Fedora core suggestions

[Kevin Kofler]

Alo Tsum <alotsum <at> gmail.com> writes:
> First
> suggestions has to do with the software side of things. We users need
> a competent software installer which is graphical based.

Pirut is just that, as are the alternatives available from Extras (Yumex, KYum, 
Smart, and probably soon Synaptic with the new apt with repomd and multilib 
support).

> One that
> functions much the same way that the windows installer works.

I think the previous posters have explained pretty well why that's not a good 
idea.

> This
> installer should track dependencies naturally

Pirut does that.

> and place icons on the
> desktop or give the option to have icons for the software just
> installed to be placed on the desktop of the user as well as in the
> applications menu.

Pirut doesn't do that, but due to how RPMs and .desktop files are packaged, 
this would probably be best implemented within menu editors such as Alacarte 
(so you would select menu entry, pick "Copy to desktop", and it would be copied 
there) or within the menu itself (as already implemented in KDE, you can 
right-click on any menu entry in KDE's Kicker and copy it to the KDE desktop 
from the context menu!).

> Also when watching the Boston Linux conference the
> suggestion was made to offer a hard disc manager much like windows
> offers for formating and receiving hard drivers etc after
> installation. 

Well, depending on what you're trying to do, either QtParted/GParted (both 
available in Extras) or system-config-lvm may do the job. What seems to be 
missing though is an easy way to add partitions to the fstab. (This has been 
brought up recently, and indeed there doesn't seem to be one. And no, I'm not 
talking about automounting removable drives, but mounting fixed drives to a 
fixed place in the file system, which can be at any point in the FHS, not just 
under /media, so editing /etc/fstab really is needed for that use case.)

        Kevin Kofler