Over the past two weeks, I’ve been playing around with Fedora, and trying to see what makes it tick, how can I break it, how can I fault it for being something I don’t want it to be. Unfair, I know, but that’s how most reviews these days try to aim to do, to slam a product for not being exactly what the person who reviewed it wanted. I received a lot of backlash by a certain individual for not taking advantage of virtual machines, but the truth of the matter is the operating systems I’ve tested are not supported by virtual machines. As well, it’s meant to be harder to install actual drivers and see how the program works under not ideal conditions, but in the worst conditions, to provide a fair review. So I scrapped the first test I did in on a real machine to install Fedora in a VM, then once I found out it was buggy that way, I installed it to my desktop computer. And while my desktop is by no means powerful or new, I did find some things out about Fedora and how it works. And believe me, it works well.
Since this is the Fedora review, I’ll be covering the case against the virtual machines at the bottom of this article. But long story very short, Fedora has impressed me. Completely. I downloaded the Gnome Desktop edition because I have a slower internet speed, and because I had no DVDs to burn the DVD edition. That on top of the fact that GNOME with me is usually a hit or a miss at the best of times, I figured it would be worth a shot to see how Fedora might have made it their own. Booting off the liveCD and installing it was extremely easy as was installing it, much like installing Ubuntu on the ease of use. Nothing caught any problems and I certainly didn’t have any hiccups setting it up. After setup completed, the reboot to get into the main system was painless though also took a bit of time to do some auto-tuning. After that first little bit, I noticed it had gotten a lot of it set up correctly and was working extremely smoothly and quickly, the only problem being my ATI card but that’s because the current Xorg doesn’t work well with the ATI Radeon cards.
Fedora 13′s Desktop [not mine, though I customized mine heavily so I couldn’t show mine]
Setting up the restricted extras was rather unique though, because the documentation offered only the Fluendo MP3 plugin, which while free, getting the rest of them going isn’t so cheap. In this sense, it seems, if you are not using open formats before switching to Fedora, you will be forced to once in Fedora, as the wiki suggests paying for the closed formats. Ditto on the DVD playback.
Turns out that restricted formats are in a third party repository, as reported in the comments. The wiki page I have linked to has been updated and now explains how to install all the restricted formats you’ll most likely need, such as MP3 and DVD playback. There is also EasyLife to install the restricted extras for you as well. So in the end there is a way to play your restricted codecs! Seeing as my music is in many formats, including the open OGG and FLAC formats, I persisted and found it to be a rather easy time to play the music. Unlike OpenSUSE, the music sounded nice and fair, and wasn’t grating on the ears. I found Fedora to be extremely responsive unlike Ubuntu on the same system, and was quickly impressed by the fact I could still get so much done, even without the codecs. Installing programs was a breeze using their Add/Remove software, which you can see below.
It’s not everyday you get something this easy!
I faced only one ‘serious’ bug during my time in Fedora, but only because I didn’t think about it. One of Fedora’s defining features is SELinux, which is a Security Enhancement for Linux, and I forgot to add an exception into the Firewall/SELinux to allow me to connect to it. Otherwise, Fedora was completely uneventful and great. I’d rate it about an eight and a half out of ten. I was rather impressed and if there was a better way then paying for the closed source codecs in the official documentation, I would have given it higher, however, seeing as Fedora tries to stick perfectly to the ideas of Open Source, it is completely understandable why they weren’t included. However, to many people that aren’t so lucky to have a varied library, they will no doubt be turned off by this factor. Ciao until tomorrow!
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