Fedora 10
Hvnt gt too much to do tonight.. So thot I’d share some of my experiences with F10… incase You are thinking whether or not to switch to F10…
The Plymouth boot screen is the first thing tht looks diff. There is no graphical boot screen by default. Yu can switch on the graphical boot screen however by passing an argument to the kernel. Just add vga=0×318 after rhgb in the line kernel argument in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. The new booting is really fast!! This is one of the best things I liked about it.
The login screen looks pretty much the same as in F9… Gnome looks pretty much the same … Though it is a newer version. KDE 4.1.2 iz amazing. With the instabilities and bugs of KDE4.0 largely fixed, it is an eye candy in itself. I alwez had issuez with wifi in fedora. That was one reason I was triple booting with Ubuntu included. But for F10, my wifi worked out of the box!. One big issue I alwez had with using fedora wz my nVIDIA GEforce 8400 GS. I had the drivers installed on my f8 wen i had it, but it dint work properly.. however, the drivers work perfectly for me now… I have been using compiz on Ubuntu and it fairs great on F10 as well…
I like the look of Konqueror. But it is having issuez with some sites like orkut and gmail. As usual, it was the same with the earlier releases as well… but this one definitely looks and works better than the rest. Okular, my favourite document and image viewer is included in KDE4. Network sharing has greatly improved. Empathy is included in the repos. It supports audio and video chatting on a XMPP protocol, but I’d still prefer the old Pidgin which hasnt been left out either. The latest OpenOffice comes bundled with Fedora 10 There were a few bugs I encountered. Took me a while to remove them. I’m putting them down here for the others who r battling similar issues.
Firstly, the brightness control buttons dont work on my laptop on KDE4. They work fine on Ubuntu and even in F10 gnome.. but they magically stop working on KDE4. I tried looking for the K Control centre, only to find it replaced with System Settings. Well, it has better functionality, but I could not find a Power Manager option, the way they had in gnome earlier. Fiddling around for a while led me to the /proc/acpi/video/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness file which contains the brightness value graded on a scale from 0 to 10. adding ‘echo 8 >/proc/acpi/video/video/VGA/LCDD/brightness’ in /etc/rc.local did the trick for me, Later, I realised that there is something called guidance-power-manager in the task applet. Yu can invoke it with the same command. There yu have options to control brightness that do work.
With this bug fixed, I moved on to configure the LAN I use in the lab, only to find another bug . This one is a problem with the GUI. The code which conveys the values yu input in the GUI, is broken or mis-written. It copies ur Gateway address into the subnet mask field. Modifying the values using the GUI makes them revert back immediately. The simplest way to work ur way around this bug is to use the CLI. Find the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg_eth0 Edit the file manually with ur desired addresses. then restart ur network… yu can do tht with ’sudo service network restart’ Now yu shud b able to surf the internet. Incase yu use a proxy server, just this line to ur /etc/yum.conf ‘proxy=http://proxy_address:8080″ where proxy_address is replaced by proxy address and 8080 is for the port. And yeah, /sbin/ , /usr/sbin/ are included by default in your path.
The other issue I had was with including Ubuntu in the boot loader. Normally a copy paste from the /boot/grub/menu.lst from the Ubuntu filesystem into Fedora’s menu.lst should work. But for me, it did put the names in the grub bootloader… but I could not boot into it.. gave some Error 15: filesystem not found message. Then I realised that the problem was with the filesystem labels. Previously wen I had installed ubuntu after fedora 9, ubuntu was on (hd0,9) and fedora was on (hd0,5) Now after reinstalling F10 twice(the first time i had a corrupt DVD), they had interchanged places… I wasnt aware of that… but after some playing arnd, juch changing 9 to 5 in the labek did the trick…
This is by far the best F distro I have used.. working in KDE is added pleasure . The Plasma workspace is an eye candy. I think, now the Vista guys have a reason to switch to F10…. Its like a dream come true… the functionality of Fedora with the looks at a level which can compete with Vista… I am certainly not going back to Ubuntu unless I have a very strong reason to. I haven’t faced an instability issue on F10 yet.. minor crashes on power off occured with Kopete, but that was outright insignificant. F10 is definitely worth it… The only problem I am facing is that things seem to have slowed down a bit on KDE4… M trying to sort this one yet,,, have tried putting off ‘not so needed’ programs… any1 with any suggestion??
Lucifer
Lenovo Y510 44Q
2GiB RAM
Intel Core 2 duo 1.66Ghz
nVIDIA GEforce 8400 GS 128 MB
tv tuner
OS: Fedora10/Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop version/WIndows Vista
changing default display manager to kdm and managing login screen
When I could npt find /etc/sysconfig/desktop I thot they had moved it. But the release notes did not mention anything of this sort. Then I decided to look into /etc/X11/prefdm and there were the very familiar lines…
if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/desktop ]; then
. /etc/sysconfig/desktop
if [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = GNOME ]; then
preferred=/usr/sbin/gdm
quit_arg=”–retain-splash”
elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = KDE ]; then
preferred=/usr/bin/kdm
elif [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER" = WDM ]; then
Now, it was certain, there should have been a file named /etc/sysconfig/desktop So I decided to createone with the lines DESKTOP=”KDE” and DISPLAYMANAGER=”KDE” Rebooting gave me what I wanted.
Managing the login screen seemed difficult at first because I could not find the Login manager. I realised that it had been moved to the Advanced section of System settings. There yu get all the options You would expect. Thats it! Now I have kdm at startup and KDE as my default.
