The Fedora Desktop

Today I thought I’d report back in detail on my experiences with Fedora 11, the community distribution release from perennial Linux giants Red Hat. It’s a distribution with a reputation for being close to the cutting edge, some would argue too close. Many people have complained to me about bugs, but is this fair? I haven’t looked at Fedora in depth since version 8 or 9, so I wanted to see for myself. I have some history with Fedora, but I felt it lost it’s way a little a few years back. It was time to put past experiences – both good and bad – aside, to really see what Fedora 11 could bring to the table…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Red Hat
Packaging – .rpm (Managed by YUM)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.29.5-191.fc11.i586
Default Desktop – Gnome 2.26.2

Introduction & Background:

Boot screen

Although I downloaded Fedora 11 a few weeks back, I actually installed it while at FUDCon (the Fedora conference) in Berlin; surrounded by Fedora developers and Red Hat employees. Now that’s what I call support. I first installed Fedora way back in 2003 when it was called Fedora Core, it had just been split from Red Hat Linux. It was even one of the first distributions I managed to convince my employers at the time (the National Health Service) to try out. It wasn’t my first Linux experience by any means, but it was quite early in my adoption of the platform. I kept coming back to it over the years but felt increasingly disappointed as it got more experimental and felt less usable. The last version I used properly was Fedora 8 and that left something of a sour taste in my mouth. YUM (the package management tool) kept locking up for no apparent reason and the system wasn’t really stable enough to use as a proper desktop. I’d briefly looked at other releases of Fedora in the meantime, but going into this Fedora 11 install, I wasn’t sure what to expect at all. Read the rest of this entry »