Distro testing marathon - Fedora - day 2/3

Distro testing marathon - Fedora 15 - Day 2/3

This is my second day with Fedora 15 Lovelock installed on my laptop. Below are my thoughts about the Fedora experience.

G3

Today I've tried to make myself as comfortable as I could on Fedora 15. So, I've started with Gnome 3. I was tired of clicking the upper left-hand corner or hitting some key combinations only to get to other windows of the opened apps so I've had a hallelujah moment and I remembered about the fallback mode. After that I was much more “like home”!

Another problem I have now is with Nautilus, it's so stubborn or forgetful that it won't remember that I've set it up in split view (Extra Pane). Well, I can live with that after all… One more thing I've discovered digging on the internet was that there's a little tool which I can use in order to tweak Gnome, yes, it's gnome-tweak-tool. I've fiddled with the fonts a little and now I like it.

Oh, two more things about the looks and ergonomics, the bluetooth icon up there is still present even if I have bluetooth disabled from the BIOS. I don't get it why I can't hide it or hide itself automatically. About the previously mentioned display brightness problem, I've found out in the System Settings that there's a slider which curiously works to set the brightness but only for the current session, after a restart bye-bye, the brightness is messed-up again.

Ok, after you read the things above you might say that I had a bad day. Well, it wasn't. It was challenging and I like challenges.

Apps

So, let's continue! I've tested the torrent client, Transmission. It's better from the download speed point of view than the KTorrent. Still, I had to figure out why the torrent won't start sometimes. Well, it seems that Transmission is from the future, it's IPv6 capable so I had to disable the IPv6 capability (use: bind-address-ipv6”: “fe80::). Yes, I could've put some holes in ip6tables but I don't want to abuse the kindness of Hurricane Electric which offered me the 6in4 tunnel. It would be a nice thing to have an option in the GUI for that. Now I'm thinking more and at replacing KTorrent with Transmission but I still miss the RSS feature which KTorrent has.

I've also tried the Add/Remove Software utility and the Software update one. I felt like home (Mandriva), both are easy to use and simple.

One thing I missed was the LibreOffice suite. I've noticed that the image is 568 MB. I wonder if LibreOffice would have fit in the 700 MB limit. Mandriva One had OOo…

"Internets"

After this, I wanted to test how easily is to set up a PPPoE connection, because my ISP uses this type of connection and sometimes is troublesome to set it up. The configuration went smoothly because the pppoe-related packages were already installed. Still, I couldn't figure out how can I set up the connection from the Network Manager Applet so I went for the console setup.

Next, I've continued with the USB modem dongle, a Huawei E1750 from my ISP. The configuration was spot-on, I even had my ISP in the providers list and the whole connection was set up from the Network Manager Applet. Hats off for this one!

But! There's always a but somewhere… SELinux thought that pppd was not worthy enough to write a .pid file so the connection went dead. I know, SELinux is a good tool, but really… for a simple user it's just a pain in the dorsum. I had to set it to permissive to stop nagging about things and let the connection free. I had some other AVC denial warnings previously already. At this point I really missed MSEC.
Games

After all this adventures in the Fedora world I had to relax a bit and play. I'm not a big gamer but sometimes I have the mood for games. I play mainly two games on Linux, Tremulous and YSFlight. So, I've copied my old installation folder of YSFlight and after installing some 32 libs dependency packages I tried to play. Well, guess what, I only get 3 to 8 fps. I've checked the settings but it all looked well. I don't know what's missing but I suspect that the Nvidia driver from RPMfusion doesn't have the 32bit-compat things in it. Otherwise the driver works perfectly (VDPAU and all).

Conclusion

All in all I like Fedora, it has it's bad sides and good sides but I could live with it and make it suited for my needs.

I'll conclude this post with a bootchart from yesterday night (click to see it larger).

Tomorrow it'll be my last day with Fedora. I'm going to try to digg more and test stuff. If you have any suggestions you're welcomed to drop me some lines here…

http://i.imgur.com/qW87D.png

Part 1: http://mandrivausers.ro/node/6702
Part 3: http://mandrivausers.ro/content/distro-testing-marathon-fedora-15-day-33