Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Fedora Core 6 - How it's shaping up

Well, I've been using FC6 for a week or so now, and I've been able to settle on my opinions of it. Overall I'm really impressed. The desktop effects are awesome, the range of applications I have available is immense, and we've been watching TV and films on DVD (and in mpg, mp4 and avi format) and it's held up really well.
One thing is certain; whenever I've had one of the previous versions of Fedora Core on the system, as much as I've tried, I've eventually had to flip back to Windows to use one tool or another. Not any more. Wine or Cedega run all the things that I need, and I'm slowly moving my documents across to Open Office (I should have done this a long while ago, really, but I've not got no Windows on my laptop, so I've got no real choice - and the file sizes have come down by over 80% - I wont need a new hard disk at this rate...)
Bad points for FC6? Well if I'm honest, there aren't any serious issues. There no Wine menu on the main menu from Gnome, and the mouse pad was a bit dodgy (it was unresponsive, the pointer was slow or wandered on its own) in KDE last time I used it. Oh, and you have to be careful where you click in the text fields in VNC viewer logon and pasword boxes, because it doesn't always recognise that you've clicked in the edit field.
On to the good points. Mplayer is an awesome tool; it will play just about anything. And if it cant handle it, VLC player certainly can (OK, so these apps are both available for Windows too - but they're native to Linux and are cool). I use Cedega to play windows games, Wine to use anything else that I really cant live without (but that's nothing, yet). The email tools are better than Outlook Express by a very long way; they're still better when compared to Outlook - my mail server is IMAP4 using Dovecot, and Evolution wins on this hands down. I used Thunderbird from Windows on the laptop before I re-installed, but I've never needed to install that on Linus. I've tried using Outlook with this mail server too, and not only is performance crap, but it doesn't handle the protocol as cleanly as other applications. Both the text editors (gedit from Gnome and kate from KDE) piss all over notepad, which looks very lame and unuseable in comparison. I actually get a word processor that I dont have to pay an arm and a leg for, I have the Gimp installed so my webpage graphics all look nice, and I listen to my music collection (FLAC and OGG, of course) with xine. I've got the full suite of developer tools installed too, but I've not had chance to use any of those yet. There's plenty of time yet, though, I'm still getting comfortable with it.
A quick note about Cedega; I've been so impressed with it that I've installed it on my tower PC. It lets me play Windows games. I dont have all that many games, but I've been selective down the years. It handles all the DirectX acceleration cleanly, and uses OpenGL to provide the performance required by computer games. Of all the games I've tried on it, very little has failed to install.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mine is a hp laptop too.. with nvidia videocard. Newbie? yeah, i suppose i am. The graphics is way too slow... meaning the gui's take more than a min to launch. Any suggestions? I'd be more than grateful.. :)
fc6, 1 gb ram..

Neil Stevenson said...

Mine has a Nvidia GO 64 or summat similar, so I set up the livna repository by following the instructions at http://rpm.livna.org, and installed the package 'kmod-nvidia' which is a binary build of the video drivers. Startup time is an inconvenience, but everything is fine once it's all up. My other suggestions is to go down the list of services and turn stuff off that you dont use (run 'system-config-services' as root, it's also available on the gnome menu as 'Services' somewhere under 'System Administration'). HTH