Re: fc5 thoughts


<mpresley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:9EzVf.10379$k75.8681@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This is simply a general, for what it's worth, post. Treat it
accordingly.


I had mostly used Mandrake/driva over the past several years. But with
poor results from 2006, and with the departure of their founder, I decided
it was time to look elsewhere. I had tried fc4 in the past, but on my
particular setup certain things never pleased me. Particularly, for some
reason, the Gnome panel was curiously unstable on my system.


Anyhow, fc5 seemed to be a good choice to try. I checked out the latest
and greatest SuSe, however I could not get sound to work. Similarly,
Kubuntu never really "felt" right on my machine.


Fedora 5 installation went well. No problems whatsoever. Using the Gnome
window manager, everything is very snappy (even with old hardware--Pentium
1.7, 640MB of not so fast RAM, along with a run of the mill 128 MB nvidia
card). My flash drive was recognized and mounted upon log in. I plopped
in a music CD and the thing actually played without any need for
configuration.


The new and improved bubbly fedora wallpaper had to go. No accounting for
aesthetic taste, I guess.


In the past I'd mostly used KDE, however the Gnome panel works so well
that I think I'll make this the stop. Obviously I wish Gnome were more
configurable, but then it would not be Gnome.


For me, Nautilus remains a poor substitute for Konqueror file manager, but
placing a link for the latter on the upper panel bar did the trick. I wish
there was an easy way to get rid of both the "Home", and "Computer"
desktop icons; I've seen some work arounds I may try. I don't know who
decided they must be an integral part of a desktop, but that's the way
things are, these days.


All in all, I'd say the Fedora team has produced an excellent distro.

mp

Thanks for your comments. I'm an ex Windows
(C#?, a big NO THANK YOU, VISTA? I won't hold
my breath waiting and hope to be able to ignore
it when it finally arrives. .NET? .NO!) software developer
who discovered FC4 and few months ago and have been quite thrilled
with it. To my astonishment, Wine and dosbox allow me to run
most of the legacy apps that I had on my XP box, particularly
APL and the most wonderful old DOS file and directory differencing
utility from a now defunct French company called "Open Network"
(last time I looked, this program, "delta.exe" was still out on the
web, released as freeware in 2001 after they updated it to
be able to handle long file names. It crashes now and then
but is so useful and the interface so intuitively easy that
I use it all the time. Both Linux and Windows versions available).

Linux is now at a crucial crossroads. The installation process has come
a long way from the days 5 years ago when one got ridiculous error
message like "XTransocket Error" because there was not enough memory
available for a graphical install and many of the hardware devices
could not be automatically installed. Linux, particularly Fedora and
Suse, are now strong threats to take over corporate desktops.
Corporate inertia, and the fear that corporate administrators have
over people doing things on their own with their desktops,
will block many of the larger companies from immediately taking
advantage of this highly cost effective desktop solution but
the more agile and aggressive mid size and small companies
will surely start to move in the Linux direction in a big way,
dramatically slashing their IT budgets and eliminating major
system vulnerabilities in the process.

We are now in a period of time when conditions are ripe for a new
application,
approach, or AI, can come to the forefront, creating new paradigms and
applications. I had hoped that such a thing would arise from the
world of Lisp, but they, particularly the vendors, refuse to even
acknowledge the superiour tools that existed in the late
1980's and early 90's and have proceeded on the
arrogant assumption that people will simply forget the kinds
of tools they had and the kinds of development environments
they had on Lisp machines and Symbolics workstations,
but this is for some other thread elsewhere.

Anyway, I just downloaded FC5 and will be installing it shortly.

Thanks
Mu.


.

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