Switcharoonie

Source

So tonight I've basically switched my main desktop to Fedora. I have dual Cooker and Fedora 10 installs, now, but I plan to stick with Fedora as much as I can. It was pretty easy, really - only took about two hours to make it pretty much identical to my usual desktop. Linux is Linux, after all. It's a bit odd needing a third party repository to get my graphics card and wireless working, but it works perfectly well. I suppose the oddest thing, to me, is that it seems more or less impossible to run Rawhide as a main system - it's not a constant rolling distro exactly (it gets updated in a big clump, one time a day) and it isn't really developed in such a way as to be usually usable, it seems. I dunno if I'm wrong here, but that's the impression I'm getting. I get the idea that even Fedora developers mostly only run Rawhide once a release goes into its alpha / beta / RC cycle. Maybe I'll try to get a working install of it going in a VirtualBox or something. It's also a bit strange not having the Mandriva tools available for things like remote shares and bootloader configuration... I was planning to do some testing on issues with nv / nouveau on my particular card for Red Hat's new NVIDIA guy, but didn't get around to it in the end. Hope I will tomorrow. Oh, and I helped Jerome Soyer out with a little gotcha in updating slrn to the latest release, in Cooker.

Comments

pacho wrote on 2009-01-24 10:34:
I already have opensuse, mandriva, fedora, ubuntu and Gentoo installed on my system (I use Gentoo as main distro since 2005). When I have tried fedora, I have only had some "problems" with nvidia acceleration, as it's more "difficult" (-> have to add another repository) and not as "automagic" as mandriva is for configuring 3D acceleration. Other "problem" I have seen is that PackageKit is a bit slow (at least for me), but, hopefully, most of these issues will be fixed or improved in the future. When will we see your posts also in planet fedora? I usually visit it and I would want to read your experience with fedora and your new job :-) Best regards!
Linux » AdamW on Linux and more » Blog Archive » Switcharoonie wrote on 2009-01-24 10:46:
[...] entry is fully written in it’s author’s blog. Read all about this here. This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can [...]
rview wrote on 2009-01-25 01:21:
I've been using Fedora a couple months or so. I actually like it, and have had fewer buggy things going on than with Mandriva. I used autoten to install Nvidia, it adds the repository and sets it up (also did it manually by downloading it from Nvidia). It would be nice if Fedora would be more complete out of the box, but understand why it isn't. My main gripe is the same as with many distros. I would like a consistent total download amount, percent done, etc. in the graphical package manager. I am limited to 7.5GB a month, and sometimes when thinking about updating, it would be nice to know how much is being downloaded before I start (and eta after I start), that way I can figure if I actually can download the updates, or install that program I want. The command line methods sometimes do this between distros, but I'd think in the "pretty" gui it should be possible too (like synaptic does, last I looked). I'm sticking with Fedora, I like the stability better than most distros I've tried (at the moment at least it's stable). Hopefully you will do well with your employment with the company.
allangen wrote on 2009-01-26 04:33:
Congrats on the new job..Red Hat is a terrific company. They're a responsible member of the open source community. They don't let their proprietary work get in the way of their open source commitment. They are very corporate. The culture is very different from Mandriva's, but they do a good job of both making a buck, contributing mightily to new innovations in the linux universe, and staying true to community expectations. I'm an old retired Cisco guy. I remember the culture shock I experienced at the beginning. Gradually I came to realize that having a plan, being organized, setting standards, and allocating resources in a way that has a chance of achieving success, especially in a very large organization, is not a bad thing. It's all relative. They're facing stiff, cut-throat competition as well, it's just larger, better financed, and more ruthless. They do an admirable job of navigating through that mess and presenting the public with a first rate product. I hope you'll find a happy home there. Lots of us are rooting for you.
rpkemp wrote on 2009-01-26 11:27:
Congratulations and best wishes. Having myself switched to being a Fedora user soon after you were canned, basically because I no longer wish to bet on the future of what seems a moribund distribution, I can empathize with your culture shock. While it seemed likely to HAVE a future, Mandriva had a hell of a lot going for it. Fedora is more work. But the future of Fedora is probably more assured on account of all that Red Hat hard headed business sense. You did an excellent job at Mandriva, and you obviously worked your socks off for whatever they were paying you. I am glad you will now be associated with the distribution I'm using, not that I expect our paths will cross with me being a confirmed end-user. Once again, congratulations - and the best of luck in your new job. Rob
anshulajain wrote on 2009-01-31 13:48:
Hi Adam, Really happy for you to have found a place in RedHat after Mandriva. Your dismissal really made me reconsider Mandriva as our deployment platform since the it brought to fore the long term viability of Mandriva. I'd be willing to switch to Fedora if I can make my hardware interfaces to install right on it...and have some propeitary USB interfaces to work on kernels 2.6.25+ and onwards :) Good luck to you Adam...and I will strongly look at Fedora now after the Mandriva letdown. -Anshul