Fedora 7 Test 4 GNOME based i386 Live CD report

[Michael Wiktowy]

Just adding my thoughts about the LiveCD so far:

- Two of my main use cases for a LiveCD are missing: checking the
memory and checking the hardware
     - Where did memtest on the boot screen go?
     - There was some smolt GUI but now it seems to have vanished?

- crond and atd were turned off but anacron seems to be left on
leading to some pretty severe slowdowns when that kicked in

- Desktop Effects works great for me! (ATI X800XL) Fedora made some
good choices as to the default actions to include but some more
customization exposed would be nice since there seems to be more in
there than wobbly windows and workspace cube. Hyperconfigurability is
what Beryl is for but being able to enable and disable the included
features and reassign hotkeys/hotcorners would be a minimum.

-  Inclusion of some default xorg.conf file is messing with the proper
screen resolution autodetection. I have had two systems so far have
vastly reduced screen resolutions on booting the LiveCD and the
solution was to clobber xorg.conf and restart X and both were detected
perfectly after that.

- Is yum upgrading from test4 to final going to be "supported"? I know
there was some talk of this earlier but haven't heard anything formal
lately.

- I am very happy that NetworkManager now finally supports WPA without
any special tricks. I found that is was requiring some manual
intervention to switch between wired and wireless networks ... is that
because NMDispatcher is not enabled by default? Was that disabling by
deafult intentional?

- Wireless has improved quite a lot. I have an assortment of those
little wifi USB dongles that I picked up for $20 each that work out of
the box now. I have a Netgear WG511T PCCard that doesn't work out of
the box. I think it has an atheros chipset. Is that one of those
non-free things that Ubuntu includes but Fedora doesn't?

- The LiveCD runs quite slowly on my 850 MHz laptop with 256 MB RAM
but it does run OK. That might have been due to the cpuspeed service
being enabled.

- I don't like the excessive amount of default folders in your home
directory. I agree that they should be consolidated somewhat. I would
suggest that Pictures, Video and Music should be put as a subdirectory
of Multimedia.

- The new organization of the preferences is great and makes it much
clearer than Ubuntus preference menu.

- It is lovely that you are including links to Magnatune and Jamendo
in Rythmbox and Firefox ... the only problem is that their music is in
mp3 format which we cannot play (without some hoop jumping)

Overall though, things are looking very good.

/Mike