Fedora 9 Preview: Successful Install Report

Peter Gordon peter at thecodergeek.com
Tue Apr 22 04:00:16 UTC 2008


I downloaded and installed the Fedora 9 ("Sulphur") Preview release over
the weekend, replacing my current F-8 installation. The following is a
report of my experiences with it, so far.

My hardware is Smolt UUID 6059d15d-2980-42a7-8027-525b1ec25833 [1].

Anaconda: Everything went fabulously. I easily saved my /home partition
and re-sized some others (all ext3) before installing. The install
actually seemed to take significantly less time than the same Fedora 8
configuration (same box); but I don't know how much of that is
subjective and how much is actually quicker. =)

(Please note, though, that I do not use LVM, nor did I try encrypted
partitions. I don't have a need for either of those options.)

X/RHGB: Beautiful. The new theme work is brilliant. I did not notice any
flicker when starting X initially. It recognized my G965 onboard and
properly used the intel driver. 3-D and XVideo acceleration work as
expected.

Firstboot: No errors or faults. Since I kept my /home partition from the
F8 installation, I rather like how it warned me about the user directory
already existing when I re-created the 'pgordon' user for myself. (Was
that in previous releases?)

Input: Setting up the caps-lock as a compose key for diacritics
(Spanish) was simple as it has always been though GNOME's keyboard
preferences capplet. Getting Japanese input with SCIM was a bit more of
a hassle though. For some reason, even though installed just about
everything I could find SCIM-/Anthy-related, im-chooser still errored
with a "No input methods found" message when I tried to select it.
However, I updated everything to current rawhide using PackageKit and
rebooted; and SCIM+Anthy once again works beautifully and as expected
(Romaji method). My Wacom BambooFun tablet also worked beautifully with
no effort on my part, whereas I had to manually compile and use the
linuxwacom stuff in F8.

(On a side note, I had stability issues with SCIM+Epiphany in F8; but
try as I may, I have yet to be able to produce the same issues on my
Sulphur install.)

PackageKit/PolicyKit: WONDERFUL. I love the work you developers are
doing with these things. The only regression I saw from Pirut/Yumex is
that there was no way to select and install multiple packages at once.
However, I found after some experimenting that I was able to easily
select one package, click Install, then select others and click Install
again, and they would be queued as sequential transactions. Spiffy.

NetworkManager: Another awesome feature. I had been using this in F8,
but with Sulphur, I found it much simpler to edit my DNS settings
through its GUI connection editor [2], instead of having to hardcode a
bunch of IP addresses in /etc/sysconfig files. My home Wi-Fi (802.11b)
works beautifully, and NetworkManager takes care of the nasty
configuration stuffs for me. \o/

SELinux: Happily does its job and stays out of my way, as it should.
I've noticed only that I have yet to notice anything from it, which is a
very good sign. =)

Swfdec: YouTube works beautifully "out of the box" after installing the
various swfdec packages through Anaconda. Yay!

Sulphur is looking AWESOME so far; but I will be sure to file any bugs
should they arise in my using it. =]

[1] http://www.smolts.org/client/show_all/pub_6059d15d-2980-42a7-8027-525b1ec25833
[2] My ISP's DNS is horrendously slow, so I have all of our computers
at home set to use OpenDNS's namservers. Much nicer...
-- 
Peter Gordon (codergeek42)
GnuPG Public Key ID: 0xFFC19479 / Fingerprint:
  DD68 A414 56BD 6368 D957 9666 4268 CB7A FFC1 9479
  

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