Thursday 14 October 2010

Fedora 14 - a preview








With the release of one of my favourite Linux distros imminent I decided to try out Fedora 14 beta release candidate for a sneak preview. The one thing I will say is that Fedora have concentrated on speed, this distro is fast, a quick install and boot up times. The usual slick blue design is there, but as with 13 I do think they may have stripped the core system back a bit too much, I felt that selection of applications upon installing a bit limited.

Firefox, Pino, Shotwell and Rhythmbox are all very useful but no word processing or graphics packages at all??? Stability, as Fedora releases love to be cutting edge, may be a bit of an issue. I tested this on two laptops (HP & Lenovo), both with similar specs 2GHz processor, 2GB ram, both capable of running the 64bit versions. The only major setup difference was that I used the entire hard drive on the HP, but only a partition on the Lenovo. The HP worked perfectly from the install, this could quite easily have been the final version. However the same install disk produced a very different outcome on the Lenovo. Almost nothing worked as it should; nautilus kept crashing, I couldn't get the wireless working properly and I couldn't burn a CD or DVD. The software started up but then hung for a while before crashing. I thought to myself this could be an error during installation but sadly on a re-install I was greeted with the same problems. This appeared to be more like an alpha edition than a release candidate.

Anyway we shall wait and see what the final release will bring, I hope that if these bugs are not sorted then Fedora will push the date back rather than releasing an unstable system.


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