightning on Fedora 7; I would not be surprised to see it jump to the top of the distrowatch rankings before another week is out. It is that amazingly good and mind-blowingly fast, even on a really old laptop. Having used rpm files in OpenSuse I expected to have to do some stuff in the command line, but not a once was it needed.
This is a distro for the ages, of that I have no doubt; it is by far (light-years far) the finest distro I have ever tested out or run, by orders of magnitude. Ubuntu, OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, and Debian just all got smoked, and badly. If you are new to Red Hat/Fedora or a long time user, either way you are going to want to try this distro out.
Best liveCD. Best installation. Easiest installation. SELinux secure. Beryl at the click of a button. Packages installed with the greatest of ease. Scarily fast. No idea what they put in their Wheaties over at the development offices, but whatever it is, they better market it, and fast. Words alone cannot describe how cutting edge wonderful this is. Will update as soon as I finish playing with it some more. Get this torrent, and soon.
Had a chance to explore a bit further since my original posting, and the one area that Ubuntu and Debian best Fedora 7 is the speed of the updates; I'm guessing that the repositories for Fedora 7 are not as spread throughout the world as those of Debian are. You can largely obviate this by getting the install DVDs; the total packages included in Fedora 7 weigh in around nine Gb.
Just a final thing I'd like to add about Fedora 7: this is a fully F/OSS offering, so that none of the 'dirty' (i.e., proprietary) codecs are included--some assembly required, or have to wait until some kind soul gets an rpm to install them. Additionally, this is just one person's opinion; on my box, it worked great, and I'm very impressed, but as with any new system, the bugs (and there must be some) will be appearing and have to be squelched. There is currently no automatix like easy installer for Flash or Adobe; though you can install fluendo to get mp3s going; Fedora will get Linspire's Click 'N Run software installer in the fall of this year, and that would probably be a good time to check this out, particularly if you want that 100% out of the box media goodness feeling. Hey! Don't listen to me! I'm a Linux nut! I'm NOT abandoning Ubuntu; just have to say that outside of Ubuntu this is the most impressive effort of putting together various elements I've seen to date. You should probably consult someone other than a nutcase newbie like me for final resolution--though the liveCD is a definite must try. Cheers!
There is an easy way to get Flash, RealPlayer, audio and dvd codecs, mp3 codecs, etc; it can be found at this link--it does involve some of that nasty, nasty command line, though, so absolute new users should probably steer clear, unless you want to learn something.