I spent most of the weekend installing “Fedora Core”:http://fedora.redhat.com/ and then playing with it. Unless FC does something evil to my computer, this should be the last time I do major operating systems stuff with my computer for a while.
As it says on the website, The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software.
So far I have been very pleased. The upgrade went smoothly, and it didn’t take me long to check out all my peripherals. (I had to fix up the permissions needed to burn CDs under k3b, but that was all.) The scanner still works like a charm, which is great because I wasn’t at all sure what I had done that succeeded in making it work before.
The distribution I was using, Redhat 9, will no longer be supported in another six months, so I decided to give Fedora a try. The most difficult part was downloading the three very large files required to make the installations CDs. The install itself took about an hour and required little besides switching the CDs.
New stuff in the distribution includes better methods for installing new software and Openoffice 1.1. This is the release of Openoffice that allows the creation of pdf files.
The best support I have found so far is the very active #fedora channel at irc.freenode.net. I haven’t had more than one or two questions, but just checking in occasionally is educational. There is very little “RTFM”:http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/r/RTFM.html perhaps because there isn’t one.