Fedora is one of the projects that are supported by Red Hat and was released on November 19, 2009. Well, currently, I am using Ubuntu 9.10 and I’m pretty much satisfied with the features it provides. Moreover, it is simple to use because of its user friendly interface and one click installations, which kept me away from trying any other distribution. But, I felt it was high time and I should try my hands on some other distro[?]. I decided upon Fedora 12.
The next question I had in my mind was, what’s new in Fedora 12? Has it got better looks or more enhanced security or does it have a friendlier interface or are they trying to make the distribution more compatible to the third party software. I did not have any clue. So, I popped in the CD and tried my hands on it. Here is a recap of my experiences with the new Fedora 12.
My System Specs
- Intel Core 2 Duo
- 2.0 Ghz processor
- 4 GB RAM
- 320 GB hard drive
Pop in the Live CD
Live Desktop of Fedora 12 (click to enlarge)
I downloaded the Live GNOME version, burnt it into a CD and popped it into my DVD Drive to let it boot. In the live mode, the OS ran flawlessly. After the booting process is over, you see a blue back ground theme and with Computer icon and a Install to Hard drive icon. In the live mode, the network adapter, webcam, bluetooth, all of them worked out of the box. But, while trying to play audio/video files, there was a problem. The required codecs were not installed. Had to take a short trip to the repository to download the codecs and then it was good to go. I liked the overall look and feel of the Fedora 12 and the daily activities of Internet browsing, word processing and amateur image editing could easily be done. Finally, decided to install Fedora 12 on the hard drive.
Fedora 12 Installer
After you click on the Install to Hard drive icon, you will be welcomed by a new window which has the Fedora logo. It is basically the welcome screen of the Fedora Installer, with the highlighted Next button. Pressing the Next will bring you to keyboard layout option. Choose the one applicable to you. I chose U.S. English. Then after clicking Next, it will look for the storage devices that are avilable on your machine. Also, it will present you with the following prompt, Please name this computer. The hostname identifies the computer on a network. Click next and it will bring you to the window which lets you choose the time zone that you belong to. I chose Asia/kolkata, unchecked the UTC checkbox and pressed Next. It will ask for the root password. Please enter your root password twice and press Next. Next, choose your partitions as per the layout of your hard disk and press Next. I chose a 10 GB ext4 partition and a 2 GB swap space. Press Next and it will continue with the formatting of the partition and installation of a fresh Fedora 12 on the hard drive.
It took just 4 minutes to copy the image to the hard drive before the installation would begin. Post the installation, reboot the system and remove the Live CD from the CD/DVD drive. The system boots with a Welcome screen and then reads the License Information on the screen. Next, you have to enter the user name and password.
The GNOME 2.28 Experience!
The default IM client on the Fedora 12 is Empathy. Until Gnome 2.28, the default IM client would always be Pidgin. They moved on to Empathy with the latest version. Moreover, with the latest version of Empathy comes the perks of seamless audio and video chat over the XMPP and Jabber network. One of the popular apps that function on the XMPP protocol if Google Talk. Moreover, the webcam also got detected flawlessly and Cheese worked just perfect. It lets you take picturtes, record video and also animate your images while taking a snap.
Transmission is the default torrent client that is available. It is easy to use and lets you download your torrent files with ease. While speaking of the Office tools, you will find only Abi Word and Evolution Mail as the default appplications. There is no OpenOffice suite installed in Fedora 12.
Multimedia
Totem and Rythmbox are the default multimedia apps available with Fedora 12. I tried running MP3 files with the default player but not one of them worked since the required codecs needed to be downloaded. Well, rather than installing the multimedia codecs, I decided to install VLC player as I use it on all my OSes. It is realy simple to install VLC in the your system. I did it using the command line and these are the steps that you need to follow -
$> su - #> rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm #> yum install vlc
VLC and Totem in action
That’s it. The moment you key in the last command, it looks for all the files that are required to install the VLC player, along with the dependencies and asks whether you want to go ahead with the installation (also mentioning the size of the entire download). If you choose yes, VLC player wil be installed and shall be ready to run any media file that you might wish.
In a nut shell
Fedora 12 is one of the ideal distributions for regular usage. The UI is extremely user friendly, and newbie friendly too. All the generic software are bundled with it. However, we faced a few issues that we wanted to highlight. The touch pad did not work out of the box. I needed to install certain packages to make it work. Also, the multimedia codecs are absent, out of the box. Moreover, while lack of space could be a plausible explanation for excluding the OpenOffice suite from the Live CD, the inclusion of Abi Word in place of OpenOffice Writer is quite puzzling.
Fedora is available for — both the 32-bit and 64-bit systems. The 32-bit version works for almost all types of processors. Almost all multimedia plugins and software work with the 32-bit version. In order to take full advantage of systems which have Athlon 64, Opteron, EM64T Xeon, and Intel Core 2 Duo processors, one is highly suggested to use the 64-bit variant. The 64-bit version is suitable for servers, has advanced features such as hardware error detection, and also detects machines with more than 4 GBs of RAM.
Why Waste a CD?
A new trend has recently emerged in the Linux world where almost all distributions have started giving support for installation using a USB key. Nowadays, there are various software using which a Linux distribution can be made bootable from the pen drive. Fedora has its own liveusb-creator (approx 8MB). It is a cross platform software and its work is to install live operating system on a USB flash drive. It is a cross platform software; hence available for both Linux and Windows.
Download
- Live CD (.iso)
- Upgrade from an older version (.iso)
- Torrents
Release Notes
In case you are interested, you can also read up the official release notes of Fedora 12.
Video Preview
Moreover, here’s a video preview of Fedora 12 ‘Constantine’
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