Today I decided to give it a shot and install it on a spare drive I had in my PC. I grabbed the KDE spin.
Installation was done from a USB stick (because kernel 2.6.38 does not fully support my mobo) and this, as was the case with Kubuntu, was a blessing in disguise. It happened really really fast.
On rebooting I had my first nasty surprise. While the KDE desktop worked okish when I booted from the USB stick, this time I would not get even a proper X session. Dunno why. Some problem with the opensource nouveau driver prolly. Ok, no problem, fired up my phone browser and "asked" google how to install the nvidia driver for fedora. It requires one to add the RPMfusion repository (which has some other goodies aswell), install the relevant packages and update the initramfs which is a tad different from Ubuntu. It my also require one to manually edit grub.conf (heh).
I also disabled the firewall (got a NAT router in front so I do not really need additional fw) and SELinux (it started to annoy me as soon as I installed Crossover Games and tried to activate it)
Clearly, this aint a newbie friendly distro.
Multimedia playback is fine once you added the RPMfusion repo. Amarok complained it needed additional stuff to play my files and I told it it could search. I got a window with a bunch of packages that needed to be installed.
So why do i bother with it then? Well, for starters, being rpm based, if one has a .spec file for building some software, you download the source, modify the spec to reflect the correct version and fire up an rpmbuild command. Resulted a nice rpm package for FC 15. Had to do this for Mangler. Ofc its not always this easy, but far easier than the last time a looked a building debs.
There is also the myth that it may be speedier than Ubuntu. Ok, let's see how a bunch of benchmarks reflect in real day use on my machine.
Installation was done from a USB stick (because kernel 2.6.38 does not fully support my mobo) and this, as was the case with Kubuntu, was a blessing in disguise. It happened really really fast.
On rebooting I had my first nasty surprise. While the KDE desktop worked okish when I booted from the USB stick, this time I would not get even a proper X session. Dunno why. Some problem with the opensource nouveau driver prolly. Ok, no problem, fired up my phone browser and "asked" google how to install the nvidia driver for fedora. It requires one to add the RPMfusion repository (which has some other goodies aswell), install the relevant packages and update the initramfs which is a tad different from Ubuntu. It my also require one to manually edit grub.conf (heh).
I also disabled the firewall (got a NAT router in front so I do not really need additional fw) and SELinux (it started to annoy me as soon as I installed Crossover Games and tried to activate it)
Clearly, this aint a newbie friendly distro.
Multimedia playback is fine once you added the RPMfusion repo. Amarok complained it needed additional stuff to play my files and I told it it could search. I got a window with a bunch of packages that needed to be installed.
So why do i bother with it then? Well, for starters, being rpm based, if one has a .spec file for building some software, you download the source, modify the spec to reflect the correct version and fire up an rpmbuild command. Resulted a nice rpm package for FC 15. Had to do this for Mangler. Ofc its not always this easy, but far easier than the last time a looked a building debs.
There is also the myth that it may be speedier than Ubuntu. Ok, let's see how a bunch of benchmarks reflect in real day use on my machine.
